The late afternoon sun slanted through the dormer window of the safehouse attic on Tanner’s Row, cutting a long, amber rectangle across the scarred pine floorboards.
Ren Prime sat alone at his battered wooden workbench, his head cradled in his hands. His knuckles were pressed against his temples until his skull throbbed.
The battle for the city was won. The Loom was dead. The charter was signed. The streets were quiet. But in the silence of the empty room, the body penalty of his sixteenth summon was exacting its merciless, brutal price: Exclusion Axiom 16: Memory Multiplicity.
With the fight-or-flight rush drained from his veins, Ren’s mind was an open floodgate of incompatible, authentic autobiographical memories.
Whenever he closed his eyes, his mind fractured into a swirl of colors of lives:
He remembered his mother. But he didn’t remember one mother. He remembered three.
He remembered Martha Vale, the exhausted washerwoman of Tanner’s Row who had died coughing black thick spit into a zinc bucket. Just then, he was eight years old. He remembered the smell of lye soap on her chapped hands, the rough texture of her grey wool apron. The way she sang old canal ballads when the winter winds rattled the loose windowpanes.
