The heat came early that morning, settling over Tassirin like a hand pressed flat against the city's back. By the time Farida had hauled her cart to its usual spot between the spice merchant and the blind calligrapher, the air above the sandstone was already shimmering, thick and slow. She wiped her brow with the hem of her sleeve and squinted down the long throat of the market street. Stalls were opening like flowers. Awnings unfurling, copper pots catching the light, the first sweet threads of incense reaching out to tangle with the smell of bread and donkey sweat. Somewhere a boy was singing for coins, his voice high and clear above the clatter of shutters.

Farida uncovered her wares. Dozens of small glass jars, no two quite alike, each stoppered with wax and arranged in rows on a cloth of faded indigo. Some held an amber liquid that shifted when you tilted them, viscous like honey. Others were darker, nearly opaque, or pale as watered milk. A few glowed faintly, though that was a trick of the early light, or so she told the tourists. Every jar bore a handwritten label. First kiss, rooftop, midsummer. Mother's song, half-remembered. The sound of rain on a tent. Memories, harvested and bottled and ready to be someone else's for the right price.

It was honest work, mostly. The harvesters brought her stock each week in wooden crates lined with straw, and she never asked where they sourced it. Some sellers did. Some made a point of knowing every name, every story, and charged double for the tragedy. Farida preferred not to know. A memory was just a thing, she told herself, light as perfume. You smelled it, and then it was gone. Leaving only the faint aftertaste of a meal. She had sold hundreds of them. She had never once been tempted to open one herself.