The tram always sounded wrong when it crossed the river.
Lina had grown up with that sound—a little shiver in the metal, a stutter in the wheels as they hit the old span and pretended it was still solid. The city council's last report had called the bridge "structurally adequate." People in Riverside called it "if God wants you, He'll take you."
Today the tram shuddered the same way it always did. The passengers didn't look up. Everyone was already half-ghost in the morning rush: headphones, bowed heads, fingers scrolling as if they could dig a tunnel out through their screens.
Lina watched the water instead.
From up here the river looked clean. It never did at ground level. Down there you could smell the rot and oil, see the bottles get caught in the reeds, watch the foam collect in the eddies and pretend it was just soap.
She counted the stains on the concrete piers as they rattled past.
One, two, three, four—
Her mind helpfully supplied the missing posters that had once been taped there.
Same spots, different paper.
By the time they reached the far bank, her stomach had settled into its usual tight knot.
Null's district rose on this side. Smooth-faced buildings, all glass and brushed metal and the gentle smugness of places that always have electricity. The closer the tram got, the more the air changed—from river damp and fryer grease to coffee and toner and something like disinfected anxiety.
Lina got off at Saint Gabriel Station and let the crowd carry her up the escalator. The tunnel posters here were different—no missing faces, no cheap adverts for payday loans. Just Null's campaigns:
WE MAKE LOSS ADMINISTRABLE.
YOUR STORY, HANDLED WITH CARE.
DEATH DESERVES DIGNITY.
She tried not to read the slogans. Every time she did, a small, mean part of her wanted to write in the margins.
*You mean: paperwork.*
Outside, security was the same dance as always: badge, bag check, walk through the quiet archway that smelled faintly of ozone. The guard on duty glanced at her ID.
"Morning, Lina," he said. "Big drill today, yeah?"
"Apparently," she said.
"Don't die," he added cheerfully. "We're low on temps."
"Not funny," she said, but she smiled anyway. It was easier than explaining why the joke landed wrong.
The lift up to Training hummed with soft music and softer lighting. Lina watched her reflection in the brushed metal panel. Hair scraped into a bun so it wouldn't tickle at her neck during sessions. Null lanyard straight. Dark circles under her eyes mostly concealed.
She still didn't look like she belonged here.
In Riverside, people had said the same thing, but for different reasons.
"You're wasting your brains on them," her mother had said, folding laundry as if it were a form of prayer. "You think that building cares if our papers are in order? They barely know we exist until rent is late."
Her grandmother hadn't said anything. Just made the sign against bad luck and pressed the Saint Gabriel medallion harder against her chest.
Lina had gone to Null anyway.
Because someone had to know how the machine worked.
Because the missing posters on the riverside walls were starting to blur in her head, faces slipping into each other like ink in rain.
Because every time another name went up, people said the same things—gangs, bad choices, wrong place at wrong time—and never the one she felt in her bones:
*Maybe the city forgot them on purpose.*
The Training floor smelled like coffee, plastic, and stress. Rows of terminals, lecture rooms with soundproof walls, small glass-box offices where supervisors sat like specimens. On one wall, the latest schedule blinked.
LIVE EXERCISE – CASCADE SCENARIO ALPHA
Mandatory: Cohort 7, Contract Auxiliaries A–D
Time: 09:30
Location: DRILL FLOOR 3
"Trainee 06!" someone called.
She turned.
Hawk—real name Hevelin, but nobody called him that—strode toward her, tablet tucked under his arm. His vest already said FACILITATOR in block letters, like he'd been born with it printed on his chest.
"You're with Group B," he said. "High-density incident at District Office. You'll be handling subject profiles similar to 7F-19N."
The case code landed with the small thud it always did.
"Is this about the module again?" she asked.
"What module?" he said, too fast.
"The one with the administratively dead man and the bad quiz," she said. "The one where you added a fifth answer and then pretended you hadn't."
His mouth tightened.
"Your feedback was… noted," he said. "Today we're testing response under cascade conditions. You'll have live observers."
"Live as in… ?" she asked.
"Live as in breathing," he said. "Don't worry. You're not on performance review. Yet."
Reassuring.
He pointed toward the end of the corridor.
"Vest up," he said. "Drill starts in twenty."
---
The warehouse-level looked worse the second time.
From the doorway, the taped-out streets and foam people might have been funny. A school project about "society" done by an overachieving thirteen-year-old. But once you stepped in, the absurdity curdled.
Lina tugged at her RESPONSE TEAM vest, feeling like the word on her back was a lie. The mannequins stared past her with their blank ovals. Someone had drawn a smiley face on one and been forced to scrub it off; the faint ghost of the ink still showed.
On the far side of the space, up on a low platform, she spotted the observers Hawk had mentioned.
Three of them.
Clarke from Audit: posture like a measuring tape, eyes like they were always calculating whether you fit on the page. Mara from Technical: perched on a crate, tablet in hand, leg stretched out stiffly. And—
Lina's throat went dry.
Him.
She'd only seen him in recordings until now. Case 7F-19N. The administratively dead man with the careful voice, the one who kept refusing to be useful in the ways the module wanted. In person he looked… smaller. No, that wasn't it. More compressed. Like the building had put pressure on him from all directions and he'd folded neatly instead of breaking.
He wore a vest that said NULL – OBSERVER. The irony made her want to laugh.
As she watched, he looked up, scanning the room. Their eyes didn't meet; his gaze slid past her, taking in the mannequins, the tape, the trainers. Still, a weird, pricking sensation ran down her arms.
*That's him,* something in her thought. *The one who answered no when the form only allowed yes.*
"Trainee 06!" Hawk barked. "Stop staring. Positions!"
She moved.
Her assigned station: behind a cardboard counter with DISTRICT OFFICE printed across the front. Next to her, another trainee she barely knew fidgeted, pulling at his vest collar.
"You ready?" he asked.
"No," she said. "You?"
He huffed something that might have been a laugh.
The overhead loudspeaker crackled.
"Full Cascade Exercise Alpha will begin in two minutes. All participants, please move to your starting positions. Remember: this is a simulation. No live cases. This is for training purposes only."
The phrase slid over Lina's skin the wrong way.
*For training purposes only.*
She thought of the posters by the river.
Of the way some faces disappeared, not because they'd come home, but because the paper had disintegrated and no one could find the original photo.
"Just a drill," her colleague muttered. "We mess up, nobody dies."
He meant well.
He hadn't grown up cataloguing exactly how long it took missing posters to fade.
Hawk raised his hand.
"Begin!" he shouted.
The first mannequin rolled toward her, guided by a facilitator behind the counter's blind side.
Its tag read: SUBJECT: ADMIN CASE 4B-71 – MISFILED.
The facilitator, pitching his voice, said, "This is a mistake! I'm alive. I'm standing right here!"
Lina's wristband buzzed, feeding her the script.
—I understand this must be confusing.
—Administrative death is a complex process.
—We're here to support you.
She swallowed the words back.
Confusing. Complex. Support. None of them meant sorry.
"I can see you," she said instead. "Which means the system did something it didn't intend to. I can explain how it thinks this happened. Then we can talk about what you want to do about it."
The facilitator faltered for a fraction of a second, then recovered.
"What I want," he snapped, "is to not be dead on paper."
"I don't have that button," she said. "But I can show you what buttons exist, and which ones have teeth."
On the monitors, somewhere behind her, a branch of the logic tree lit in a color it hadn't had yesterday.
> ACKNOWLEDGE STRUCTURAL LIMITS – ADVANCED RESPONSE
She didn't see it, but she felt the room notice.
The drill rolled on. More mannequins. More raised voices. Subjects arguing, staff soothing. Family members escalating. Lina danced between script and honesty, trying not to fall off either side.
Then they wheeled in the one with the tag that made her chest hurt.
SUBJECT: ADMIN CASE – PROFILE SIMILAR TO 7F-19N.
It faced her, blank and accusing.
For a second, the warehouse, the tape, the facilitators—all of it—fell away. She was back in the training module room, watching the case they'd turned into a lesson. The man on the screen—Noor, the system called him, as if using his name made it kindness—refusing to be patient zero for their good intentions.
In that module, the question had been simple:
WHEN A SUBJECT REFUSES ALL PROVIDED PATHS, THE PRIMARY OBSTACLE IS:
A) THE SUBJECT'S DENIAL
B) FAMILY REINFORCEMENT
C) MEDIA MISREPRESENTATION
D) LACK OF ADEQUATE NEUTRAL SPACE
There had not been an E until she'd written it in the free response box at the bottom, hands shaking.
E) THE DESIGN OF THE PATHS.
She had expected a reprimand.
Instead, a week later, Hawk had called her into a room with too many observers and showed her a new build of the quiz. Version 2.4.
There was a fifth option now.
E) STRUCTURAL LIMITS IN THE INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE.
He hadn't looked at her while he said, "We're testing language. Don't make a thing of it."
She hadn't.
The thing had made itself.
Now the mannequin that was roughly, horribly him waited in front of her fake counter.
Lina's wrist buzzed.
—We understand this is distressing.
—The death registry protects you and your loved ones.
—You are safe.
She turned the volume down until the words were a distant insect whine.
"Hi," she said to the foam. "I'm not going to insult you by saying this is for your own good."
The facilitator gave her a tiny, startled look—this wasn't in the script.
"So what are you going to say?" he managed, in the subject's voice.
"That the building has limits," she said. "And it was built by people who thought those limits were acceptable. You don't have to agree. But any real choice you make has to start with knowing where the walls are."
On the platform, Lina saw Clarke's shoulders tighten. Mara leaned forward. The real Noor—if anyone administratively dead could be called real—tilted his head, expression unreadable.
The mannequins' tags flickered.
For a heartbeat, every laminated card in the room blurred, as if a wet thumb had smeared the ink.
The air went sharper.
Lina's skin prickled.
"What was that?" her colleague muttered.
"Static," she said, though it felt like more. Like the city had just taken a breath in the wrong place.
On the monitors, the logic branches ghosted double, an extra option flashing in and out:
> NO ONE DESERVES THIS – ABORT SCENARIO
By the time Lina glanced up, it was gone.
She thought of the wall by the river again. Three fresh posters last week. Three new faces. Three sets of wilted flowers under them. Nobody had aborted those scenarios.
The drill wobbled.
Another mannequin, not in her lane this time, jerked on its base. Not moved by a facilitator's hand. Its tag flashed like a glitching billboard.
SUBJECT: TRAINING DUMMY – SAFE – NON-ACTIVE
—> SUBJECT: PILOT-03 – CONTENT QUARANTINED
Then back again.
The voice that came out of it wasn't the facilitator's.
"No one deserves to be turned into—"
Cut. Hard. Silence slamming down like a lid.
Hawk's whistle shrieked.
"Pause the drill!" he yelled. "All systems hold!"
Lina's body obeyed, muscle memory before thought. Her mind did not. It raced past the whistle, past the amber lights, into the space that had opened when the mannequin had almost finished the sentence.
*No one deserves to be turned into content.*
She tasted the missing word like ash.
Observers converged. Clarke's face went flat in the way that meant three reports were already writing themselves in his head. Mara grabbed her tablet, fingers flying. Noor stepped over the tape like it meant nothing.
He walked right up to the stuttering dummy and spoke to it quietly, like it was a person.
Lina couldn't hear the words from where she stood. She felt them, though, in the way the air thickened. In the way the tag on the foam chest hiccuped and changed.
ANOMALY – EMERGENT REFUSAL PATTERN – DO NOT ERASE
The phrase sent a clean, painful line down her spine.
Refusal pattern.
That's what she had been, back when she wrote Option E. That's what everyone in Riverside became when they stopped believing the official stories about crime and gangs and "wrong time."
People who refused to fit.
"Continue," Clarke said eventually. "Mark it as an advanced scenario element. We'll review."
The drill lurched back into motion.
Lina moved on instinct, saying the right sounds in the right order, while her head replayed the dummy's cut-off sentence. The way the observers had looked at Noor afterward. The way Noor had looked at the mannequin, like he was seeing someone standing behind it.
When it was over, when the trainees had been dismissed with notes about tone and time management, Hawk pulled Lina aside.
"You're going to get me in trouble," he said.
"What did I do?" she asked.
"You keep letting them talk," he said. "Subjects. Dummies. Anomalies. Whatever we're calling them today. You treat them like they're allowed to say no."
"They are," she said. "That's what consent is."
He rubbed his forehead.
"You're not wrong," he said. "You're just… expensive."
"People dying are expensive," she snapped, before she could stop herself. "Paper is cheap."
His expression shut down.
"We're done for today," he said. "You'll get written feedback before your next shift. Go home. Sleep. Don't write manifestos on the feedback forms again."
She wanted to ask him if he'd ever seen a face from the modules on a real poster. If he'd ever dreamed in missing-person fonts.
Instead, she nodded and left.
---
On the tram back over the river, the bridge stutter was louder.
Null's district receded behind her in clean lines and controlled lighting. Riverside rose ahead in its familiar, crooked way—buildings too close together, laundry like flags, satellite dishes aimed unevenly at whatever hope still bounced around the sky.
She stepped off at her stop and breathed in the smell of the real river. Oil. Rust. Frying fish. Something sour and old that never quite washed away.
The wall by the underpass had new posters.
Three faces.
Three names.
Three dates.
Lina read them all. She didn't know the people, not this time. That somehow made it worse. If you knew them, you could at least lie to yourself that you'd seen them last week and they'd been fine.
She reached into her bag, pulled out a pen, and, checking that nobody was watching, wrote in small letters at the bottom of the middle sheet:
YOU ARE NOT PAPER.
Then, below it, even smaller:
E) THE DESIGN OF THE PATHS.
Her heart hammered as if she'd done something criminal. Maybe she had. Vandalizing grief. Someone would be angry if they saw. Or worse, they wouldn't notice at all.
At home, her grandmother was watching the news with the sound off.
The screen showed a politician touring a factory. Smiles. Hardhats. Familiar choreography.
"Late," her grandmother said, without looking away.
"Drill ran long," Lina said.
"Practice for when they erase us," the old woman muttered. "So they can do it politely."
Lina kissed her cheek.
"Don't watch that," she said. "It's all lies."
"You work for lies," her grandmother said.
"I work near them," Lina said. "It's different."
"Sitting in the same room as poison still kills you," the old woman said.
She'd grown up on a street that no longer existed. The only reason Lina knew its name was because she'd once seen it in a yellowed folder on a Null shelf, stamped LEGACY INCIDENT – CLOSED.
"Did you have drills?" Lina asked suddenly. "When you were young?"
Her grandmother snorted.
"We had fires," she said. "No drills. Just real flames and people who counted the dead afterward."
Lina thought of Tesse, the woman from Oversight who'd come once to Riverside to talk about "community liaison" and then sat on the steps with her after the meeting, smoking, eyes tired.
*We started by counting missing posters,* Tesse had said. *By the time we realized the numbers matched the daemon logs, it was already too late for the first ones.*
"Did you ever feel like the city was… watching you?" Lina asked.
Her grandmother turned to look at her properly for the first time that evening.
"The city?" she said. "Child, the city has always watched us. We're the only ones it still remembers when the nice parts go dark."
She tapped the side of her head.
"The question is," she added, "do we remember it back?"
Later, in her small room, Lina lay on her bed and stared at the damp mark on the ceiling.
Her Null-issued tablet buzzed.
ASSIGNMENT UPDATE – AUXILIARY PERSONNEL
SUBJECT: CLUSTER CASE 3H-DELTA – "RIVERSIDE MARGIN"
ROLE: COMMUNITY INTERFACE / RECONCILIATION SUPPORT
STATUS: PRE-APPROVAL – PENDING HANDLER MATCH
Her own district. Her river. Her missing posters.
She scrolled down.
FIELD TEAM: S. RAHMAN / N. [REDACTED] / E. HALE / M. IOSELIANI / L. FARIS
Her name at the end of the list like an afterthought.
Underneath, in smaller text:
NOTE: SUBJECT PREVIOUS RESPONSES TO ANOMALY CASE 7F-19N FLAGGED AS "USEFUL PERSPECTIVE." DO NOT DISCUSS MODULE CONTENT WITH NON-PROJECT STAFF.
Lina let the tablet fall onto the mattress.
"Useful perspective," she said aloud, to the crack in the ceiling. "That's what you are now."
Somewhere under her window, the river muttered against the rocks. The tram clanged over the bridge, making that wrong note it always made.
She thought of the foam mannequin trying to say what the building cut off.
Of Noor stepping into the tape and persuading a haunted dummy to take a new label.
Of the city seen from above on some projection she wasn't allowed to stand in front of.
"Emergent refusal pattern," she whispered.
In Riverside, emergent refusal meant tenants refusing to move out when the landlord "accidentally" turned the water off. It meant grandmothers refusing to forget the names of streets Null had erased from their maps. It meant teenagers refusing to believe that getting shot in the wrong hall stairwell was just statistics.
She didn't know what it meant in Null.
Not yet.
Her tablet buzzed again.
MEETING SCHEDULED – TOMORROW 10:00
TOPIC: CLUSTER 3H-DELTA – PRE-FIELD BRIEFING
ATTENDEES: S. RAHMAN, GABRIEL A., M. IOSELIANI, L. FARIS, OTHERS TBD
Gabriel.
She'd heard his name in whispers. Architect. Oversight. The man who designed the modules and then looked unhappy when they did exactly what they were built to do.
Her grandmother's words from earlier sat heavy in her chest.
*Do we remember it back?*
The city had taken people from her side of the river for as long as anyone could remember. Now Null wanted her to help them… what? Tidy the aftermath? Explain to families how to accept clean endings?
Or something else.
On the wall over her bed, in the square of plaster that caught the morning light just right, Lina had taped a single, old photo.
Not a missing poster.
A street. Crowded. Kids playing in water sprayed from a broken hydrant. A row of low buildings with peeling paint. In the corner, almost out of frame, a sign with a street name.
It was the only surviving picture of the place her grandmother had grown up.
Null's maps didn't show that street anymore. But if you held the photo just right, you could almost hear it—the music, the shouted greetings, the way the air itself had once known people's names.
She touched the edge of the picture.
"I'll go," she told it. "But not to help them forget."
The tram rattled in the distance. The river breathed.
In the dark behind her eyes, for a second, she saw something else.
Not her block. Not the river. A different street, paused mid-heartbeat. Traffic lights changing for no one. And a girl on a low wall, scarf bright orange against a grey coat, watching her with the steady patience of someone who has been waiting a long time.
Lina blinked.
The image dissolved, leaving only the familiar cracks in her ceiling.
She lay there a long time, listening to the city's slow machinery.
Somewhere under Null's polished floors, haunted mannequins whispered truncated sentences.
Somewhere above the river, a bridge pretended to be strong.
And somewhere between, a file in a system updated itself:
AUXILIARY L. FARIS – STATUS: TRAINED
PATTERN: EMERGENT REFUSAL – OBSERVE.
Act Twenty-Fifth's End – "you"