For six years Lucia Senza had watched the shop next door, waiting to catch its owner in the act. Tonight she meant to end it. She stood at her turret window in her black widow's dress and stared at the heavy velvet curtains across the way. She had a plan, a girl on the inside, and witnesses coming at dawn. She had a notebook full of dates, smells, and sounds. Now she needed only to see behind that curtain herself. The girl on the inside was Caterina. Lucia had found her weeks ago, hiding near the fountain, foreign and lost. Caterina hated the shop as much as Lucia did. So Lucia had made a bargain. Caterina would open the door. Lucia would finally step inside and gather proof. Then the authorities would come and drag the truth into daylight. Lucia crossed to the shop under the dark. She pressed her palm to the velvet drapes at the front window. They did not part. She pushed harder. Something held them fast from within. She leaned close and saw it. Blue thread, stitched tight along every seam. The curtains were sewn shut from the inside. Caterina had done this. The girl who swore to help her. Lucia rapped on the glass. A shape moved behind the fabric. The curtain shifted an inch, and Caterina's face appeared in the gap. Her mouth opened, but no sound came. She pointed at her own throat and shook her head. Her eyes were wet. "You promised me," Lucia hissed. "You promised to let me in." Caterina pressed a slip of paper to the glass. The handwriting was shaky. "I can't speak now. She sealed my voice. I sewed the curtains so you'd stay out. If you come in, she'll do to you what she did to me." Lucia read it twice. Fear crawled up her spine, then hardened into rage. The girl had chosen the woman inside over her. She had chosen the very person she claimed to fear. "Then you've made your choice," Lucia said. "And I've made mine." She stepped back from the sealed window. She would not get inside tonight. But she no longer needed to. She had watched Caterina's silent mouth. She had watched a girl too frightened to scream. That was proof of something monstrous. That was a witness who could not lie. Lucia walked home through the empty square, past the tiered fountain, her boots loud on the stone. At her desk she opened the notebook and wrote the date. She wrote what she had seen. A voiceless girl. Curtains stitched shut against a neighbor. A door that would not open. At dawn she would bring the authorities. Not to see inside the shop. To take the girl out of it. If Caterina would not help her expose Artemisia, then Lucia would expose Artemisia by rescuing the proof herself. She blew out the lamp and waited for the light.

Lucia waited for dawn at her desk. But dawn did not come first. A crash came instead. Plaster rained from her ceiling. Something heavy struck the floor above her, then dropped through the boards into her sitting room. Lucia grabbed her lamp and climbed the stairs. A girl lay tangled on her rug, coughing in the dust. The girl was young, with green eyes and short brown hair. She wore a thin pink jacket, pale trousers, and white shoes with no heels. Nothing about her belonged to Lucia's world. She sat up slowly and stared at the dark room, the lamp, the widow's black dress. "Where am I?" the girl whispered. "How did I get here?" Lucia knelt. Fear and cunning worked in her at once. She had seen a foreign girl fall from nowhere once before, into the shop next door. That girl now served the woman Lucia hunted. This one had fallen into Lucia's own house. This one was hers. "You're safe," Lucia said. "You fell. You hit your head. My name is Lucia Senza." She helped the girl to a chair. "You must trust me. This town is not kind to strangers." The girl trembled. "I don't remember falling. I was just walking home." Lucia went to her wardrobe. She lifted out a dress she had not worn in years. Soft pastel silk, pink and blue, with a matching hat and lace at the wrists. She had worn it before her husband died, before mourning swallowed her whole. She pressed it into the girl's arms. "Put this on. Your clothes will draw eyes you don't want." Lucia's voice stayed gentle. "And you need a name that fits here. You'll be Valeria. Valeria Senza. My niece. No one will question a girl who shares my name." Valeria looked down at the strange, bright clothes she wore. Then she nodded and clutched the pastel dress. Lucia leaned close. This was the danger. If Valeria wandered next door, if she knocked on that sewn-shut door, the woman inside would take her the way she took the last one. So Lucia built a wall of fear instead. "Listen to me carefully," she said. "There is a woman next door. Artemisia. She looks kind. She is not. She steals people. She strips their memories and stitches new ones into them. The last girl who trusted her cannot even speak now." Lucia gripped Valeria's hands. "You must never go near her shop. Never let her see you. Promise me." Valeria's green eyes filled. "I promise." Lucia sat back, satisfied. She had done it. She had hidden the girl in plain sight, dressed and named and warned. No one would know Valeria fell from another world. Outside her window, a black shape pressed against the glass. A moth, wide as her two hands, its velvet wings catching the lamplight. It clung to the pane above Valeria's head and did not move. Lucia stared at it. She knew that sign. Where the moths gathered, time had torn open. And now one clung to her own house.

Artemisia stood on the step and waited. Lucia held the door two inches open. The girl was buried in the garden. The moth still hung on the glass behind her. Lucia knew why Artemisia had come. The tear in time had pulled her here, straight to the wall she shared. Now the seamstress smiled at Lucia's cold greeting, and Lucia had no story ready. No reason a stranger should knock. No lie to cover the mark on her window. "You have a moth on your glass," Artemisia said. Her voice was flat and even. "A large one. Black wings. They gather where things do not belong." Lucia's throat went dry. She had documented that creature for six years. Now the woman she watched named it back to her, calm as weather. Lucia said nothing. She had learned that a silent face gave nothing away. "I came because of the moth," Artemisia went on. "Not because of you." She tilted her head. "Are you alone in this house?" The question landed like a hand on Lucia's arm. She thought of Valeria folded into the dark earth. She thought of the two knocks, the brambles pulled across. If Lucia lied badly, Artemisia would read it in her mouth. So Lucia chose the truth she could afford. "My niece stays with me," she said. "She is resting. She is not well." Artemisia's clear blue eyes moved past Lucia's shoulder, into the dim hall. "A niece." She let the word sit. "I did not know you had family." "You know very little about me," Lucia said. "You do not receive visitors. Neither do I." For a moment neither woman moved. The moth's wings shifted on the glass. Artemisia looked at it, then at Lucia, and something settled in her face. She had come for a traveler. She had found a shut door and a widow who gave no ground. "Keep your niece indoors," Artemisia said at last. "The moth means the air near here is torn. People fall through such tears. If a stranger comes to your door, you send her to me." She stepped back off the stoop. "I mend what does not fit." "I will remember that," Lucia said. She closed the door and set her back against it. Her hands shook. The lie had held. Valeria was safe under the root, unseen, unnamed. But Lucia understood what she had just heard. Artemisia had all but told her the truth of the shop. She mended people. She stitched strangers into her time. And now she knew Lucia had a niece she had never mentioned before. Lucia went to the window and watched the woman cross back toward her own drawn curtains. The moth stayed on the glass. Lucia took out her record and wrote the date. Below it she wrote three words. She suspects me. The watching had turned. For six years Lucia had studied that shop. Now the shop was studying her.

For three nights Valeria filled the record book with what she had seen inside the shop. The tin. The cracked plate. The stitched air. But every page ended the same way. Nothing they wrote could be shown to a constable. Words were not proof. On the fourth night Lucia closed the book. "We keep circling her door," she said. "The answers are not there. They are where the moths come from." Valeria looked up. "The forest," she said. Lucia nodded. "We go tonight." They left after the lamps went dark. A weathered sign marked the path with hand-painted letters. Lucia carried a shovel. Valeria walked ahead, quiet, watching the trees. The willows here wound like wrung cloth. Their black foliage hung low and shimmered purple where the moonlight touched it. A wide carpet of dark grass covered the ground, black and violet, glinting as they stepped through it. "This is where she gets them," Lucia said. "The moths. She uses them to find the tears." She had written about the moths for six years. Now she stood in their home ground. Valeria stopped. "Look." She pointed past a leaning willow. A glow came from the roots of the grass. They crossed to it. A shard of amethyst rose from the black earth, taller than Lucia's hand. Its upper corner caught the moonlight and threw it back sharp. The stone hummed faintly, a sound Lucia felt in her teeth. "It fell here," Valeria said. She crouched and touched the dark grains around its base. "From the sky. Like me." She said it plainly, but her hand did not leave the stone. Then the moths came. Not one, but a dozen. They rose from the willows on black-velvet wings and gathered over the shard, circling, their long antennae trembling. Lucia had only ever seen one at a time, at a window. Here they swarmed the stone the way flies swarm meat. The air went thick with the sweet chemical smell she knew from the shared wall. The same smell. Here, at the source. "This is it," Lucia whispered. "This is where her scent begins. The moths, the smell, the tears. It all comes from this." She lifted the shovel and pried the shard from the earth. It came loose heavy and warm. The moths scattered, then settled back over the hole she had made. Valeria stood. "If we carry it out, she will know," she said. "She feels the tears. She will feel this one move." Lucia held the glowing stone against her chest. She had wanted proof for six years. Now she held a thing that hummed and drew the moths and smelled of Artemisia's wall. It was better than any photograph. But Valeria was right. Moving it would send a signal straight to the seamstress. Lucia looked back toward the town. "Let her feel it," Lucia said. "This time I have the thing she hides. Not a picture of it." She wrapped the shard in her shawl and turned for home, the moths rising behind them like smoke.