When she woke, the page in her hand was not blank but a thin, faded ribbon of paper sewn into the lining of her gauntlet. There were letters—DFW—stitched in a tidy, invisible hand. She had no idea how long it had been there. She had never met a man named DFW off the riverboats and book fairs. Names arrived and left the town like birds, but the letters clung, promising a story unfinished.

Rebecca's lantern caught a sudden glint near the thing's throat—tiny stitches arranged like a title page. She realized then that the armor of the thing was not metal but pasted paper, these pages forming a scaling that rustled whenever the thing moved. Each fold held a name, a half-remembered job, a letter from a lover, a ledger entry.