The bone scythe sheared through the air where my head had been a millisecond before. It didn't whistle; it screamed, a high-pitched vibration that shattered the remaining glass in the nearby windows.

  I didn't think. I scrambled backward on all fours, my hands catching on the jagged edges of the dry earth. The old woman didn’t move with the frailty of age. She moved like a shadow cast by a flickering flame—staccato, impossible, appearing five feet closer with every blink of my eyes.

  "The debt is old, Jun Liu," the voices in her throat chimed. "The village was a bargain. We gave you silence. We gave you a place to hide from time. Now, time wants its marrow back."

  I felt the crinkle of the yellowed map in my pocket. The Ninetieth. I looked at the village square. Under the sickly violet light of the smoking chimneys, the world was unspooling. The low houses weren't just smoking; they were melting, their wooden beams sagging like soft wax, folding back into the mud.

  The tall grass from the fields was flooding the lanes. It wasn't growing; it was prowling. Each blade was a razor-thin finger, questing for the heat of living skin.

  I looked for the tally post. It was gone. In its place was a jagged hole in the reality of the square—a void where the stone base had been.

  The well.

  The map hadn't shown a well in the center of the square because it was hidden under the tally. The post hadn't been a sign; it was a cork, plugging the throat of the village.

  "Jun! The tally!"

  I spun around. The man with the cigarette—the one who had warned me about the rules—was standing near the edge of a dissolving house. But he wasn't a man anymore. His skin was turning into the same grey, weathered wood as the village post. His eyes were already gone, replaced by two knots of dark timber.

  "Jump!" he croaked, his jaw snapping as it hardened into oak. "It’s the only place the Harvest can't reach! The water remembers before the bargain!"

  The old woman lunged. The bone scythe swept in a wide, horizontal arc, decapitating the melting chimneys and sending a spray of black soot into the air.

  I bolted for the hole.

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  The ground beneath me felt like curdled milk. Every step I took, the earth tried to swallow my boots. Behind me, the "things from the grass" were no longer just eyes. They were spindly, multi-jointed horrors made of woven hay and human hair, galloping through the smoke with a sickening click-clack of chitinous limbs.

  I reached the edge of the void.

  It wasn't a stone well. It was a throat of raw, red earth that seemed to go down forever. Far below, I could see a faint, rhythmic pulsing—not water, but a deep, subterranean heartbeat.

  "You cannot leave the ledger!" the old woman shrieked. She was mere feet away now, her silhouette stretching until she was ten feet tall, a tattered kite of black rags and bone. "You are the witness! Without a witness, the Harvest is eternal!"

  She swung the scythe down, aiming to pin me to the earth.

  I didn't jump. I fell.

  Gravity took me, and the scream of the village faded into a low, thrumming roar. The air in the shaft was thick with the scent of wet iron and ancient rain. As I tumbled through the dark, my hand brushed against the side of the well.

  It wasn't stone. It was covered in something soft and damp.

  Thousands of red rags.

  They were lined along the walls of the well, millions of them, stretching back through centuries. These weren't just tally marks. These were the skins of the forgotten.

  I hit the water—or whatever it was—with a bone-jarring impact.

  It was freezing. It was thick. And it was full of hands.

  I struggled to the surface, gasping for air. The light from the village above was a tiny, violet pinprick. Down here, the only light came from the water itself—a bioluminescent, sickly green glow.

  I wasn't alone in the water.

  Floating around me were hundreds of wooden tablets. My name. My uncle’s name. Names I didn't recognize. They were all swirling in a slow, clockwise vortex, drawn toward a dark tunnel at the edge of the pool.

  Suddenly, a face broke the surface right in front of me.

  It was my uncle. But his eyes were clear now, the salt-crust gone. He looked younger, terrified, and very, very real.

  "Jun," he gasped, grabbing my shoulder. "You blew it out. You actually blew it out."

  "We have to get out of here," I said, treading the heavy, viscous water. "The old woman... the things in the grass..."

  "They can't come down here," he whispered, looking up at the violet pinprick above. "This is the 'Room with no Windows.' The real one. This is where the village hides the things it can't correct."

  He pointed toward the dark tunnel.

  "The water flows out to the river under the hills. If we reach it, we're off the ledger. We’ll be 'errors.' The world won't remember us, but the village won't own us."

  A loud thud echoed from above. Then another.

  Something was climbing down the well.

  Not the old woman. Something heavier. Something that made the red rags on the walls hiss as it passed.

  Click. Click. Click.

  The fabric-thing. The Ninety-seven. It was unraveling its own body to bridge the gap, spinning a web of red thread to descend into the throat of the earth.

  "It’s not just counting anymore," my uncle whispered, his face turning pale in the green glow. "It’s trying to stitch us back into the story."

  The red thread hit the water, and the pool began to boil.