When Tasha had heard everything, she reached out and pressed the back of her hand to Mia’s forehead.
The metal had no warmth in it.
Its joints were still streaked with hot oil from the purification works, and a dark drop slid from one knuckle onto Mia’s coat.
Mia stayed where she was.
“You’re getting oil on me,” she said.
“If you’ve cooked up this hallucination with a fever, I’ll wash your coat tomorrow.” Tasha lowered her hand.
“For now, show me.” “The entrance to the hidden layer is unstable,” Mia warned.
“Then start with something that isn’t.” Tasha took her back to the purification works.
At night, the building resembled an iron animal too sick to sleep.
Pipes of six different widths crossed the ceiling and vanished through the walls.
Six steam pumps took turns drawing breath, each exhalation heavy enough to rattle dust from the rafters.
Apprentices ran between the machines with rolled sleeves and wet boots.
The water beneath the grating was warm; where it met the night air, vapor climbed in pale sheets and blurred everyone below the knee.
Tasha barked two instructions at the nearest apprentice, hauled Mia into the office, and locked the door.
Mia spread the Registry Hall papers across the desk.
Tasha read slowly.
Each time she reached a number, her gaze moved beyond the office window—to the pipework, the cots along the wall, the cupboard where the apprentices kept their bread—as though the figures had to be weighed against the things they would crush.
When she reached the population attached to the root anchor, she underlined 23,074 three times.
The third stroke tore the page and left a thin white scar in the desk.
“The shanties aren’t included,” Tasha said.
“Neither are unregistered newborns, migrant laborers, or wasteland scavengers.” “A little gutter rat like Amon won’t be in there either.” Mia wrote that down.
“Then the true number is higher.” Tasha looked up.
“The list called it a batch deletion.
What does deletion mean?” Mia described the inverted houses, the transparent platform, and the red announcement line by line.
When she reached the storyboard of her death, she left out the dialogue.
She said only that her own file appeared under character disposal.
“You saw yourself die?” Tasha asked.
“I saw a scheduled image of it.” “Were you frightened?” Mia paused.
She could classify a hazard.
She could calculate evacuation distance.
When a starbeast came near the seawall, she could slow her breathing until her voice stayed level.
The registry had no field for fear, however, and neither did her daily reports.
Only then did she notice that her fingertip had been pressing down on the corner of the paper.
When she lifted it, a small crescent remained in the fibers.
“I don’t want it to happen,” Mia said at last.
Tasha watched her for a moment.
She did not demand a more emotional answer.
“We’ll assume what you saw was real.” Tasha twisted the wrist of her left arm.
A tiny screw sprang from the joint into her palm.
“Can Grayharbor sever the root anchor?” “I don’t know.” “Where is the root anchor?” “I don’t know.” “Who can alter it?” “I don’t know.” Tasha gave a short, humorless snort.
“Have you said that many times in your whole life?” “I haven’t kept a count.” “Then tonight’s a grand opening.” She screwed the piece back into her wrist and pulled a map of Grayharbor’s pipe network from a cabinet.
The core furnace occupied the city center.
From it, lines spread toward the purification works, the Registry Hall, and all seven docks like vessels leaving a heart.
Tasha marked the main lines in red.
Every one of them converged beneath the core furnace, in a section of the city no maintenance crew was permitted to enter.
A gear-shaped emblem sat in the lower right corner.
Mia had always taken it for the cartographers’ guild seal.
Tasha slid a knife beneath the paper and peeled up a newer layer.
Words lay underneath.
[FARSTAR SEED-7 / HABITATION UNIT GH] “What is Farstar?” Mia asked.
“Don’t know.
The word turns up on old workshop plans sometimes.
A newer stamp usually covers it.” Tasha brought out three more plans, each from a different decade.
The oldest showed no spell circuits at all.
It contained dense lines and symbols Mia could not read.
The second drawing placed the core furnace over the same structure.
The latest had blacked out every lower level and labeled it UNMAINTAINABLE WORLD-ROOT ZONE.
“Same place.
Three explanations,” Tasha said.
“A machine doesn’t change its insides because somebody gives it a new name.” She rapped two metal knuckles against her chest.
The hollow sound lingered in the cramped office.
“This arm’s the same.
The registry calls it a lumen prosthetic.
I’ve taken it apart.
There isn’t a grain of lumen powder inside.
Something smaller than a watch spring drives it.
Much smaller.” “Why didn’t you report that?” Mia asked.
“Because the last time I reported it, the drawings involved disappeared the next morning.” Tasha opened another drawer.
Dozens of hand-copied booklets stood in careful rows.
Their pages held designs that had changed and changed back, part numbers that had vanished without an order, and signatures from artisans whom the furnace core had later classified as mistaken.
Tasha had been collecting doubts about the world for years.
Until tonight, they had lain separately in a drawer.
None of them had carried a deadline.
None of them had threatened to kill an entire city in three days.
Mia’s countdown gave every old discrepancy the same destination.
Tasha tapped the blocked section of the map.
“If one anchor controls the city, I’d put it here.” “The lower furnace is under the governor’s authority,” Mia said.
“Grayharbor’s governor hasn’t shown his face in three years.
He can authorize my ass.” Tasha rolled up the oldest plan.
“I’ll get in tomorrow on a maintenance pretext.” “I’m coming with you.” “You planning to skip work?” Mia looked down at the lamp badge the world had fastened back onto her coat.
She had tried leaving once.
The world had returned her to her post.
Descenders arrived in dense numbers during the day.
If she vanished then, the repositioning might trigger immediately.
“I need to remove my position lock first,” Mia said.
“How?” There it was again.
Tasha read the answer from her silence and waved her away.
“Then we look separately.
You investigate yourself; I’ll investigate the furnace.
And until dawn, keep your head out of any more walls.” “Is that an order?” “Advice.
Ignore it if you like and get erased somewhere I can’t find you.” Tasha slapped the red pencil onto the desk.
“But once you’ve put twenty-three thousand people in my head, don’t expect me to enjoy pretending I never heard you.” Mia thought of the countdown in the announcement layer.
She had meant to bring Tasha a solution, then explain the danger.
That would have been efficient.
It followed the logic of tutorial work: a newcomer needed the next step, not the uncertainty of every road that might fail.
Tasha had the uncertainty now.
She also had to keep the city’s water running by morning.
“I’ll notify you before my next attempt,” Mia said.
Some of the strain went out of Tasha’s mouth.
A pressure valve shrieked beyond the door.
Someone yelled that Pump Three had stopped.
Tasha was on her feet before the second shout.
She reached the door, then looked back.
“Mia.” “I’m here.” “Don’t turn lives into numbers.
And don’t reduce yourself to a position.” Then Tasha ran into the roar of the workshop.
Mia remained in the office, looking down at the red lines converging beneath the core furnace.
A stack of disposal forms lay at one corner of the desk.
The top sheet read: WHEN AN OBJECT HAS LOST ITS USE, RELEASE OWNERSHIP AND TRANSFER IT TO THE SMELTER.
She copied the sentence into her ledger.
Grayharbor had been judged to have lost its use.
That was why it could be deleted.
Mia began copying every population connection the workshop records could provide.
Twelve hundred patrol officers.
Four hundred seventy-three furnace workers.
More than three thousand shopkeepers.
Five thousand one hundred six minors.
The system compressed marriages, family ties, and neighbors into gray links.
Only when she opened a name did its relationships unfold for a moment.
Tasha’s record had empty fields for parents.
Under APPRENTICES, there were seven names.
The youngest belonged to the child who had just been scalded when Pump Three failed.
“Your connections extend beyond one workshop,” Mia said when Tasha returned for a clean coat.
“Obviously.” Tasha dragged off one wet sleeve with her teeth.
“I owe the bakery twelve gear repairs every week.
Does that count as a relationship?” The system had no fields for owing favors, remembering how someone took their tea, or repairing a person’s water line while still angry with them.
Mia opened a new page.
Instead of CONNECTIONS, she wrote PEOPLE WHO MUST BE ASKED INDIVIDUALLY.
She began with Tasha and recorded the relationships Tasha chose to name, without opening the system-generated links.
The first page filled quickly.
Ink seeped through the paper in uneven shadows.
The number 23,074 still sat at the top of the master list.
Yet every name Tasha spoke drew another room behind it, another supper, another debt left unpaid too long.
A cleanup program needed to remove only one root node.
All those untidy, troublesome, irreplaceable connections would break with it.
What if some use remained that could neither be replaced nor interrupted?
The thought was incomplete.
It was still one step beyond I don’t know.
Mia packed the records and left the works.
Dawn had thinned the dark to dirty silver.
The first horn would sound soon.
In the southern ward, the old woman at the bakery pushed her first tray of black bread into the oven.
Patrol officers changed shifts at the corner.
Two unregistered children slept beside a hot-water pipe with their shoes beneath their heads.
The one-eyed dog behind the tutorial sign raised its muzzle and thumped its tail once.
The cleanup list called them linked objects.
Mia crouched and, for the first time, read the lettering on the dog’s collar.
RIVET TWO.
Tasha’s work.
Not an original name in sight.
The dog rested its chin in Mia’s palm.
The third morning horn sounded.
White arrival light began falling over the docks, and Mia returned to the tutorial sign.
Her lamp badge brightened with the dawn.
Sixty-five hours remained.
At the top of the day’s first ledger page, she wrote: [DELETION TARGETS: AT LEAST 23,074 PEOPLE, AND ONE DOG WITH A NAME.] After a moment, she added another line.
[THE NUMBER ABOVE DOES NOT MEAN THEIR CONSENT HAS BEEN OBTAINED.] Until she knew how to save them, the least she could do was remember that they had not volunteered to become the objects of her rescue.