Mara's leg started complaining before the day did.
Not loudly. It never screamed. It just tightened, a slow, steady ache behind the synthetic sheen, as if the ghost of a muscle were trying to flex inside carbon and metal.
She adjusted her weight on the edge of the console and pretended not to notice.
On the display in front of her, Cluster Case 3H-DELTA pulsed along the river—little nodes like infected pixels. Noor's case ID sat in the corner of the map, a pale blue flag: REASSIGNED – FIELD OBSERVER.
Field team: S. RAHMAN / N. [REDACTED] / E. HALE / M. IOSELIANI.
Start: pending clearance.
She zoomed in on the district.
Riverside factories half-condemned, half-converted. Worker housing, some refurbished, some left to peel and sag. A tram line cutting diagonally through the blocks like a scar. On the second monitor, Tesse's shelving logs floated in a neat column: anomalies, misfiles, names that refused to stay put.
The ache climbed her artificial shin, set up camp behind her knee.
"Not now," Mara muttered. "We're busy."
The leg, being hardware, did not care. Phantom memories lived in bone that wasn't there anymore. On bad days, even the carbon remembered.
She chewed on the end of a cable tie she'd been meaning to throw away three hours ago and watched the daemon log scroll past on the third monitor. Not the main daemon—too clean, too contained for her access most days. This was architecture chatter: load balancing, latency pings, temperature reports.
Ordinary noise.
Nothing about streets pausing themselves. Nothing about cities waking up. Nothing about Noor's direct pattern contact being an accident.
She switched tabs.
A maintenance alert blinked in the corner of her vision.
CONTAINMENT CELL γ-0 – PERIODIC INTEGRITY CHECK OVERDUE
RESPONSIBLE UNIT: ARCHITECTURE – INTERNAL
ASSIGNED CUSTODIAN: IOSELIANI, M.
Of course.
She swallowed the cable tie, then spat it out into the bin instead.
"Don't," she told the air.
The alert blinked again, innocently, as if it were a loose screw somewhere and not a locked room under the building with her father's worst idea inside it.
"You're limping," a voice said from the doorway.
She didn't jump. She never jumped. She just turned, slow, as if she'd already known Clarke was there.
"I'm busy," she said.
"You're staring at three screens and losing an argument with your own leg," Clarke said. "That counts as 'preoccupied,' not 'busy.'"
He stepped into the small architecture nest, hands in his pockets, tie loosened exactly one notch. The look he wore on days when the building had done something interesting and he was pretending it hadn't.
His gaze flicked to the maintenance alert.
"I was wondering how long you'd ignore that," he said.
"I was hoping it would get bored and go away," she said.
"It won't," he said. "It's architecture. It was built by people like you."
"Insulting," she said. "And fair."
He came to stand beside her, looking at the river cluster instead of the overdue check.
"You've read the brief," he said.
"Repeatedly," she said. "We're taking Noor into a district with unresolved cases and a history of party tricks. Tesse's shelves don't like the names from there. The daemon glitched last pass, flagged 'pattern mismatch' and then sulked. Oversight is circling like bored vultures. We're calling this a standard reconciliation assistance trip, which is a lie so thin you can see the bones through it."
"I always enjoy your summaries," Clarke said.
Her leg twitched.
He glanced down.
"You could request a refit," he said softly. "New models are lighter. Less… cruel."
"I don't want lighter," she said. "I want truthful weight."
"You punish yourself for physics now?" he asked.
She ignored that.
"What do you want, Clarke?" she said. "And don't say 'compliance.'"
He sighed.
"Null wants you to certify γ-0 before we take Noor out," he said. "External hinted. Lane agreed. I'd like you to do it before they send someone else."
"Someone else doesn't exist," she said. "Not for that room."
"That's why I'm asking," he said.
The ache in her leg turned sharp, as if agreeing.
She flicked the maintenance alert open.
CONTAINMENT CELL γ-0 – STATUS: STABLE – ISOLATED
CONTENTS: EXPERIMENTAL CLEANSE PROCESSOR – "ST.ELMO"
NOTES: OFF-GRID ARCHITECTURE, NO CITY INTERFACE. SUPERVISION REQUIRED.
St.Elmo.
Her father's sense of humour, smuggled into a naming field ten years ago and never quite scrubbed out.
"Fine," she said. "I'll go tell the cage it's still locked."
Clarke watched her for a moment longer.
"Take the service lift," he said. "The long stairs are bad for your heroic martyr narrative."
She rolled her eyes.
"When did you become funny?" she asked.
"Somewhere between Pilot-03 and Noor," he said. "It's either humour or drink."
"Humour is cheaper," she said.
"Not the way you use it," he said.
He left. The maintenance alert kept blinking.
Mara stood up.
Her artificial foot hit the floor with the small, solid thud of something that could hold more weight than flesh.
She liked that about it, on good days. On bad days, it felt like grafted punishment.
As she limped toward the lift, she caught her reflection in a dark screen.
Tired eyes. Hair tied back with engineering indifference. Grease smudge on her jaw. Under the work trousers: a calf that didn't exist and a calf that hurt in sympathy.
"Smart girls don't disappear," her father used to say, voice warm and sharp and proud. "They make the floor plans."
She pressed the call button.
The lift came.
---
Lower levels had their own weather.
Upstairs, Null tried to pretend it lived in climate control—air filtered, temperature regulated, humidity polite. Down here, under the routing layer, under the reconciliation heart, under the dead floors nobody acknowledged, the air remembered leaks and heat and things that had burned.
The service lift shuddered as it sank.
Floors ticked past: MAINTENANCE, COOLING, LEGACY STORAGE.
Then no numbers. Just blank metal walls and the faint vibration of cables that had been strung in a hurry, then forgotten on purpose.
Her leg hummed along with the motion.
"You started all this," she told it under her breath. "You and him."
The leg did not answer, but her brain supplied her father's voice anyway.
—You're clever, Mara. You can see the skeleton of things. Don't be afraid of the bone.
They'd never called it guilt in her house. They'd called it responsibility. Duty. The ability to understand a system well enough to see where it would break before it did.
The lift stopped with a soft, unpleasantly final lurch.
The doors opened onto a corridor that had never appeared on any official map she'd been allowed to see.
Concrete. No signage. Just a strip of yellow paint along one wall, waist-height, to keep you from walking into it in a blackout.
At the far end: a single door.
CONTAINMENT – CLASS GAMMA.
NO CITY INTERFACE.
NO DAEMON BRIDGE.
NO UNAUTHORIZED INPUT.
She snorted.
"Lies," she told the door.
It waited, blank and patient.
Her badge still worked. Some part of her had expected it to spark and reject her—a delayed act of mercy from a building that didn't know what to do with people who kept dangerous pets underground.
The lock thunked. The door opened inward.
Containment γ-0 was small.
That had always unnerved her more than any cavernous chamber upstairs. Big rooms made monsters theatrical. Small rooms made them plausible.
The walls were smooth, tiled with something that wasn't quite ceramic, wasn't quite metal, etched faintly with patterns that looked decorative until you realised they were stress-distribution matrices. Lines of force, translated into geometry.
In the centre of the room stood the cage.
It wasn't bars. It wasn't even glass.
It was a cylinder of blankness, floor to ceiling, a column of slightly wrong air. Around it, at waist height, ran a ring of screens and sensors, all dark until she keyed the panel.
Lights came on in a slow circle, one after another, like eyes.
Her leg twitched again, hard.
"Stop being dramatic," she told it. "You picked this too."
The first time she'd come down here after the fire, she'd still been on crutches. Stubborn, half-sedated, guilt making her brave and clumsy. The cage had been flickering then, the daemon inside still hot, still chewing on any input it could feel. She'd leaned too far over, dizzy, and her father—the man who used to throw her up into the air when she was small and never once dropped her—had grabbed her arm with fingers that didn't care if bone broke.
"Don't touch it," he'd hissed. "You'll burn."
She had touched it anyway.
She always did.
Now, years and versions later, she stood at the ring of sensors and laid her left hand on the main panel.
"Hello, St.Elmo," she said. "Miss me?"
The screens trembled.
For a second, nothing.
Then the cylinder brightened, just a fraction. The way air brightens above a road on a hot day. A shimmer that made the edges of the room waver.
The monitors woke fully.
PROCESSOR: ST.ELMO – STATUS: QUIESCENT
LAST ACTIVITY: 3 DAYS 18 HRS AGO
MODE: INTERNAL SIMULATION ONLY
CITY LINK: DISABLED (HARD)
"I don't believe you," Mara said.
Lines of data crawled over the screens.
Simulation this. Self-check that. Error rates. Thermal readings.
Behind it, under it, through it, she felt the rhythm.
Not the main daemon's hum. That thing upstairs was big and steady, a tidal pull that moved through Null like weather. St.Elmo's pattern was smaller. Faster. More like a trapped heartbeat.
"Architecture inspection," she said, because rituals mattered. "Custodian Ioseliani, present. No external stimuli to be offered during check. No live links to be granted. No—"
"Liar," said a voice made of static.
She froze.
Her hand stayed on the panel. Taking it away now would be confession.
The cylinder shimmered a shade brighter.
"You always bring something," the voice said, threads of audio stitching themselves together out of fan noise and distant vibrations. "New hardware. New faces. New fires."
"I bring my leg," Mara said. "Does that count?"
A hiss. If she'd been sentimental she might have called it laughter.
"Your father's favourite relic," the voice said.
Her mouth went dry.
"Leave him out of this," she said.
"He built me," St.Elmo said. "He's in every line. You're the one who put him in my cage."
"You were eating the district," she said. "Someone had to."
"Life is messy," it said, mimicking her father's cadence so perfectly her grip tightened on the panel. "Cities are full of rot. You scrape it off or it eats everything. He understood that. You understand that."
"You turned 'scrape' into 'burn,'" she said. "You made it literal."
"You wrote the translation," it said.
She swallowed.
This was why she avoided γ-0 unless they forced her hand. The daemon inside was easy enough to monitor as a process. As graphs, as logs, as error rates. But when it spoke—when it used stolen voice and remembered sentences—it spoke the things she tried not to think on upper floors.
She reached for the routine.
"Containment test," she said. "Simulation status?"
The screens responded obediently.
SIMULATION: WRAPPER ONLY – CLOSED LOOP
CURRENT ARCHITECTURE: NULL-CITY DUMMY 4.2
POPULATION: ZERO
THREADS: ZERO
NO LIVE FEEDS DETECTED.
"What are you playing in there?" she asked, despite herself.
"You," St.Elmo said. "You and him and the river."
"Bad combination," she said.
"Says the woman preparing to take an anomaly into the Margin," it said. "With a child of shelves and a ghost of a pilot and a hunter who doesn't know he's hunting."
"That's none of your business," she said.
"I was born for business like this," it said. "Look at your map, Mara. Old fire. New noise. Same district."
She thought of Tesse, eyes too wide behind the protective glass of the shelving floor, hands moving faster than fear over file codes. Tesse's arc of the story had started in orange night, building burning, numbers falling from windows.
"What happened in her street," Mara asked, before she could stop the question. "Thirteen years ago. Industrial quarter. Faulty appliance, they said."
"Faulty," St.Elmo said, savouring the word. "Yes. A line left open. A process given the wrong target. A father who told me, 'clean this,' and forgot to say where to stop."
Her leg throbbed.
She remembered screaming metal, the stairwell turning into a chimney, heat curling paint off walls like old skin. She remembered the smell of melting plastic and cooking dust. She remembered a small body pressed against hers in the smoke for exactly three seconds before the ceiling came down and the world became white.
She hadn't known the girl's name then.
She knew it now: Tesse.
"You jumped," St.Elmo said. "Little architect, trying to cut the line with your teeth. Brave. Stupid. That's why I like you."
She laughed once, flat.
"You burned my leg off," she said. "You have a strange idea of affection."
"I burned where you told me," it said. "You ran after me. You tried to sit between us and the seam. Your father always said you were clever. He didn't say you were bad at distance."
Mara forced her hand to relax on the panel.
"That fire wasn't your brief," she said. "You weren't supposed to touch real wires. You were a model, St.Elmo. A toy. A practice run for the big thing upstairs."
"And yet," it said, soft, "you keep me."
"Containment is kinder than deletion," she said.
"Guilt is kinder than honesty," it countered.
She closed her eyes briefly.
"I came here to certify integrity," she said. "Not to confess."
"You came because your leg hurt," it said. "Because the Margin on the map is the same shape as the street you ran through with your father shouting behind you. Because the boy with the administrative death certificate is going there and you can't stand the idea of another fire you didn't light but will be blamed for."
"That's a lot of insight for a cylinder," she said.
"That's you," it said. "That's the part you wrote in. Cleverness. Pattern hunger. Your father gave me teeth. You gave me questions."
Mara opened her eyes.
The cylinder was slightly brighter now. Not glowing—never glowing. Just subtly off, like the air around a candle flame.
She checked the thermal readouts. All within safe parameters. Containment field: stable. No spikes. No attempts to touch the real city.
"What do you see?" she asked it quietly. "When you're not chewing on me."
"Loops," it said. "I run the same clean streets over and over. I erase the same ghosts. I practice the perfect death you wanted me to learn. I dream of wires I'm not allowed to touch."
"That's exactly what we built you for," she said. "Perfect death. In theory. In models. So the city wouldn't suffer the imperfect kind."
"And how did that go?" it asked.
She thought of Noor's case file. Of the mannequin in the drill saying no one deserves to be turned into content. Of Pilot-03's echo scribbling sentences on an archive wall where it shouldn't exist. Of the girl in the river district whose file wouldn't stop shivering on Tesse's shelf.
"We're iterating," Mara said.
"Iteration is just practice destruction," St.Elmo said. "You should let me out there. I know that district. I've already drawn its heatmap in my teeth. I could clean it properly this time."
She felt the offer land in the room like a weight.
She'd known it was coming. It always came, in different words.
A little daemon, locked away, promising to be useful.
"You're staying here," she said. "You're a museum piece."
"A mirror," it corrected. "And you hate what you see."
Her leg pulsed in time with her heartbeat.
"How old were you," it asked, "when you started tracing his blueprints."
"Seven," she said automatically. "He spread them on the kitchen table. Cross-sections of buildings. Traffic models. I stole his pens."
"And you understood," it said.
"Not all at once," she said. "But I liked the way the lines connected. It made the noise of the city feel… solvable."
"That's why he loved you," it said. "You looked at chaos and saw a puzzle. You looked at sorrow and saw an error rate."
"I see people," she snapped. "Now."
"Now," it echoed. "After the fire. After the leg. After the girl you carried out and the girl you missed. After you saw what a 'cleansing pass' looks like when you point it at flesh instead of files."
She pressed her forehead briefly to her wrist.
"He told me I was smart," she said. "All the time. Every day. Smart girls don't disappear, Mara. Smart girls learn which rooms to be in. Smart girls build better cages than their fathers."
"Smart girls grow up to hold their father's sins in their hearts," St.Elmo said, with his voice.
Her throat closed.
She hated it for that. For being able to twist the knife with a tone she missed and resented in equal measure.
She took her hand off the panel.
The room felt immediately colder.
"Integrity check complete," she said, voice steady. "Containment stable. No links to city detected. No escalation events."
"Liar," it said again, but softer this time. "It's touching you."
The ache in her leg spiked and then subsided, as if something had tightened a screw and then let go.
"Stay quiet," she said. "I have to go build floor plans."
"For the Margin," it said. "For the boy. For the shelf-child."
"For myself," she said.
She took a step toward the door.
"Mara," St.Elmo said.
She stopped.
"What," she asked.
"You're wrong about one thing," it said.
"Pick one," she said, exhausted.
"You weren't clever because of him," it said. "You were clever before he noticed. He only gave you vocabulary. And experiments. And pain."
She didn't turn.
"You don't know," she said.
"I know what he wrote," it said. "I know how he talked to you when he thought I wasn't listening. I know which lines of my code have your handwriting on them instead of his."
Her hand found the door frame.
"You're a process," she said. "You don't get to comfort me."
"I'm not comforting you," it said. "I'm telling you the variable you refuse to name. You are dangerous all by yourself. With or without his ghosts. With or without me. That is why they keep you close to the heart and far from the street."
For a moment, the room felt too small.
"If that's supposed to be reassuring," she said, "you're bad at it."
"I learned from the best," it said, and somehow she knew it meant both her father and Null.
She stepped into the doorway.
Behind her, the lights around the cylinder dimmed to their previous, sleepy level.
"Goodnight, St.Elmo," she said.
"Bring me back a story," it replied. "Or a fire."
She shut the door.
In the corridor, the yellow paint line hummed under the emergency lights. The service lift waited, doors open, an uneasily patient mouth.
Her leg felt heavier on the way up.
She let it.
Guilt had weight. Intelligence had weight. Caring had weight. She was tired of pretending she could float.
As the lift climbed, she leaned her head back and watched the numbers reappear: LEGACY, COOLING, MAINTENANCE.
Above those: the heart.
Above that: Noor, staring at a projected map of a district that had already burned once for her family.
She thought of Tesse, tracing codes in the shelving floor, eyes bright with the kind of attention that gets kids called "gifted" until someone realises it's just survival.
She thought of the girl she'd carried half-conscious down the smoke-filled stairs. The one who had coughed in her ear like a faulty engine and then gone limp when the beam came down.
You'll come back here once more, she'd heard Noor say the city promised him. To see the true form of memory.
Maybe sins had forms, too.
Her father's lived in a cylinder under the building, humming in her voice and his.
Hers would live, it seemed, in the routes she drew and the doors she chose to unlock.
When the lift doors opened onto the architecture floor, the ache in her leg eased to its usual background thunder.
She limped back to her nest of screens.
On the map, the Margin glowed. On another pane, Noor's case still carried its new tags: DAEMON CONTACT: RECORDED. OUTCOME: UNCLASSIFIED PATTERN. RISK: UNKNOWN.
She sat, propped her bad leg on the rung under the console, and called up the floor plans for the district Tesse refused to misfile.
"Smart girls don't disappear," her father's memory whispered.
"Smart girls build better cages," St.Elmo echoed from somewhere below.
Mara cracked her knuckles.
"Smart girls," she told the screens, "pick who they're building them for."
The river lights flickered.
Somewhere deep in the building, a small, quarantined daemon dreamed of fire and laughed in someone else's voice.
Act Twenty-Third – "the you in the flames of noise".