On The Pilgrim, forgetting is holy. The blankness every arrival wakes into is not a wound to be managed but the Mercy — the central sacrament of a faith that receives the newly arrived as souls delivered clean into a new life. Halia was received that way: blessed, named off the Roll of the Delivered, given a lamp and a vocation. And then, weeks on, the emptiness begins to fill back in — another name, a life, a past the Mercy was meant to have taken. On a train where the wipe cannot fail, she can only be one of two things: a blasphemer to be corrected, or a miracle too holy to empty. And the Conductor must rule which she is before she is allowed to choose for herself.