Obligation. Grief. The quiet tyranny of memory. Iris Vale never wanted a spotlight; she wanted a steady room and a clean waveform. As a sound archivist in Brighton, she catalogues the dead and their voices. After a winter surge ruptures the seafront, a teak crate washes out from beneath the old Palace Pier, stencilled with "HERMIA, 1901". Inside: a brass metronome nicked with tiny strokes, cracked wax cylinders, a playbill from the Regent, a pressed cornflower, and a harmonograph drawing of curlicued loops. When Iris threads the first cylinder, she hears a lullaby threaded through the tick of the metronome—a melody only her vanished mother, once a magician's assistant, ever hummed. But Iris's own recall is a trapdoor; since the night the Saltdean cliffs punched her hearing and left her with hyperacusis, she trusts recordings more than memory—and she promised she would keep her teenage brother, Leo, safe.
To read the music's code, Iris turns to Noah Quinn, a designer of stage illusions who rebuilds Victorian acts for a touring show. He knows the grammar of misdirection and the mnemonics of conjurors; together, they reconstruct an antique illusion called the Echo Cabinet in a shuttered music hall off the Brighton Lanes. Their chemistry threads itself between trapdoors and cues. Iris cannot risk travel—noise puts her flat on the floor, and Leo's exams are weeks away—so Noah goes north to Edinburgh with a list of coordinates and a cipher keyed to the metronome's scars, searching the Caldow Collection and a ledger with tea-stained palimpsests. Iris tells him: "Keep your voice down. Hug the shadow of the walls. And for the love of God, don't palm anything that isn't yours."
In the wynds of Old Town, Noah enlists Eddie Pike, a silver-tongued mentalist who can't stop talking and won't stop flirting with trouble; in Soho, a private club called the Silver Circle whispers about the crate. Dr Selene Harrow, a memory scientist with immaculate gloves and an agenda, insists the cylinders can overwrite trauma if played in the right chamber. The pressed flower hides numbers; the harmonograph loops sketch the coast; the tick-tock cut marks map a sequence you can hear but not see. Each answer opens a false bottom.
A shadow begins to pace their edges. Anonymous texts. A keyed lock picked. Leo vanishes after leaving a note in the margin of his physics book. Smoke threads the Regent's rafters the night Iris dares the Echo Cabinet live. Water rises under the West Pier where the Angel's Steps surface at low tide like a scraped staff of music. Together, Iris and Noah will chart the route through silence and fog, decoding the score before tide and fire erase it—learning, at last, when to listen to the past and when to let it fade. And if they make it out, the harmony they've been chasing might be their own.
