Entrustment

Ailis Verane is nineteen and audits the memory of Averaunt. The city keeps copies of its citizens’ memories. Her office checks each final copy against the public record and resolves the difference. The work is quiet. Then an intake file arrives bearing the Office’s gentlest word: entrustment. Ailis learns what the word actually names, and that she has been signing it.

What waits below is not resistance. It is keeping.

Three levels below the coverage line, beneath a sign that reads DIGNITY WITHOUT RECORD, people hold funerals for the legally living and keep the selves the Office has erased. They have been expecting her.

When the record and the person disagree, who gets to decide which one is real?

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