Sleep in Null feels like being filed for a few hours.
You close your eyes, and instead of dreams you get the sense of being put back on a shelf. Not in a bad way, not in a good way. Just stored.
I didn't sleep.
I lay on the cot in my new, smaller office, staring at the fake window while the loop ran. Tram lines. Clouded sky. Lights in far-off tower blocks coming on and off in a cycle someone thought looked natural.
Every thirty minutes, the same tram passed. Same smudge on the side. Same flicker in the overhead wires. I timed it twice before I gave up pretending it might surprise me.
"Next time you come here," she had said, "you won't ask if it's real."
My brain offered the helpful question what if this is here and that is fake and then went quiet, maybe out of self-defence.
On the wall panel, the last line of my case display kept replaying itself in my head, even with the screen off.
LEAVE IT. I WANT TO SEE WHERE IT GOES.
At some point the sentence stopped being a note and became a person in my mind. Not with a face, just a presence. Someone up there, above Samira and Clarke and Lane, leaning over the map the way I had leaned over it, tapping my node with a clean finger.
Leave it.
Don't fix it.
Let it grow strange.
I rolled onto my side and pressed my fist against my mouth until the urge to laugh or scream or both passed.
The door hissed.
I sat up fast enough that my neck spasmed.
Echo slipped in sideways, balancing three paper cups and a folder under one arm.
"Good," they said. "You're awake. Or at least upright."
"What time is it," I asked.
"In Null, meaningless," they said. "In clocks, early. Don't ask which early, you'll only get sad."
They set the cups on the tiny table, then shut the door carefully, like the corridor might be listening.
"Did they tell you you're under mild observation with no change to your duties," they asked.
"More or less," I said.
"That's the Clarke version," they said. "The translation is 'everyone is watching you and nobody knows what to do with you yet so try not to explode.'"
"Comforting," I said.
Echo slid one of the cups toward me.
"Drink," they said. "It's coffee. Real coffee. Mostly."
"Mostly," I repeated.
They shrugged.
"Machine coffee, plus something I stole from an actual pot upstairs," they said. "Do not ask how I got up there. It's better for both of us if you can testify you honestly don't know."
The first sip tasted like ash and hope. It burned all the way down. It was the best thing I'd put in my body since dying.
"Congratulations," Echo said. "You're officially the most interesting thing in Null."
"That cannot be true," I said. "There's a room downstairs full of people who voluntarily do compliance training."
"A thing can be deeply disturbing and still boring," they said. "You, on the other hand, shook hands with the building's pet dragon and came back with a ghost city and a not-girlfriend. You're top of the charts."
I stared into my cup.
"She's not—" I started, then stopped.
Echo's grin flickered.
"Relax," they said. "I know better than to joke too hard about whatever had the daemon back off. I like my skin the way it is."
They slid the folder onto the table, tapping it with two fingers.
"Also, we brought you a present," they said.
"We," I said.
"Samira and Mara and I," they said. "Lane is pretending they're above this. Clarke is pretending he hasn't already read it."
"Read what," I asked.
"Your afterlife," Echo said. "Version two."
I opened the folder.
Inside, clipped together neatly, were printed screenshots. I recognized the format: restructuring proposals, the kind of thing Clarke waved around in meeting rooms to justify budget lines.
NULL PROCESS REFINEMENT PILOT – SUBJECT: 7F-19N – ANOMALOUS CASE
PROJECTED APPLICATION: EXPANDED ANOMALY HANDLING / NARRATIVE RISK MANAGEMENT
Below that, bullet points. Even my life looked dull in bullet points.
PHASE 1 – MONITORED CONTINUATION OF STANDARD THREAD RESOLUTION PROCEDURES
PHASE 2 – CONTROLLED EXPOSURE TO HIGH-RISK PATTERNS (DAEMON ADJACENT, MULTI-SUBJECT CASES)
PHASE 3 – MODELING: USE SUBJECT RESPONSES TO INFORM FUTURE PROTOCOLS, TRAINING MATERIALS, PUBLIC COMMS
There were charts, of course. A little graph with my residual score on one axis and something called NARRATIVE ASSET POTENTIAL on the other.
"I'm… a pilot program," I said.
"Look at you," Echo said. "Moving up in the world."
"Is this why I got the nicer cot," I asked.
"You got the nicer cot because Lane thinks you won't sleep," they said. "And because External likes its toys where they can see them."
"Does external have a face," I asked.
"Several," Echo said. "More than I'm allowed to gossip about before coffee."
I flicked to the last page.
There, in smaller text, was a list.
ASSOCIATED STAFF – CORE CONTACTS
HANDLER – S. RAHMAN
SUPPORT – E. LANE, M. IOSELIANI, E. HALE
OVERSIGHT – [REDACTED]
"E. Hale," I said. "That's you."
"I'm flattered you noticed," Echo said.
"M. Ioseliani," I went on. "Mara's surname. Lane's initial. And Oversight, redacted."
Echo leaned back, balancing their chair on two legs.
"'Oversight'," they said, "is a polite way of saying 'person who wrote leave it and enjoys watching things malfunction in interesting ways.'"
"You say that like it's a normal job," I said.
"In Null," they said, "it is."
The folder shook a little in my hands.
"This looks like a plan," I said. "Like someone sat down and turned me into a three-phase project."
"That's exactly what it is," Echo said. "But, look on the bright side. They could have just tagged you for permanent Archive study. At least this way you get to walk around and complain."
I put the pages back and closed the folder.
"What's Phase 2 look like," I asked.
"Ask Mara," Echo said. "They drew most of the diagrams."
The door opened again.
Samira stepped in, hair still damp from a too-fast shower, shirt not quite tucked in all the way. The badge on her belt was turned inward, as if she'd clipped it on while walking.
She looked tired in a way I hadn't seen before. Not just late-shift tired. That hollow, brittle kind of tired that comes from fighting invisible battles uphill.
"Good," she said. "You're both here."
Echo raised a hand.
"I'm in trouble," they said, before she could continue. "I accept this. But it was for coffee, so morally I'm right."
Samira ignored that.
She dropped another file on top of the first one, then sat without ceremony, her mug clinking on the table.
"We're done pretending this is temporary," she said. "The pilot is approved. Noor, you're officially staying."
The floor didn't fall away. It just tilted a little.
"I thought I already… was," I said.
"You were a question mark," she said. "Now you're a line item."
"And that feels worse," I said.
"It's different," she said, which wasn't an answer.
She opened the second file and turned it so it faced me.
This one wasn't about me.
CLUSTER CASE 3H-DELTA – "RIVERSIDE MARGIN"
NODES: MULTIPLE
TYPE: ENTANGLED THREAD FIELD – WORKING DISTRICT – POST-EVENT INSTABILITY
There was a blurry map underneath. Buildings along a river, marked with little dots. Each dot had a case code attached, all admin-dead like mine. Arrows traced connections between them and living people.
"The daemon's pass showed something odd in this district," Samira said. "Residual spike. Several old cases we thought were resolved started tugging again. Same area. Same social circles. We've been told to treat it as a pattern."
"Pattern as in 'problem'," I said.
"Pattern as in 'story,'" Echo said.
Samira shot them a look, but didn't disagree.
"You want me to… what," I asked. "Field trip? Group therapy for ghosts?"
"You're the only administratively dead person who's been allowed to see their own threads from both sides," she said. "You've been through the process, you work for the process, and the process failed to fully digest you."
"Don't phrase it like that," Echo said. "I just ate."
Samira tapped the map.
"You'll go in with a small team," she said. "Carefully. Officially to help, unofficially to see what reacts to you. If this cluster is linked to the same… whatever you touched… we need to know."
"The city," I said, before I could stop myself.
Her eyes flicked up.
"That's what you're calling it," she said.
"That's what it is," I said.
"Labeling it makes it neater," she said. "Don't get too comfortable with neatness."
"You work in a building made of forms," I said.
"That's why I know what I'm talking about," she said.
Echo leaned over the map.
"Riverside Margin," they said. "I know that area. Old industrial quarter. Half converted into overpriced flats, half left to rot."
"There was a tram line," I said slowly. "In the place I saw."
"There are tram lines everywhere," Samira said.
"No," I said. "Not like this. The wires. The way the intersection sat. It felt… close."
Echo glanced between us.
"So we're taking our haunted anomaly to a haunted district," they said. "What could possibly go wrong."
Samira closed the file.
"Not today," she said. "Not tomorrow. We're not throwing you straight back into the fire. Lane wants a baseline first. Cognitive tests, stability checks, boring questions. Then we move."
"Lane always wants tests," Echo muttered.
"That's why Lane is still alive," Samira said.
She looked at me.
"You don't have to say yes," she said. "They're not calling it compulsory. Not yet."
I wanted to laugh at that little "yet," curled up like a snake in the corner of the sentence.
"If I say no," I said, "what happens."
"Someone else goes," she said. "Someone who hasn't seen what you've seen. Someone the daemon will burn clean given half a chance."
She didn't say and the pilot quietly closes, and External makes a note: subject failed to deliver.
She didn't have to.
Echo drummed their fingers on the table.
"You wanted out," they said. "Way back when. Before Null. Before death by paperwork. You took the only door they offered. How'd that work out."
"Badly," I said.
"So maybe this time," they said, "you try the door they don't like."
Samira looked like she wanted to argue and couldn't find the angle where it wouldn't be a lie.
I thought of the ghost street. Of traffic lights changing diligently for no one. Of a girl on a wall, coat like wet asphalt, scarf the colour of warning signs. Her in the air, in the hum of unseen fridges, in the small, stubborn details of a city that refused to be just a backdrop.
"You'll come back here once more," she'd said. "To see the true form of memory."
I was very tired of being right about the worst possibilities.
"I'll go," I said.
The room didn't gasp. No trumpets. Just the same hum, the same coffee smell, the same folder on the table.
Samira closed her eyes briefly, as if steeling herself.
"All right," she said. "Then we do it carefully. Team no bigger than four. You, Echo, Mara on technical, one field archivist as cover. We go in as standard reconciliation assistance. No mention of patterns, no mention of daemons, no mention of whatever lives in your nose."
"That phrasing," Echo said, "is going to haunt me."
She stood.
"There's one more thing," she said.
"Of course there is," I said.
"Gabriel asked to see you," she said.
The name dropped into the room like a stone into shallow water.
Echo rolled their eyes.
"Of course he did," they said. "Our favourite white-haired ghost."
"He's not a ghost," Samira said.
"Then why does he only appear when things go weird," Echo said.
"Because that's his remit," she said.
She looked at me again.
"He's part of Oversight," she said. "Not the same part that wrote 'leave it,' as far as I can tell. But he's close enough to hear the pen scratch."
"Where," I asked.
"Observation deck," she said. "Fifteen minutes."
Echo winced.
"Fancy," they said. "Dress code is 'existential dread.'"
They left me alone to wash my face and try to look less like someone who'd met a city and fallen a little bit in love.
I stared at my reflection in the tiny sink mirror.
Same nose. Same bad shave. Same scar on my chin from when I'd fallen down the stairs at sixteen and refused stitches.
If you cropped the background and put this face back into old ID cards, no one would know it belonged to a dead man in a building under the city.
"You will remain you as long as people know who you are," she had said.
I touched the glass.
"Problem is," I told the mirror, "I'm not sure I do."
The observation deck was misnamed. There was no sweeping view, no glass walls. Just a long, narrow room with one entire side taken up by a projection of the city from above.
Not a map. Not quite.
It was a pulsing, shifting thing. Veins of light where traffic moved. Darker patches where power cheapened. Occasional flickers where the system registered "events."
Gabriel stood with his back to me, hands in the pockets of his too-clean coat, hair falling in silver lines to his shoulders. He looked like a cutout from some higher-budget reality that had been pasted into ours and never fully blended.
"You're late," he said, without turning.
"I had to decide whether to come," I said.
"You already decided that when you left your room," he said. "The rest was just giving yourself excuses."
He turned then, and the city light washed over his face in blue and white.
He looked the same as last time. Calm, tired, annoyingly composed. The kind of man who would apologize as he pushed you off a cliff, and mean it.
"So," he said. "You met it."
I didn't ask what he meant.
"You knew this would happen," I said.
"I knew something would," he said. "You poked a question through a wall you weren't supposed to see. Questions echo. Sometimes they come back with… attachments."
"She's not an attachment," I said, sharper than I meant.
One of his eyebrows lifted.
"Interesting pronoun choice," he said.
I folded my arms so I wouldn't try to hit him.
"You're Oversight," I said. "You could have stopped this. You could have told Null to purge me and move on."
"I could have," he said.
He looked back at the city projection.
"I didn't," he added.
Silence stretched.
"Why," I asked.
"Because watching systems do the same thing over and over is dull," he said. "Because sometimes you need an error to see the shape of the rules. Because there is something in that district that has been bothering us for longer than you've been alive."
"Us," I repeated.
"People who remember the city is older than its forms," he said.
He gestured at the glowing map.
"Look," he said.
Lines pulsed along the river. Tiny flares where Null's data intersected with the living city. Each flare had a code I couldn't read at this distance.
"You see this cluster," he said. "Old industrial belt. Workers' housing. Rivers of cheap labour keeping the rest of the city lit. They built Null, in a way. Their lives made the statistics that justified smoothing out the rough edges."
"And now," I said.
"And now," he said, "they keep dying the same way. Not just bodies. Names. Cases the Archive insists are closed keep tugging open. Threads we cut reattach. It's as if something down there refuses to stay deleted."
"Maybe it doesn't like being turned into scenery," I said.
"Maybe," he said.
He glanced at me.
"You've seen it from one angle," he said. "In the fire. In the street that isn't supposed to exist. You're going to see it from another. In the places where people still live and work and pretend the ground under their feet isn't constantly being reworded."
"Is this where you give me a speech about responsibility," I asked.
"No," he said. "This is where I tell you the truth and let you decide if you'd rather have the lie."
He took his hands out of his pockets, palms open.
"Null will tell you this cluster is a malfunction," he said. "They'll say it's grief echoes, administrative error, psychological contagion. They will build beautiful models explaining why it is safe to keep doing what they're doing."
"And you," I asked.
"I think," he said slowly, "this is the moment when the endless death starts complaining."
The phrase settled somewhere deep in me, like a stone hitting mud.
"The endless death," I repeated.
"The long process your building runs," he said. "Bodies go one way, names another. Stories get shaved down into something palatable. Most of the time, people accept it. They call it moving on. In places like this—" he nodded at the glowing river "—it cuts deeper. It takes more. And sometimes, what's left pushes back."
"Is she that pushback," I asked.
He smiled, faintly.
"Do you want her to be," he asked.
"Yes," I said, before I could lie.
"Then act accordingly," he said.
He stepped closer to the projection, the light painting his hair in lines of static.
"Here's what they won't put in your file," he said. "Null was not built to be evil. It was built to be kind. Quiet. Efficient. It was supposed to make death less messy. To give the living cleaner endings. But once you teach a system to tidy, it will eventually decide that people are clutter."
"And you work for it," I said.
"I work around it," he said.
He turned fully to me.
"You, Noor, are now officially both a part of the machine and a crack in it," he said. "You're going to walk into that district with three different sets of eyes on you. Null, looking for confirmation that its methods still 'work.' Oversight, looking for signs that something bigger is waking up. And something under the streets, watching to see if you remember its face."
"And what am I looking for," I asked.
"That," he said. "You'll have to decide on the way."
He started to walk past me. I caught his sleeve.
"What happens if I choose wrong," I asked.
He considered.
"There's no right," he said. "Just different ways of being forgotten."
"That's not an answer," I said.
"It's the only one I trust," he said.
He slipped free of my grip with practiced ease.
"At least this way," he added, pausing at the door, "you get to pick which kind of forgetting you fight."
The door shut behind him with a soft click.
I stood alone in front of the city.
From up here, it looked almost peaceful. Light streams. Dark blocks. Little pulses where lives intersected with data. Somewhere down there, a river cut through the grid. Somewhere along it, a street paused itself when I arrived. Somewhere, a girl with an orange scarf leaned against a wall and listened to the hum of fridges, the click of traffic lights.
"You'll come back here once more," she'd said.
Behind me, in the wall, a panel blinked.
ASSIGNMENT UPDATE – CLUSTER CASE 3H-DELTA
FIELD TEAM: S. RAHMAN / N. [REDACTED] / E. HALE / M. IOSELIANI
START: PENDING CLEARANCE – EXTERNAL REVIEW
At the bottom, in smaller text:
NOTE: SUBJECT CONSENT RECORDED. PROCEED.
I touched the edge of the display.
"It's not consent if the only alternative is being nothing," I said, to no one in particular.
The projection of the city kept pulsing, indifferent.
Still, under the hum of the building, I thought I heard something else. Faint. A fridge. A tram. A voice that could have been wind.
Real darkness has existence of man for a face, she'd told me.
You will remain you as long as people know who you are.
Maybe that was the only choice I had left. Not between life and death, not between system and revolt, but between the way I disappeared and what kind of shape I left behind.
The first arc of my death had been about letting go.
The next, apparently, would be about refusing to.
I stepped closer to the city until the light from it washed my hands pale.
"All right," I said quietly. "Let's see where this goes."
Act Twentieth's End – "Thus do i remain."