The Entropy PI Bureau

Arthur checked his pocket watch, though he hadn’t had eyes to read the dial since the third Tuesday of November and wouldn't have a tongue left to name the month by winter's end. The fedora hovered precisely three inches above his collar, held aloft by sheer stubbornness and an escalating cloud of crimson and teal vapor that tasted faintly of ozone and old telegrams.

"Mr. Vance?" the frightened woman across the desk stammered, staring into the roiling plume where his profile ought to have been.

"Speak up," Arthur’s voice rumbled from somewhere deep within the breast pocket of his pinstripe suit, his throat already halfway to becoming smoke. "I'm listening with everything I've got left."

The client swallowed hard, sliding a grease-stained photograph across the blotter. It showed a street corner in the Fourth District, a place where the very air chewed the marrow out of you just for breathing it too long.

"That’s where my husband vanished," she whispered, her hands trembling as she clutched her handbag. "Not his body, Mr. Vance. His whole tenure. One day he came home wearing a district-issued hat, and when I looked at his face, there was nothing under the brim except a bad dream and a rapidly shortening fuse."

Arthur reached out, his gloved fingers hovering over the photograph while a fresh burst of scarlet smoke curled angrily around the fedora's brim. It was a steep price to take on another man's entropy, but every lost memory he investigated bought him seventy-two hours of solid form before the district's authorities started dissolving him again.

"A heavy case," he said grimly, leaning back into his chair as the office walls began to disintegrate into a haze of turquoise sparks. "Let's go find out who's spending the time he left behind shall we?"