The Shadowless Man

At 3:40 in the morning, crime-scene cleaner Hale Chen kneels in apartment 5C to scrape a dead clockmaker's blood out of the floorboards, and counts six burn marks on the walls of a one-man home. Five stand at the height of a person. The sixth is the height of a person folded, like a letter forced into an envelope. When Hale puts his palm against it, the folded man's leftover dark climbs his arm and settles in him, and his own shadow comes off the wall a little thinner, measured that night at ninety-five of a hundred.

By day he erases the worst night of strangers' lives. By night he has learned to walk the seams between shadows wearing a dead man's habits, and to step on a shadow and take it. In Meridian City, where the lightline divides honest noon from the trade, that makes him fluent in the only currency that matters. The bereft remember everything about their lives except their anger, and their anger is priced by an assessor, crated in the dark, and rowed out on the ebb tide to a buyer no one has seen. A boy named Tan tells Hale the fact the trade keeps quiet. The folder counts everything it takes, and it says the city is almost finished.

Then Wen Qing, a night-desk reporter whose sister Wen Shu came home flat-eyed and forgiving after three missing days, lays photographs on his table and a column from 1924 under his nose: a man burned at noon a hundred years ago who cast no shadow at all. Together they follow the count down through pawnshops, laundries, and a harbor shed run by a man in white shoes. A coat, sewn fold by patient fold out of a century of taken lives. Its collar row is cut to one measure, and the measure is Hale.

The summons arrives folded in eight creases: the wardrobe is packed, the coat remains, bring the room. So Hale gathers a crew the trade never planned on, a reporter who reads first, a lamp man who can build noon out of barrels and switches, a fold-reader with taped hands, a returned thief who counts stairs, and a witness with a loaf of bread, and he declares war in the coat's own grammar. Folds run against the nap. Linings are read aloud as evidence. A stitch, one sentence the book cannot contain, will be given by hand at a fitting the coat believes is its own.

Everything is paid for on the same page as it is won. Returned shadows come home creased and late, and the people who love them must decide what an imperfect homecoming is worth. One sister cannot come home at all, and is kept instead, read aloud once a year in a hall of mirrors. And Hale, holding door after door of light for everyone else's dark, spends himself down to five points of shadow, by choice, witnessed, the thinnest man in the city.

The Shadowless Man is a noir of folds and lamplight, told in the dry voice of a man who keeps accounts of the soul and refuses to round the numbers up. It is a story about what cannot be returned, what must be refused, and the difference between rescuing someone and keeping them.