The Continuity Bureau

The world forgot Elias Ward once. Now it is doing it again — politely, and by the book.

His name is gone from the building directory. His landlord swears unit 4B has been vacant for months. Then Elias finds the door he was never meant to find: the Bureau of Continuity, a waking-world agency founded in 1911 that has always known about the Thirteenth Second — and pays the Curators for their mercy with the Tithe, small harvested memories collected from sleepers who never miss them.

The Bureau offers Elias everything back: his name in every record, Sarahs memory sealed safe, Wrens stay made permanent. All he has to do is stop slipping, and surrender a piece of footage from a night that hasnt happened yet.

Instead, in the Archive, he pulls a file cross-referenced to his own: WARD, M. — status: VOLUNTARY. His mother died when he was nineteen. He stood at her funeral. Her signature on the consent to be erased is dated three years later.

Some of the Forgotten were never taken. Some of them chose. And the oldest file in the Archive — the first one, with no name on it — is still waiting.

Book Two of The Second Draft.