November 17 did not exist on Minh An's calendar.
He discovered it while searching for an old receipt in a drawer.
The sixteenth and eighteenth still sat beside each other. Between them was a blank space exactly one line wide, so clean it didn't look torn out.
Minh An pulled the calendar closer.
The seventeenth had been printed in advance. The gray number was still there. Only everything he'd ever written on that day had disappeared.
No appointment. No notes. No ink marks.
He opened his phone. The message history had a similar gap. Six messages from Tung on the sixteenth. Seven messages on the eighteenth. Nothing on the seventeenth.
Tung walked into the restoration room carrying two bags of food.
“Have you eaten?”
Minh An turned the phone screen toward him.
“What day is this?”
Tung looked.
“Friday.”
“I mean, what happened?”
Tung set the bags down. He stared at the number on the screen longer than necessary.
“Nothing.”
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
Minh An opened the drawer and took out a black notebook. It was the notebook he used to record every photo he'd restored: the people in it, the location, the date it was taken, and whatever remained after the colors returned.
The entry for the sixteenth stopped in the middle of a sentence.
The next page began with the eighteenth.
The ink along the edge of the paper had bled into the shape of a wing.
Tung didn't look at the notebook.
“You haven't been sleeping enough.”
“Where's the seventeenth?”
“Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth.”
“Not on the calendar. In your memory.”
Tung fell silent.
A drop of water fell onto the tabletop.
There was nowhere for the restoration room to leak.
Minh An looked up at the ceiling. There were no damp stains. A second drop fell onto the notebook, right between the two undated pages.
Tung stepped back.
“Don't open that page.”
Minh An looked up.
“You remember now?”
“No.”
“Then why are you scared?”
Tung reached out to wipe away the drop, but the moment his fingertip touched the paper, it came away stained with blue ink.
A sentence appeared beneath the water:
DON'T LET MINH AN GO THROUGH THE DOOR.
Tung's expression changed when he finished reading.
“This is your handwriting.”
“No.”
“You wrote it.”
“No, I didn't.”
“You wrote it.”
Tung clenched his ink-stained hand. “I don't remember.”
Minh An turned the page.
The photographic paper was completely blank, but when he tilted it beneath the light, an image began to emerge. A flooded tunnel. An iron door. Tung stood in front of it, both hands gripping Minh An's shoulders.
On the other side, Lam was pounding on the glass.
He couldn't hear her, but he could see her lips moving.
Don't let him remember.
Minh An touched the image.
Pain shot through his temple.
A smell of smoke. A rescue siren. A hand clasping his in the darkness.
Then Lam's voice:
“You have to choose.”
Minh An closed the notebook.
“What happened on the seventeenth?”
Tung looked at him, his eyes reddening with the effort to remember.
“You died.”
The room fell silent.
“Where?”
“In the tunnel.”
“Then why am I standing here?”
Tung didn't answer.
The phone on the table lit up. A new message appeared from a number with no digits.
If you want to know about that day, ask the person who survived.
An address appeared beneath it:
BUILDING 17.
Minh An stared at the words.
Lam had told him not to go there.
Tung saw it too.
“We're not going.”
“She told us not to go because someone is looking for us.”
“That's exactly why we can't go.”
“Or it could be why we have to go before they find us.”
Tung laughed, but there wasn't a trace of amusement in it.
“You're starting to sound like her.”
Minh An picked up his coat.
“Do you remember Lam?”
Tung stood still.
“No.”
“Then how do you know what she said?”
Tung looked at the blue ink on his hand.
“Because some things get erased from your mind, but remain in the way people are afraid.”
Building 17 was no longer there.
The address led Minh An and Tung to a vacant lot between two newly built apartment blocks. Grass grew through cracks in the concrete. An old construction sign lay facedown beside a pile of rubble.
Tung checked the map.
“There is no building.”
“But there is an address.”
“An address isn't a building.”
“With the Archive Room, maybe it is.”
Wind swept across the lot. The sound of an elevator moving rose from beneath their feet.
Minh An crouched down.
A rectangular outline was appearing in the concrete.
The iron door opened.
Beyond it was the sixth-floor lobby of a building that was still intact, except that every window looked out into the darkness.
Tung grabbed Minh An's sleeve.
“Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Someone's coming down.”
A figure appeared at the end of the hallway. A black coat. An indistinct face. The person was dragging a metal suitcase.
Minh An stepped forward.
“Bao?”
The figure stopped.
It wasn't Bao.
A young woman stood beneath the flickering light. Her face looked so much like Lam's that Minh An couldn't breathe, but her eyes were completely unfamiliar.
She looked at him as if he were someone who had died.
“You're a day late,” she said.
“Who are you?”
“The one who survived.”
Tung pulled Minh An back.
The woman opened the suitcase. Inside were dozens of photos stacked on top of one another. The top photo showed a flooded tunnel.
In the photo, Minh An stood on the other side of the door.
Lam stood beside him.
They were both still alive.
But in the corner of the photo, a third person lay beneath the water.
A strangled sound escaped Tung.
The woman looked at him.
“You still don't remember her?”
Tung raised a hand to his chest.
“Who?”
The woman took out the photo and turned it over.
A name written in blue ink.
Van.
The hallway lights went out.
When they came back on, the woman was gone.
Only the open suitcase remained on the floor, along with a new line of text on the photo:
THAT DAY ISN'T OVER YET.