Mia’s workday began after the third morning horn and ended after the evening bell rang six times.
For seven years and four months, there had been no exceptions.
That evening, the sixth bell sounded.
Mia removed the lamp badge from her chest and locked the ledger in the bottom drawer of the tutorial desk.
Then, instead of taking the familiar street home, she left the Seventh Dock, crossed the fishbone-shaped Old Bridge, and entered Grayharbor’s Registry Hall.
The hall was busy only when new Descenders wanted their first city map.
Local residents seldom came.
Births, marriages, deaths, and relocations were recorded in the furnace core; the paper archives existed mostly so human eyes would have something to read.
The night clerk was asleep behind the service window.
Mia tapped the counter three times.
He opened his eyes, saw her, and let his head sink back onto his arms.
“Did the tutorial guide get lost?” the clerk mumbled.
“I am requesting a copy of my entity assignment,” Mia said.
“You?
Seventh Dock.
Service class.
Permanent post.
What is there to look up?” “I require a paper record.” The clerk fed her copper identity plate into the furnace-core reader.
Blue light passed over it.
A paper wheel clicked, turned, and produced a thin sheet.
[MIA GREYLIGHT] [Assigned Region: Grayharbor, Seventh Dock] [Position: Beginner Tutorial Guide] [Relocation Authorization: None] [Conditions for Release from Position: None] The final entry made no sense.
Grayharbor guards could retire.
Artisans could leave their guilds.
Even the old aristocrats bound by lifetime furnace contracts had death listed as a release condition.
“Why is there no release condition?” Mia asked.
The clerk paged through an old register.
“All the guide templates look like that.
If you leave, who’s supposed to meet the new Descenders?” “What if the Seventh Dock no longer exists?” “How would that happen?” the clerk muttered.
Mia folded the page.
Then she requested the city’s population count, property register, and furnace-core dependencies.
The clerk finally woke all the way up.
He asked whether she had received a new assignment that the Registry Hall knew nothing about.
“Routine safety verification,” Mia said.
It was true.
She simply did not explain the scale of the hazard she was verifying.
Two hours later, Mia left the hall with a stack of paper in her arms.
Grayharbor had 23,074 registered residents and 1,892 permanent structures.
Temporary shelters were not counted.
The core furnace, purification works, docks, and resident identities all belonged to the same regional root anchor.
Mia did not know what a root anchor was, but the term had appeared in the Version 2.0 cleanup list.
[Deleting a regional root anchor transfers all linked objects to batch cleanup.] She returned home first and locked the records beneath her bed.
Then she changed into a plain gray coat with no lamp badge.
She wanted to test the simplest possible solution.
She would leave Grayharbor.
The western gate closed at sunset, but the railcar to Whitetower ran until midnight.
Mia spent her savings on a one-way ticket.
The clerk at the ticket booth recognized her and read the destination three times.
“Taking a vacation?” he asked.
“Starting today,” Mia said.
She boarded and chose the last row.
The car was full of Descenders returning from a day’s worth of quests.
Some compared equipment.
One had planted bloodstained boots on the seat opposite.
Two others were arguing over whether Version 2.0 would wipe experience from old accounts.
“Grayharbor’s definitely gone,” a player near the front said.
“It blows up in the trailer.” “Good,” his companion replied.
“The starter quests are long as hell.” “What about the blue-haired NPC?” a third player asked from the aisle.
“Probably dies for motivation.
Standard opening trick.
Kill an old character so we’ll hate the new boss.” They spoke loudly.
No one recognized Mia without her uniform.
Or they recognized her and did not care.
The railcar cleared the western gate.
Grayharbor’s coal lamps receded behind her.
Mia placed a hand against the window and saw her home from the outside for the first time.
It was smaller than she had imagined.
Seven smokestacks held up a dull yellow sky.
Repairs covered the city wall.
Steam escaped through a thousand seams.
The tutorial sign on the Seventh Dock had shrunk to a copper spark she could barely make out.
If the cleanup list had held only her name, Mia might have remained on the train all the way to Whitetower.
She could have tried more walls, hidden in the announcement layer, or looked for a city that still required a guide.
She had no family.
Nothing in her apartment could not fit inside a single trunk.
The root anchor, however, held 23,074 people.
Mia watched Grayharbor until the dust of the wasteland swallowed it.
The carriage lights flickered.
Something wrenched inside her chest, hard enough to feel like a hook had caught behind her ribs and a rope was pulling from the direction of the city.
The wasteland, the seats, and the Descenders stretched into narrow lines of light.
Mia did not have time to reach for a handhold.
The world assembled itself around her again.
She stood beside the tutorial sign on the Seventh Dock.
She still wore the gray coat.
The ticket to Whitetower remained clenched in her hand.
No one else stood on the dock.
Midnight vapor moved across the stones.
The tutorial desk opened by itself.
Mia’s lamp badge shot out of the drawer and fastened itself to her chest.
[Assigned entity has left service region.] [Repositioning complete.] Mia pulled at the badge.
Its pin had grown into the fabric.
She could not remove it.
“Are you fighting your coat in the middle of the night?” A rough voice came from the direction of the works.
Tasha Rivet stood at the end of the bridge holding a work lamp.
Her steam-driven left arm was black with machine oil.
She had plainly come from an emergency repair, and her face looked worse than Grayharbor’s midnight sky.
“The clerk told me you looked up everything the Registry Hall would let you touch,” Tasha said as she approached.
Her gaze traveled from Mia’s plain coat to the ticket in her hand.
“Now you’re at your post dressed like that.” Tasha stopped in front of her.
“You trying to run?” Mia could have denied it.
She had waited forty minutes at the Whitetower ticket window.
For the first time, she had answered questions about destination, luggage, and emergency contacts as an ordinary traveler.
The clerk had not recognized her uniform.
He had only complained that the fields in her identification were out of date.
When the ticket printed, Mia had allowed herself one brief thought: perhaps automatic repositioning was only a regulation no one had ever tested.
Once the train left Grayharbor, she had watched the wall contract to a gray line and the abandoned colonial tracks emerge from the wasteland.
The players beside her had spent the journey discussing the new city coming in Version 2.0.
No one had asked why she was traveling alone.
Mia had planned to find another tutorial position in Whitetower.
At that point, she had not intended to save Grayharbor or uncover the nature of the world.
She wanted only another sign beside which she was still required to stand.
She had even calculated whom she might bring back for: Tasha, several acquaintances, perhaps as many names as a new assignment would let her register.
Then the population count reflected in the carriage window had changed from 23,074 to zero.
Mia had understood what her plan truly was.
She meant to reach into a sinking city and rescue one small fistful of names first.
The world dragged her back to the dock and rejected the escape on her behalf.
Tasha’s question still required an answer from Mia.
“I was testing whether I could leave,” Mia said after a moment.
“And?” Tasha asked.
“I can’t.” Tasha raised her metal hand and pinched the one-way ticket between two steel fingers.
Its blue ink was fading.
The printed destination, WHITETOWER, blurred and reformed as GRAYHARBOR, SEVENTH DOCK.
“Why?” Tasha asked.
Mia looked toward the salt-frosted wall.
She had intended to tell no one until she possessed a complete solution.
A disaster without an answer would create panic, and her job had always been to provide answers.
Tasha, however, was holding evidence that the world was changing in front of them.
“Because Grayharbor will be destroyed in three days,” Mia said.
Tasha did not laugh.
She did not cry out.
She lifted the work lamp until its light covered Mia’s face.
“Start at the beginning,” Tasha said.
For once, Mia did not begin by asking to be believed.
She began with the wall.
Mia described how Xinyi had entered the hidden layer, how the cleanup list spoke of Grayharbor, and how her own death had been staged.
She did not make the fire more vivid than it was.
She did not omit the fact that her first plan had been to escape alone.
She did not present the untested Glitch Manual as a rescue.
When Mia finished, Tasha folded the ticket into quarters and pressed it back into her hand.
“Keep it,” Tasha said.
“The destination has been changed,” Mia replied.
Tasha closed Mia’s fingers over the paper.
“Then it’s evidence.
Proof this city won’t even let a failed train ticket get away from you.” They stood together in the midnight vapor.
Far off, the core furnace continued beating at its old pace.
Now that they knew the world would end, Grayharbor looked no different.
That was more frightening than a fire.
A fire sounded an alarm.
Version cleanup expected everyone to continue living until they disappeared.