When the daemon touched me, I thought it would feel like being deleted.
Instead, it felt like being turned into sound.
Everything that made up "here" dissolved into a single, dense hiss—no pitch, no rhythm, just full-spectrum static pressing against my skin from every direction. My body became a rumour I was hearing second-hand. Samira's hand vanished from my wrist. Echo's face blurred into noise. The racks, the map, the lights: all gone, like someone had crumpled the frame around us.
For a moment, there was only the loudness.
Then the loudness remembered edges.
I was standing in the middle of a street.
Real asphalt under my shoes, fine grit biting through the soles. The air was cold, damp enough to sting my lungs. I could smell wet stone, old smoke, fried oil from some faraway kitchen, a hint of something sweet going stale.
Traffic lights hung over the intersection, cycling dutifully from red to green to yellow for no one. Cars lined the curb in neat rows, all parked, all empty. Their mirrors held warped slices of sky: a low ceiling of dirty white clouds.
Shops on either side of the street watched me with their dark windows. A bakery with its shutters halfway down. A pharmacy with a neon cross flickering a tired pulse. A bar with smoked glass and an OPEN sign that was obviously lying. Flyers clung to a nearby wall in overlapping patches—gigs, protests, something about a sale—but when I tried to read them, the words fuzzed at the edges, refusing to sharpen.
The city was completely still, not abandoned so much as paused between heartbeats.
I waited for the server-room hum to seep back in. It didn't.
"Okay," I said quietly. "That's new."
My voice sounded too solid, like it belonged more here than I did.
I turned a slow circle, half-expecting to see a door back to Null carved into a wall, labelled EMERGENCY EXIT: TO ERASURE. Nothing. Just buildings, tram lines, a puddle reflecting a crooked slice of billboard—the face of a woman laughing around a drink, eyes slightly wrong, like someone had drawn them from memory.
Somewhere, out of sight, a dog barked twice and stopped.
"You came through the fire," a voice said.
I spun around.
She was sitting on the low brick wall outside the bakery, like she'd been waiting there forever or five minutes. One leg drawn up, boot resting on the wall, arms draped loosely over her knee. The posture of someone who's comfortable in places other people hurry through.
At first glance, she looked like any girl you'd pass on a city street and then remember later without knowing why.
Dark hair fell around her face in an easy wave, not styled so much as let be. Her skin held that in-between tone cities make out of mixed ancestry and exhaust. Her face wasn't the kind that stopped the world; it was the kind that made the world look correctly arranged around it.
She wore a long coat the colour of wet asphalt, hanging open. Beneath it, a dress the deep blue of evening just before the lights come on, when everything holds its breath between working and sleeping. Around her throat, a thin scarf in faded orange, the exact shade of municipal safety vests and warning cones. It shouldn't have worked with the rest; it did, like a hazard sign someone had turned into an accessory.
Her boots were black, scuffed white at the toes, the sort you get from years of walking the same routes. One was laced properly. The other had the top hooks empty, laces tucked in haphazardly, as if she'd been interrupted halfway through the act of leaving.
Her eyes were brown. Pretty ordinary, until you noticed what was in them.
The street.
The whole thing—shopfronts, tram wires, saw-toothed line of roofs—seemed to sit somewhere behind her gaze, like she was borrowing her focus from every window at once.
She was the prettiest thing I'd ever seen, not in the way adverts mean it, but in the way a perfect sentence is—nothing extra, nothing missing, the exact right words in the exact right order.
"You came through the fire," she said again. "Not many do."
Her voice was soft and slow, as if the syllables had to travel a long distance to get here.
"What fire?" I asked. "All I remember is noise."
She smiled, small.
"Noise burns too," she said. "If it's bright enough."
I stayed where I was at first, holding to the centre of the intersection like it might protect me. She watched me with mild curiosity, as if I were the stranger here.
"Where is this?" I asked.
She tilted her head, considering the question like it was a trick.
"Where it hurts when they pull," she said.
"That's not very helpful," I said.
"It's honest," she said. "Helpful is usually how they sell the knife."
I took a breath that tasted of wet concrete.
"Do you… know me?" I asked.
Her gaze didn't waver.
"You're Noor," she said. "You keep trying to write sentences the building can't digest."
The words landed with the gentle inevitability of rain.
"You work for Null," I said slowly. "Or you've been spying on the training Theatre."
"I live with the consequences," she said. "That's close enough."
I walked towards her, because standing in the middle of an empty crossroads while the prettiest girl I'd ever seen sat ten metres away felt like a kind of cowardice even I couldn't justify.
I sat on the wall, leaving a respectful gap between us. The brick was cold, seeping through my clothes. Up close, I could see a faint streak of flour on the cuff of her coat, as if she'd leaned on a counter once and never quite washed it off.
Up close, she looked even more impossibly right for the place.
"What are you?" slipped out before I could stop it.
A breeze tugged at her orange scarf, lifting one corner like a flag.
"Rude," she said, but there was a soft amusement under it. She looked away, down the length of the street. "What are you?"
"Dead," I said. "Administratively."
"Dead is a kind of grammar," she murmured. "I was asking about you, not your paperwork."
I didn't have an answer for that, so I let the question hang between us.
A tram slid past at the end of the road—silent, empty, lighted windows moving like little stages with no actors. The overhead wires hummed once and fell still again.
She watched it go.
"Do you ever feel," she said, "like you're walking through a play that forgot to cast half its roles?"
"All the time," I said.
She nodded, as if she'd expected that.
"People will call that madness if you say it out loud," she said. "They prefer their theatres crowded and their scripts pre-approved."
She turned back to me.
"But someone consumed by madness can see the world in a stranger way than others," she went on, her words slow and careful. "They see where the set ends and the street begins. They see the hands holding the backdrop. It's not always a curse to see that. It just hurts."
The way she said it, I believed her.
"You think I'm mad?" I asked.
"Not yet," she said. "You're still surprised when the walls move."
We sat in silence for a while. It wasn't uncomfortable. The city hummed around us in a low, background way—the vibration of fridges in unseen kitchens, the far-off clatter of something metallic falling over, the whisper of wind funnelled down narrow alleys.
"You came through the fire," she said again, more softly. "You must have wanted to see something."
"I didn't exactly have a checklist," I said. "One second I was in a room full of servers. The next second I was… here."
"Places don't happen by accident," she said. "People do."
"That's comforting," I said.
"Is it?" she asked.
No. Not really.
She studied my face for a long moment, like she was measuring how much weight it could bear.
"Love is a strange teacher," she said. "It makes you look at yourself longer than is healthy. Everyone else glances in a mirror and moves on. Lovers stare until the silver cracks."
"That sounds unhealthy," I said.
"It's how you learn what you're made of," she said simply. "If you never love anything—really love it—you can pretend you're a shape made out of choices. If you do, you start to see the parts that were never yours to pick."
"You talk like you know me," I said quietly.
"I know your type," she said. "People who'd rather turn themselves into ash than into content."
The word hit a little too close to home.
"Maybe being content means I'd still be alive to my mother," I muttered. "Instead of… whatever this is."
Her eyes softened, just a fraction.
"Maybe," she said. "Maybe being content means that you are alive in the world even if you died. Printed in cheap ink, stacked in a drawer, but reachable. Someone can open you. Someone can say your name, even if they don't understand the story."
A chill ran through me.
"And if you're not content?" I asked.
"Then you risk being forgotten," she said. "And being forgotten is like being another piece of dirt in the world blown by the wind. People walk through you. They sweep you up. They never think, I knew that dust once."
Her words slid behind my ribs and sat there.
Ben's face flickered in my mind, bent over his laptop. My mother's hand around a chipped cup. The empty chair in our living room.
"What about darkness?" I asked, before I could stop myself. "The building keeps talking about preventing 'dark outcomes.' Like it's afraid of what happens if it doesn't tidy us up."
She smiled, but there was no warmth in it.
"Real darkness isn't what they file reports about," she said. "Real darkness has existence of man for a face."
The traffic light bathed us briefly in red, then in green, then in yellow again, like three different verdicts flickering over her features.
"You will remain you as long as people know who you are," she said. "As long as someone carries your shape around in their head and says, This is Noor, and means it. When they forget…"
She opened her hand, palm up, fingers loose.
"…you become part of the darkness of memory," she said. "Not a monster. Not a story. Just… background. The unlit parts between other people's meanings."
I swallowed.
"That's… worse than hell," I said.
"Hell at least has a cast list," she said.
We let that hang for a while.
Somewhere down the block, a shutter rattled softly in the wind. An empty plastic bag skittered across the road, caught on nothing, freed again. The everyday trash of a city that should have had people in it.
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked eventually.
She looked at me, and for the first time there was something like softness, or pity, in the way she held my gaze.
"Because you're standing in a crack," she said. "Between content and dirt. Between being misremembered and not being remembered at all. Most people never see that place. They're too busy living, or too busy dying."
"And you?" I asked.
"I'm what collects in the crack," she said, almost lightly. "Don't think about it too hard."
The answer landed like a joke told on the edge of a rooftop.
A line of pigeons sat on a wire above us, perfectly still. None of them moved. None of them blinked.
"Is this… real?" I asked, hating how small the question sounded. "This city?"
She frowned at me, just a little.
"Real enough to hurt," she said. "Isn't that your measure?"
"The building makes simulations that hurt," I said. "Crisis drills. Training modules. Mannequins that bleed if you stand close enough."
She watched my face while I talked, not the way an interrogator does, but the way a street does when you walk through it alone at night—quiet, thorough, uninterested in performing care.
"Close your eyes," she said.
I hesitated.
"If this is the part where you stab me, I'd prefer to see it coming," I said.
"If I wanted you gone, you wouldn't have noticed leaving," she said.
Fair.
I closed my eyes.
"Breathe," she said.
I did.
"What do you smell?" she asked.
"Cold," I said. "Wet pavement. Grease. Something… sweet? Like pastries from last week. And…" I hesitated. "Metal. Rails, maybe."
But i can feel her in my nostrils, through all these smells, as if she exists within all.
"What do you hear?" she asked.
I listened.
"Fridge hums," I said slowly. "In flats I can't see. A TV somewhere, low. Pipes. A bus far off. Wind. The traffic lights," I added, surprised. "They make a sound. Little electric clicks when they change."
I can hear her within those sounds, i feel her in my tympanum.
I opened my eyes again.
And Now i can see her, everywhere.
"That's a lot of detail to give to a hallucination," she said gently.
It didn't feel like proof, exactly, but it felt like a verdict I didn't know how to appeal.
"What happens to me now?" I asked.
She slid off the wall in one smooth movement and stood, coat falling around her in a soft, asphalt-coloured wave. Up close, she was a little taller than I'd thought, or maybe the city behind her had straightened.
She stepped closer, just inside the polite distance we'd kept. The air between us felt charged, like static before a storm.
"You'll go back," she said.
I exhaled, not sure if that was relief or disappointment.
"Back to the building," I said.
"Back to the version of it that still believes in itself," she said.
"And this?" I asked, gesturing around us. "This corner of nowhere?"
She looked past me, down the length of the empty tram tracks, as if she could see into streets I didn't know the names of.
"This waits," she said simply.
"For what?" I asked.
"For you," she said. "At least once more."
My throat tightened.
"Why me?" I managed.
"Because you're noisy in the right places," she said. "Because you stepped into the fire when you could have stayed in the paperwork. Because you irritate the ones who want straight lines."
"That sounds like a terrible basis for fate," I said.
"Yes," she said. "That's how you know it's human."
She reached out like she was going to touch my sleeve, then seemed to think better of it and let her hand fall. Instead, she nodded at the street around us.
"Next time you come here," she said, "you won't ask if it's real."
"How do you know I'll come back?" I asked.
Her eyes flicked upwards, following something I couldn't see.
"Because they're not done with you," she said. "And because this place remembers routes the building forgets."
She held my gaze, and for a heartbeat there was nothing else.
"You'll come back here once more," she said quietly. "To see the true form of memory."
The way she said the last word made it feel less like an idea and more like a person I hadn't met yet.
A flicker ran down the street—the faintest stutter, like bad video. The tram at the far end shivered, momentarily existing in two positions at once. The colours around us washed a little whiter, as if someone had breathed on glass.
I felt the static creeping back in at the edges of my hearing, turning individual sounds into a single, flat band.
"They're calling you," she said.
"Can I stay?" I asked. I wasn't sure why I asked it. I already knew the answer.
"For now?" she said. "No. You're more use to me noisy."
"To you?" I repeated.
She only smiled. It was small and tired and beautiful, the kind of smile cities must give each other in the dark when everyone's gone home.
"Don't let them convince you that vanishing is noble," she said. "Absence is just another kind of lie."
My vision grainified—the world breaking down into static-speckled pieces, like an image being compressed too far.
"Wait," I said. "At least tell me your name."
Wind tugged her hair across her face. She didn't move to fix it.
"You've walked my streets," she said. "You've breathed me in your whole life. If you haven't learned my name by now, that's on you."
The static roared up.
The last thing I saw was the orange edge of her scarf, bright as a warning sign, cutting across the grey.
Then the city—her, the tram lines, the waiting windows—folded into white noise, and the noise folded into dark.
Act Eighteenth's End - "you, the noise and the city that lives eternally.