The train didn't stop so much as run out of world.
One moment there was motion in every direction, the tunnel warping sideways like heat haze. The next, everything held its breath, and the doors slid open onto a platform that felt like an unfinished thought.
I stepped out.
The air was colder here. Not winter-cold, more like server-room-cold: the temperature of machines that never sleep. Concrete sweated under the tube lights. The light itself was wrong, a fraction too slow, as if it needed an extra second to catch up to my body when I moved.
Above the platform, a sign hummed faintly:
OFFICE OF CORRECTIONS
NULL DISTRICT
Underneath that, in smaller letters, like a joke someone was trying to make official:
Endless Death – Client Entrance
Echo came to stand beside me, hands in the pockets of a coat that seemed to decide its color on the fly.
"Welcome under the carpet," she said.
"This is… still the city?" I asked.
She tilted her head.
"It's what the city does with everything it can't be bothered to understand," she said. "Old laws. Lost cases. People like you. Come on."
We walked along the platform.
There were benches, but no adverts above them. Where the city would usually paste smiling faces and slogans, the walls were bare concrete, patched and repatched. Someone had scratched a single line in the middle of all that grey:
EVERYTHING SWEPT UNDER STILL LEAVES DUST.
An escalator waited at the end, dead. A paper sign hung from the handrail, flapping in a breeze I couldn't feel:
OUT OF ORDER
TRY DYING ANOTHER WAY
Echo snorted and took the stairs.
At the top was a hall.
It looked almost normal, which unnerved me more than the train had. Row of chairs. Long counter. Old vending machine with a "CARD ONLY" sticker. The smell of bad coffee and dry plastic.
The difference was in the details.
The echo of footsteps took a half beat too long to return. The clock above the counter had three hands: hours, minutes, and a restless third one that spun fast, then slow, like it couldn't pick a speed. The screens on the far wall showed lists of names, but half the letters were missing, like the database was stuttering over itself.
Echo headed for the counter.
Behind it sat a woman with dark skin, dark eyes, and a nicotine patch on her neck. Her hair was mostly grey, gathered in a loose knot. She wore a vest with too many pockets and a badge that read:
SAMIRA – CORRECTOR
She didn't look up right away. Her fingers moved over her keyboard with the casual violence of someone who knew they couldn't break anything more than it already was.
When she finally glanced at me, it was the look of a doctor who had seen every kind of injury.
"This the new one?" she asked Echo.
"Voluntary," Echo said. "Line Infinity. Name Noor."
Samira studied my face as if checking it against a mugshot only she could see.
"You don't look dead," she said.
"I feel like I always have," I said. "Does that count?"
That earned the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth.
"Hands," she said, tapping the counter.
A small device rose out of the surface with a soft mechanical sigh. Flat black plate on top, small screen on the side.
I put my palms on it.
Cold climbed up my arms, carrying something with it—static, memories, the feeling of every time someone had said my name in a tone that left a bruise. Lines lit up on the little screen: sharp peaks, tangled waves, knots.
Samira watched them, expression flattening.
"Fragmented," she murmured. "You've been shedding versions without supervision."
"Is that a complaint or a compliment?" I asked.
"Yes," she said.
Echo leaned on the counter with her elbows.
"How bad?" she asked.
Samira tapped a key. One of the big wall screens flickered and rearranged itself. For a second my name was there, bright as an accusation—NOOR—and then all but three letters dropped away.
N__R
Three points on a thread.
"On paper, you're dead," Samira said. "Your ID flagged, your file downgraded to corpse, your data handed to departments that won't read it. Congratulations. Officially, you no longer clog the system."
"Unofficially?" I asked.
She jabbed a finger at the screen.
"Unofficially, you're still stuck in three places. Residuals. People who have you lodged behind their ribs. Places where you were too loud to erase on the first pass. We call them threads."
"And if they stay?" Echo prompted.
Samira looked at me.
"Then the city starts to itch," she said. "People dream you, policies wobble, patterns misbehave. Eventually some algorithm upstairs notices a Noor-shaped hole in the picture and tries to fill it. That's how we get administrative resurrections."
"Necromancy by paperwork," Echo said.
"Worst kind," Samira agreed.
I swallowed.
"So… what, you send me up to cut those threads?" I asked.
She opened a drawer, rummaged, and slid a metal rectangle across to me. It looked like a transit card. It felt heavier.
My name was engraved on it, small and precise:
NOOR – ADMINISTRATIVELY DECEASED
On the back, the Endless Death symbol: an infinity sign biting into a circle.
"That's your pass," Samira said. "Between here and there. You follow the pull, you fix what you can, you don't get sentimental in ways that create new problems, and you come back in one piece. Preferably."
"That's it?" I said. "No epic speech about my destiny?"
"Kid," she said, "we're an underfunded department under a city that doesn't believe it has a soul. We don't do destiny. We do damage control."
She pressed another key.
The lines on the small screen condensed into three points, each glowing a different color.
"This one," she tapped the brightest, "is heavy. Parental. That's where the system complains the loudest. Start there."
Echo straightened.
"You sure?" she asked. "First-timers and parents don't mix well."
Samira shrugged.
"It's his choice," she said. "You want to stay erased, Noor, you start where it hurts. You want to half-ass it, I can send you to untangle the time you yelled at a barista. But that won't stop the algorithms."
I looked at the card in my hand. It pulsed faintly, as if agreeing.
"Parents," I said, before I let myself think too much. "Fine."
"Field dock's through that door," Samira said, nodding toward a side exit. "Echo will babysit. Don't touch anything that hums unless it hums back in a language you understand."
I hesitated.
"Samira?" I asked.
"Yeah?"
"What happens to people who refuse?" I said. "Who don't cut any threads. Who just… hide down here."
She considered that for a second.
"They don't stay hidden," she said. "Not really. Their stories get stolen. The Archive raids the leftovers and turns them into metaphors. Everyone deserves better than ending up as an inspirational poster."
The word Archive slid into my chest like a cold coin. I filed it away without knowing why.
Echo nudged my shoulder.
"Come on," she said. "Before she convinces you we're the nice part of the system."
We left the hall.
Behind us, the screens kept scrolling. For a moment, in the corner of my eye, I thought I saw my name flicker in red. When I turned, it was gone.
Maybe the light was just slow here.
Maybe something had already noticed.
—
The field dock looked like a platform that had been dreamt rather than built.
Tile floor, yes. Painted line, yes. But the walls were fog, and the tunnel was an absence so deep my eyes refused to focus on it. Thin strands of light ran parallel out there, receding into nowhere.
Echo stepped to the edge, motioning me closer.
"Same rules as any other train," she said. "Don't jump unless you mean it, don't stare into the void like it owes you answers."
"That a safety pamphlet?" I asked.
"Personal experience," she said.
I took out the metal card.
"What do I do?"
"Just stand here," she said. "Hold onto the idea that you want to fix something. The dock does the rest."
"That sounds vague," I muttered.
"It's public infrastructure," she said. "You want precision, go find a private tunnel."
I almost laughed.
Almost.
The card warmed in my hand.
Pressure formed behind my sternum, like someone hooking invisible fingers into my chest and tugging up, up, toward the ceiling and then through it. The feeling had a direction and a taste: metal, rain, old tea.
It hurt, but not in a way I could point to. More like nostalgia with its teeth bared.
My knees went weak.
"The city already built a path to your problem," Echo's voice came from somewhere close and far at the same time. "You just follow the part of you that still remembers the way."
The dock, the fog, Echo—they all folded, like scenery being packed away after a play, and for a second I was nowhere.
Then I was standing in the rain.
—
It was early evening up there.
Cars hissed past on wet asphalt. The sky was more neon than cloud. Streetlights smeared light across the puddles in long strokes.
I knew the area.
University district. The tram line overhead, the bookstores, the photocopy place that smelled of toner and panic around exam season. I'd walked these pavements for years. They looked the same and wrong at the same time, like a memory rendered at higher resolution.
Nobody saw me.
A man walked straight through my shoulder. My skin fizzed, like it had just been told it was optional.
"You're here, just not… thick," Echo said beside me, barely there herself. "Think of yourself as signal, not body."
I looked at my hands.
They were still solid, if I didn't think too hard. The rain didn't wet them, though. Droplets passed through, leaving a faint chill.
The pull in my chest tugged left.
We followed it.
—
The café was exactly where I knew it would be.
Narrow, half-fogged windows. Square tables. A chalkboard outside announcing specials in handwriting that tried too hard.
Inside, people bent over laptops and conversations. Music hummed quietly—something with a steady beat and no courage.
Near the back, facing the window, sat my mother.
She held a chipped mug with both hands, fingers wrapped around ceramic as if it were an anchor. Her hair had more grey than last time I saw her in the flesh. The coat she wore was old, lining frayed at one cuff.
Her gaze wasn't on anything. Not the phone on the table, not the people, not the rain. It hovered mid-air, somewhere in the middle distance, as if waiting for a subtitle that wouldn't arrive.
The sight hit me harder than the train had.
"I thought she'd just… forget," I said. My voice came out thin.
"She has," Echo said, soft. "Names. Dates. Events. Officially, Noor is a clerical error somewhere far away from her. What she's got left of you is the shape you left in her days. Old paths her thoughts still take even though the destination was erased. That's the thread."
"And we just cut it?" I said.
"That's the job," Echo said. "You can do it two ways."
I waited.
She watched my mother for a beat, then continued.
"Option one: we sand it down. Blur the outline. She keeps the vague sadness, but it stops catching on you. It becomes about 'the way life turned out' or 'feeling tired all the time.' The city loves that kind of sadness. It's good for productivity."
"And option two?" I asked.
"Option two, we sharpen it once," Echo said. "Give her one clear moment: you existed, you're gone, she can't fix it. The pain spikes, then settles into something the system understands as grief, not glitch. It closes cleanly."
"That sounds worse," I said.
"For you or for her?" Echo asked.
I didn't answer.
Inside, the café's waiter asked my mother something. She startled, forced a smile, nodded. When he left, her face folded back into that blank, waiting expression.
"What happens if we do nothing?" I asked.
"The pull grows," Echo said. "She dreams you without a name. Starts asking questions in ways that trip sensors. Searches for things she doesn't have words for. Takes her to doctors, priests, message boards. Patterns flag. Some program upstairs decides the easiest solution is to yank you back into the picture, regardless of what you wanted."
"So I become somebody's patch," I said.
"You become a headline, maybe," Echo said. "A human-interest story. 'Young man miraculously returns after being declared dead.' You want that?"
My mother lifted the mug to her lips. Flinched. She'd always been impatient with tea.
"No," I said.
"Then decide," Echo said. "Blur or blade."
My throat tightened.
"Do I get to talk to her?" I asked. "Properly?"
Echo's voice softened by losing everything except honesty.
"No," she said. "You can't walk in there and start a conversation. You're not memory, you're pressure. A shift in weight. At best, you can nudge her into one true moment and then step away."
The unfairness of it burned.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the café window. It didn't fog.
A child version of me in my skull wanted to hammer on it, to shout, to demand a different rulebook.
The adult version knew better.
"Blade," I said. The word surprised me, but it was the only one that fit. "If I'm gone, she deserves to know it properly, not… as weather."
Echo's silhouette nodded.
"Then you need one memory," she said. "Small. Sharp. Something that's you with her and only her. Not a big drama. A tiny, stupid thing you don't think matters. Those are the ones that stick."
I shut my eyes.
The past opened like an elevator door.
Not to the night my father left, not to hospital corridors, not to report cards. Those were the scenes you performed for other people.
Instead: our old kitchen. The bad one. The window that looked at another wall. Her standing by the stove in a faded T-shirt, stirring lentils in a pot with a broken handle. Ten-year-old me at the table, pencil clenched too tight, writing homework, letters slanting like they were trying to escape.
I'd been spelling "tomorrow" wrong. I wrote it with one R and three O's, certain that more O's meant more future.
She'd come behind me, looked over my shoulder, and without correcting the paper, took my hand in the air and traced the right shapes over nothing.
"You think with your hands," she'd said. "That's why you drop things when your mind goes somewhere else."
Then she'd kissed the back of my head, quick, as if embarrassed by kindness.
Nobody else in the world had that exact moment.
I held it like it could break.
"Got one?" Echo asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"Push," she said.
"How?"
"Remember like it's happening now," she said. "Not as a story you tell, but as an organ that never stopped beating. Let it flood everything, and look at her while you do."
I opened my eyes.
My mother sat in the same pose, mug in hand, eyes on nothing. The rain streaked the window between us.
I let the memory swell until it hurt. The smell of lentils. The hiss of gas. The scrape of pencil on cheap paper. The warmth of her hand over mine, correcting letters that wouldn't last more than a school year but somehow mattered enough for that gesture.
I didn't try to send it like a signal. I just let it be the loudest thing in me and aimed that loudness at her.
The air inside the café thickened.
The music skipped, almost imperceptibly. A spoon slipped out of someone's fingers and chimed against the floor. The waiter turned his head toward the back corner as if someone had just said his name.
My mother inhaled sharply.
Her fingers tightened around the mug. Her lips parted. For a heartbeat, all the everyday noise in her expression fell away, and something raw and precise took its place.
Her eyes filled.
She whispered something.
Through the rain-smeared glass and the double panes, I couldn't hear the word.
I didn't need to.
My chest synced to hers for one painful second.
The thread between us pulled tight, then snapped.
It felt like someone had untied a knot in my ribs and replaced it with an emptiness that would eventually become space. Not comfortable, not yet. Just possible.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I pulled it out on reflex.
The screen, which shouldn't have had service for anything but departmental messages, showed a notification from an app I didn't recognize. Black icon, white circle.
THREAD #1: MATERNAL – STATUS: RESOLVED.
SYSTEM NOTE: WE ARE SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS.
I laughed, a short, ugly sound.
"You'd think an afterlife could hire a better copywriter," I said.
Echo's silhouette tilted, maybe a smile.
Inside, my mother pressed her fingers to her eyes. She breathed through it. When she lowered her hands, her face was tired, but clearer. The sadness had somewhere to sit now. It wasn't looking for a shape.
She took her phone from the table. Typed something. Put it down again. The temptation to lean in, to see, clawed at me. I stayed where I was.
"Come on," Echo said quietly. "Before you start making up dialogue for her."
We turned away from the glass.
On the street, the rain was the same, the neon was the same, the smell of exhaust and fried food was the same.
But the pull in my chest had changed. Lighter.
We walked back into it.
The café window stayed at my back, a square of light in a city that would continue without my name.
—
The dock took us back with that same folding sensation.
One second rain, the next fog and humming tile.
Echo flexed her hands like they were cramped.
"Not bad for a first cut," she said. "Didn't even scream."
"I did internally," I said.
"That still counts," she agreed.
We pushed through the door into the Office hall.
The difference was immediate.
Every screen on the far wall flickered. Names rippled and reshuffled. A low alarm trilled somewhere, polite but insistent, like a smoke detector too polite to scream.
Samira stood at the counter, staring up.
"What happened?" Echo asked.
Samira didn't answer right away. Her jaw was clenched. Ash from a half-smoked cigarette drifted onto the keyboard.
On the biggest screen, a line blinked crimson.
UNAUTHORIZED RETENTION – SUBJECT: NOOR [REDACTED]
SOURCE: ARCHIVE NODE / DISTRICT 3 – CENTRAL
Beneath it:
Potential Narrative Asset. Review in progress.
My name wasn't even complete. Just the ghost of it—N__R—but the system had circled it like it was interesting.
"What's the Archive?" I asked, the cold coin inside my chest suddenly heavy again.
Samira finally looked at me.
"Stomach," she said. "Where the city digests stories. News, myths, propaganda, urban legends. Everything people tell each other until it turns real. The Archive feeds on that."
"And it… has me?" I said.
"Something up there noticed you as you tugged on that thread," she said. "A post you wrote. A comment. A video someone took of you once. Whatever it is, it's trying to assemble you into something useful."
"Useful how?"
"Dead son. Dropout warning. Symbol of bureaucratic cruelty. Miracle. Depends which department wins the argument," she said. "Point is: if they promote you to narrative, you're not just existing again. You're pinned. The city will keep replaying you forever to prove a point."
The idea made my skin crawl.
"Can't you just… delete it?" I asked. "Scrub me from their files?"
Samira laughed once, humorless.
"If I could tell the Archive what to do, I wouldn't be working in Null," she said. "Stories don't obey orders. They obey attention. Someone upstairs is looking at you too hard."
Echo folded her arms.
"So we cut those eyes off," she said. "Send him back. Find whatever piece of him they're using and ruin it."
"How?" I asked. "What do I do, hack a library?"
Samira leaned on the counter, meeting my gaze like she was checking whether there was anything in there besides panic.
"You wrote about this city once," she said. "About how it devours people and sells their bones as inspiration. You weren't wrong."
My stomach dropped.
"You've read my stuff," I said.
"The Archive archived it," she said. "We see the overflow. You thought nobody was listening. Turns out something was. And it liked your tone."
"So I'm being… drafted as a mascot," I muttered.
"Unless you stop it," Echo said.
"And how exactly do I stop an entire city from using me as a metaphor?" I asked.
Samira nodded toward the dock door.
"You go back up," she said. "You find the node where they're building you into a story. Could be a column, a case file, a training video, a documentary pitch. You go there as what you are now—an absence with opinions—and you make yourself unusable."
"Meaning?" I asked.
"Meaning," she said, "you refuse to fit the narrative. You contradict the moral they want from you. You turn the story so sour no department can sell it. You make sure the easiest option is to drop you."
It sounded ridiculous.
It also sounded like the kind of thing I'd always wanted to do when I was alive: walk into the middle of the plot someone else had written for me and wreck the pacing.
Samira's gaze softened, just a fraction.
"The worst fate we see down here isn't people being forgotten," she said. "It's people being remembered for the wrong thing, forever. You came to Endless Death to avoid that, whether you knew it or not."
On the screen, the red line blinked faster.
REVIEW IN PROGRESS…
Echo touched my shoulder.
"You wanted rebirth," she said. "This is part of it. Being born as something other than a warning sign."
The dock door hummed, card reader pulsing like a heartbeat.
I closed my fingers around the metal card.
I thought of my mother in the café, tears like a sudden rainstorm that had, for once, fallen in the right place.
I thought of the idea of myself being chewed into content somewhere upstairs.
"I'm not becoming a lesson for anyone," I said.
"Good," Samira replied. "Then go prove it."
I stepped toward the dock.
Behind me, the Office hummed and flickered and smoked, the unnoticed machinery that kept the city from choking on its own lies.
Ahead, the fog waited.
As it rose to meet me, pulling me back toward the surface and whatever story was trying to claim me, one thought came clear and simple:
If the city was going to write me down, I was going to make sure it regretted every word.
Act second end - "maternity"