Cough.
"HAH—"
Cough.
"HAH—"
Cough.
[Health condition worsening with each step. Immediate medical attention rec—]
"Shut up."
I said it without looking at the translucent window. Didn't need to. I could feel it hovering at the edge of my vision like a disappointed parent.
"If you care so much—" I stopped mid-sentence as another cough tore through me, "—then do something useful."
[I am an Archive. Not a hospital.]
"Then stop sending me hospital reports."
Silence from the window.
A small victory.
I gripped the bridge railing like it owed me something and kept walking.
The sky above Vasantpur had turned the colour of old bruises — black at the edges, dark grey at the centre, with the particular heaviness that meant rain in the next hour.
The air tasted oily. It always did here. The wind carried the smell of industrial dye from the textile blocks on the east side, the kind of smell that clung to clothes and hair and eventually stopped registering because it never left.
This was Vasantpur. Fully-fledged factory district, home to daily wage workers, machine operators, dye mixers, and one thirteen-year-old idiot attempting a forty-minute walk on lungs that had the structural durability of wet paper.
I paused at the midpoint of the bridge and made the mistake of looking up.
On the other side of the river — that Vasantpur. The commercial district. Casinos with holo-facades cycling through their jackpot animations. Guild buildings with actual stonework facades and doormen in pressed uniforms. Markets where the stalls had roofs. Mansions tucked behind security barriers. And there, rising above all of it like an argument made out of glass and sandstone — the library.
"...Hah."
It looked further than it had from the map. Everything does, when your legs are shaking.
[For the record,] the Archive said, [I advised against this.]
"For the record," I said back, "you advise against everything."
[I advised against getting out of bed this morning. You currently appear to be proving my point.]
I opened my mouth to answer.
And then the vertigo hit.
It didn't arrive gradually. It arrived the way a wall arrives when you walk into it — sudden, total, and humiliating. The bridge tilted. The sky and the river swapped positions. My knees found the ground before I gave them permission.
Cold stone. Good. Focus on that.
I pressed my palm flat against the footpath and breathed — or tried to. My lungs were having a meeting about whether to cooperate and hadn't reached a consensus.
"You are going to get yourself killed, boy."
The voice came from my left. I turned my head very slowly, because turning it quickly had not worked out for me in the last thirty seconds.
A car. Black. Long. The kind of vehicle that didn't drive through this part of Vasantpur by accident. The chassis was lacquered to a shine that reflected the grey sky like a mirror, and embossed along the side, in letters subtle enough to be tasteful and expensive enough to be intimidating, was a single word:
VOYAGE.
The back door was open.
An old man sat inside, watching me with the expression of someone who had seen many things and found most of them less interesting than this.
"Hop in," he said.
I stared at him.
He stared back.
[I would like to flag,] the Archive said, [that accepting transportation from unknown individuals is statistically—]
"Where are you headed?" the old man asked.
"The library," I said.
A pause. His gaze moved — unhurried, methodical — from my face, to my clothes, to my hand still braced against the footpath. His expression did not change, exactly. But something shifted behind his eyes. Assessment completed.
"In that condition?" he said.
"Yes."
He looked at me for another moment.
Then he laughed.
Not a polite laugh. A genuine one — the kind that comes from somewhere deep and takes a moment to finish.
"Pfft— you— the way you just said that—" He pressed a hand against his chest like he needed to contain it.
[Look at yourself,] the Archive said, which I ignored, because I already knew what I looked like. I had checked the rearview mirror the moment I sat down. A pale, rigid face, jaw set, posture so forcibly straight it looked architectural.
And ears, apparently, the colour of a traffic light.
[Your ears are redder than a tomato.]
"SHUT UP."
The old man laughed harder.
He dropped me at the bottom of the library steps without asking my name or giving his. Just a brief look in the rearview mirror as I climbed out — still amused, still assessing — and then the Voyage was gone, silent as it had arrived.
Who was that.
[Unknown. Vehicle registration is blocked behind a private Guild license.]
Of course it is.
I turned to face the library.
It was bigger up close. The lower floors were old — faded sandstone, wide steps worn smooth by decades of use, thick columns that had clearly been built when people believed buildings should look like they intended to remain. Above that, modernity had happened: glass and steel climbing another ten stories, wrapped in a lattice of blue-lit circuitry that pulsed at irregular intervals, like a heartbeat that hadn't quite settled into rhythm.
Holo-banners rotated slowly above the main entrance.
CITY CENTRAL PUBLIC LIBRARY Knowledge Access Initiative — Open Terminals Available New Section: Basic Fog Phenomenology & Foreign Civilizations (Public Tier)
I straightened my shirt. Patched at the elbow. Washed colourless. The shoes were scuffed at both toes and I'd stopped being able to tell what colour they'd originally been.
It doesn't matter what I'm wearing.
I climbed the steps.
At the top, a security gate hummed with the quiet authority of something that had turned away a lot of people. To the right of it, a guard stood with arms folded and smart-glasses that projected data I couldn't see. Sidearm at his belt. A baton with a charge-crackle that suggested it had been used before and hadn't minded.
He scanned my civic card without being asked. The lenses flickered as text scrolled across them.
"Arin Valen." His voice was flat. Professional. "Local resident. No ability certification. No Blessings. No institutional affiliation."
He looked up.
The look lasted exactly long enough.
"Purpose?"
"Study materials," I said. "Public terminals."
"Entry fee is twenty rupees. Three hours. After that, pay again or leave."
Twenty rupees.
In my previous life, that was a cheap lunch in Delhi. Here, it was four days of my mother's medicine budget. It was the difference between this week's groceries and next week's. It was — in the most practical possible terms — not a number I had.
"I don't have that much," I said.
The guard's expression didn't change.
"This isn't a shelter," he said. "Come back when you can pay. Move along."
He turned slightly. The universal signal for conversation concluded.
Something hot and ugly moved through my chest. I noted it, set it aside, and kept my voice level.
Arguing won't work. He doesn't make the rules.
But he might know who does.
"I'm not asking for charity," I said. "Do you have a labour exchange program?"
The guard turned back. Slowly. Like he wasn't sure he'd heard correctly.
"What?"
"Cleaning. Shelving. Sorting. Inventory." I kept my tone factual, not pleading — pleading changes the frame of the conversation and this was not a conversation I could afford to lose on framing. "Reading access in exchange for work. Some institutions run arrangements like this. I'm asking if this one does."
The guard looked at me for a long moment.
Then he looked at my hands. Then my frame. Then he did the arithmetic behind his eyes that people always did when they looked at this body, and I knew what sum he arrived at before he opened his mouth.
"You're not exactly moving-boxes weight," he said. Not unkind. Just tired.
"I know," I said. "I'm suggesting cleaning. Shelving. Sorting. Things that don't require me to lift anything heavier than a book. Which is what I came here for anyway."
"And you won't steal anything," the guard said, in the tone of someone who has heard that sentence before.
"No. I won't."
He looked at me. I looked back. Somewhere above us, the holo-banner cycled through its rotation.
"Even if that kind of scheme existed," he said finally, "it wouldn't be up to me. And we don't just let in every—" he stopped, chose his words, "—every applicant who shows up without the fee and promises to work hard. I'd have fifty people at this gate by next week."
It wasn't cruel. It was just the particular exhaustion of someone who applied rules he didn't write to people he didn't know.
I opened my mouth, not yet certain what I'd say.
And then something in my chest lurched.
Not a cough. Something deeper. A sudden, total wrongness — like my heartbeat had skipped a line and couldn't find where it had left off. The steps beneath me tilted. The guard said something I couldn't parse. The sky went very bright for a second, then very dark.
I gripped the gate.
[Cardiac arrhythmia detected,] the Archive said, and for once the tone was not sarcastic. [Sit down now, This is not optional.]
My legs agreed with the Archive.
The stone steps came up to meet me and I stopped fighting the descent. I sat — hard, ungraceful, one hand still locked around the gate bar — and put my head down and breathed.
Small breaths. Count them. One. Two.
"Hey." The guard's voice, from above me, had changed register. "Kid."
Three. Four.
Footsteps. Someone else. Different shoes — softer soles. Coming from inside the gate.
"What happened?" A woman's voice. Calm but sharp, the voice of someone who asks questions expecting to be answered.
"He just—" the guard started.
"I can see what he just did," the woman said. A pause. "How long has he been standing here?"
"Few minutes. I told him—"
"Mmm." The sound of someone making a decision. "Open the gate."
"He doesn't have the entry—"
"Open it anyway." She said
Silence