The first thing I notice about her is that she's trying not to look at me.
Not in the rude, avoiding-eye-contact way. More like someone trying not to look directly at an eclipse.
She's sitting at the far end of the briefing table, clutching a slim grey manual. Trainee badge on her chest: RIYA FARIS – INTAKE COHORT 3H. Six in the corner. Numbered, like everything else.
I recognize her jaw before I recognize anything else. The set of it. Tight, like she's about to argue with a wall and intends to win.
Trainee 06 from the drill.
Of course.
Tess taps the datapad against my shoulder, dragging my attention back.
"Try to look at least neutrally alive," she murmurs. "You're here as a reassuring controlled variable."
"I am literally classified as an anomaly," I say. "You can't put a high-vis vest on a car crash and call it reassuring."
"You'd be surprised what my department calls reassuring," she says, and nods toward the glass.
Through it, beyond our little briefing room, a vertical chamber rises: three storeys of bare concrete and cable runs, a kind of prayer shaft for engineers. In the centre, suspended in a lattice of rings and struts, hangs a glass cylinder the size of an elevator.
Inside the cylinder: nothing.
The empty is the most alarming part. I know from experience that when Null builds a cage that thorough, it's rarely for air.
The cage has a name printed on its base in harsh black capitals:
ST-ELMO / PROTOTYPE CLEANSING SUBSYSTEM
SANDBOX ONLY – NO LIVE HOOKS
Underneath that, in smaller, hastier script, someone has taped a second label:
DO NOT TRUST THIS
Mara's handwriting, probably.
Tess clears her throat.
"All right," she says. "Before we begin: this is a technical familiarization, not an exorcism. There will be no live discharges. No direct integrations. You are here to observe."
She says that last part to me.
"Is there a reason your definition of 'observe' always involves adding new nightmares to my list?" I ask.
"Yes," she says. "But I don't have time to unpack Oversight's entire org chart right now."
She swipes the pad; the wall screen wakes up, showing a diagram of Null's lower levels. Layers of corridors, nodes, daemons. At one junction, a little symbol glows orange: a stylized flame over a metro line.
ST-ELMO: CLEANSING SUPPORT – DEPRECATED
"Prototype daemon," Tess says, for Riya's benefit. "Built a decade ago by a contractor we no longer employ. Attempt to model a segment of the city's natural self-cleaning behaviour. Detect and burn out faults in the grid."
"'Burn out' is not a metaphor there," I say.
Tess admits it with a tiny shrug.
"It got out of sandbox," she says. "Overloaded a district's wiring. Fire started. City block went up. We spent three years pretending it was faulty insulation. Another two tracking down every copy of the code. This is the last one."
I look at the glass cylinder.
"So you kept it," I say. "Of course you did."
"We put it in a sealed chamber with no live hooks," Tess says. "Different thing."
Riya finally speaks.
"Why didn't you just delete it?" she asks.
Her voice is lower than I expected. Tired at the edges, like someone who hasn't slept well in years even though she's barely older than me.
"Because architecture hates gaps," Tess says. "You rip out a pattern that complex, something in the building tries to grow around the hole. Guesses. Improvises."
She flicks to the next slide: a thermal overlay of Null's spine. Little hot spots pulse along lines like embers.
"It's safer if the bad idea is somewhere we can see it," she says. "In a box. With a lot of disclaimers."
"You talk about it like it's a person," Riya says, quietly.
"That's just how we talk about daemons," Tess says.
We all know that's not true. We all hear it anyway.
The door behind us hisses open.
Mara limps in, a mug in one hand, a lopsided smile in the other. The prosthetic leg is visible today, matte black under rolled-up trousers. She moves with the half-careful, half-defiant gait of someone who refuses to let metal dictate pacing but retains a healthy respect for gravity.
"Sorry," she says. "I was arguing with a compiler. It won. For now."
She bumps her mug against mine in greeting.
"Consultant Noor," she says. "Welcome to my least favourite museum exhibit."
"Do all your exhibits come with fire warnings?" I ask.
"Only the interesting ones," she says, and leans her hip against the console. "So. Shall we traumatize a new trainee?"
Riya straightens.
"I read the brief," she says. "St Elmo is a cleansing daemon, early attempt to replicate external—"
"—don't say 'external behaviour,'" Mara cuts in, more sharply than I've heard her before. "We don't know what that actually means yet. Call it what it is. A guess."
Tess lifts an eyebrow at her.
Mara exhales through her nose, eyes flicking to the glass cylinder.
"My father's guess, specifically," she says. "And his fire."
The air shifts, slightly.
Tess doesn't flinch. Riya does, only at the corner of her mouth.
"You're the one who caged it," I say.
"Somebody had to," she says. "Turned out I was the only one in the room willing to lose a limb over it."
Her tone is light but the fingers of her right hand are white against the mug.
Riya looks from Mara's leg to the daemon's glass and back again.
"Why are we here?" she asks. "I mean—specifically. Today."
Tess taps the pad again. New slide.
> INTERNAL NOTE – ARCHITECTURE / OVERSIGHT JOINT TASK
> SUBJECT: ST-ELMO SANDBOX – CROSS-PATTERN MONITORING
> CONTEXT: RECENT PILOT-03 / 7F-19N EMERGENT REFUSAL CORRELATIONS
I make a face.
"Of course," I say. "You can never just leave two curses alone in different rooms. You have to see what happens if they meet."
"We are not cross-connecting St Elmo to your case," Tess says. "We're running a passive observation while we replay a segment of your training module in the background. No live hooks. No interface. Just… proximity."
"Like putting two radioactive samples on the same shelf and then insisting they're not technically touching," I say.
"Exactly," Mara says. "Science."
Riya frowns at me.
"Training module," she says. "You mean—7F-19N? 'Containment Through Consent'?"
"I keep telling them that's a terrible title," I say. "But yes. That one."
"I took it," she says. "Last month."
"Did you enjoy being taught the correct way to erase me?" I ask.
"It didn't teach that," she says, with quick heat. "It taught the correct way to not erase you by accident while pretending the system isn't built to make that the easiest option."
I blink.
"You're the one who wrote about structural limits in the free-text box," I say.
Her ears colour.
"Is that in my file?" she asks Tess.
"Everything is in your file," Tess says. "But yes. That answer got you flagged for this rotation."
"Punished or rewarded?" Riya asks.
"Null doesn't always know the difference," Mara says.
Tess sets the pad down with a little click.
"Here's what's happening," she says. "We're going to start a playback of a section of 7F-19N. No trainees, just the module logic itself, staged in a closed loop. While it runs, we monitor St Elmo's internal state. There is evidence that certain patterns—resistance, refusal, non-compliance—register as 'irritants' to our architecture daemons. We want to see if St Elmo reacts."
"Evidence," I repeat. "You mean the mannequin that tried to say no one deserves to be turned into content."
"Among other things," Tess says.
Riya is very still.
"And my job?" she asks.
"Sit there," Mara says, "watch the graphs, and tell us if anything feels wrong."
Riya blinks.
"Feels?" she asks. "Like… intuition?"
"We can get graphs from a toaster," Mara says. "You grew up on the lines. You know what a bad current feels like."
There's a hesitation, the space where Riya decides whether to lie.
"I used to ride past Saint Gabriel every day," she says at last. "Before the line was… reclassified. You feel the difference when a station becomes a threat instead of a way out. The rails remember."
"The rails remember," I repeat, quietly.
The name Saint Gabriel sits behind my ribs like a piece of grit.
First station on Line ∞. Endless Death dressed up as salvation. Take this train to be forgotten. Terms and conditions apply.
I remember metal walls and doors marked with percentages and the sensation of being peeled off myself.
I don't remember getting off.
"That's why we pulled you in," Tess says to Riya. "We need people who can feel what the map won't print."
"And Noor?" Riya asks. "You need him for… what, exactly?"
"Atmosphere," I say. "Noise. Data."
"Also," Tess adds, "if something goes wrong, it will probably go wrong in his direction first. That's valuable information."
I make a wounded noise. It doesn't land.
Mara sets her mug down, cracks her knuckles, and keys in a sequence on the console.
"Sandbox is sealed," she says. "No live feeds. No external hooks. Null, darling, if you're listening: we are not trying to burn down another district. Please keep all overreactions internal."
The overhead speakers remain diplomatically silent.
Tess nods to me.
"Ready?" she asks.
"I was supposed to be retired by now," I say.
"Technically, you are," she says. "This is a hobby."
She hits RUN.
The wall screen splits in two.
On the left: familiar video of my life, chopped and sanitized into training segments. The Saint Gabriel station, desaturated and over-lit. Me talking to my mother on a bench. Me refusing to smile for the Endless Death counsellor. Subtitles, bullet points, quiz prompts.
On the right: St Elmo's telemetry.
For a second, the daemon remains a flat line. Temperature stable. No flow.
Then, slowly, a faint glow appears at the centre of the cylinder. Not light, exactly. More like suggestion of light. Like someone painted heat onto the glass with invisible ink.
Riya inhales, very softly.
"You feel it?" Mara asks, eyes flicking between her and the graph.
"It's like… when dust on a cable starts to smoulder," Riya says. "Before anyone else smells it."
Tess leans closer to the telemetry.
"Minor agitation," she says. "Within safe—"
The graph spikes.
Not high. Not dangerous. Just sharp.
On the left screen, the module reaches the part where I sign the consent form for Endless Death.
In the video, I grip the pen like it's something crawling. The trainee-version of Samira slides the form across. A soothing voiceover explains that Endless Death is a personal choice.
In the chamber, the faint glow inside St Elmo curls on itself, like a fist.
A line of text blinks in the corner of the telemetry display.
> PASSIVE CROSS-REFERENCE: PATTERN MATCH – ED-CORE / CLIENT 7F-19N
Mara swears under her breath.
"We're not hooked into ED-Core," she says. "This room is air-gapped from the old lines."
"It shouldn't be able to see that," Tess says.
The glow brightens.
The temperature reading on the console ticks up by a fraction of a degree. Barely anything. Enough to make every engineer in the room sweat.
Riya's hand tightens around her manual.
"It's angry," she says.
"It doesn't have emotions," Tess says, automatically.
"Tell that to the panel melting," Riya says.
One of the rings around the cylinder throws a tiny, almost invisible spark.
Nothing hits. Nothing burns. But for a second the air smells like hot metal.
The 7F-19N module reaches the part where the narrator explains how to score a "successful de-escalation." How to keep subjects like me from "externalizing disruption." Nice language for: how to make sure we choose the train ourselves.
On screen, a diagram of Line ∞ appears. Simplified. Cute. A loop with little doors labelled with percentages.
The glow inside St Elmo flares.
For a heartbeat, the glass does something impossible.
It reflects something that isn't in the room.
Not our faces. Not the chamber.
A corridor.
Narrow, metal, lit from nowhere. Doors on either side, each with a percentage painted on in white.
67%. 43%. 4%.
My stomach drops.
"It's mirroring," I say. "That's— that's my train."
"No live hooks," Tess says again, to no one.
The telemetry scrolls faster.
> DETECTED: LEGACY LINE SIGNATURE / ED-∞ / SAINT GABRIEL NODE
> STATUS: QUARANTINED – READ-ONLY
"I thought ED-∞ was isolated," Riya says. "After the reforms."
"It is," Tess says. "On paper."
"On paper," Mara echoes. "Null, what are you doing?"
The glow inside the cylinder lashes out to the edges, then snaps back in, like it hit an unseen wall.
The chamber lights flicker.
The console beeps.
> NOTICE: INTERNAL HANDSHAKE REQUEST – SOURCE: ST-ELMO
> TARGET: DEEP LEGACY INDEX
"No," Tess says, stabbing at the keyboard. "You do not have permissions."
Her fingers fly. Access controls, sandbox flags, manual blocks.
The daemon ignores her, in the way only something built by humans can ignore the humans who built it.
"Where's it trying to go?" I ask.
"Deep Legacy," Mara says. "Archive for old core routines. Stuff we don't want to delete but don't want thinking too loudly."
"Like Pilot-03," I say.
Tess glances at me, then at the tiny coordinate numbers scrolling at the bottom of the screen.
Z-LEVEL: -3
NODE: 0
ROOM: 0
My mouth goes dry.
"Room 0," I say. "Of course."
Riya looks between us.
"You've been there," she says slowly.
"Briefly," I say. "I didn't stay for the tour."
The glow fans out again, searching.
For a second, everything feels off-balance. Like the building has shrugged.
The training module on the left keeps running regardless. It hits the section Noor-as-content hated most: the part where the narrator explains "residual," and how much of someone is safe to leave behind.
I watch myself on screen say, quietly: "I don't want to be a symbol."
The daemon flares like someone dropped fuel on it.
The glass cylinder does not break. It doesn't even crack.
Instead, the inside of it goes black.
Not unlit. Not dark.
Black like no signal.
The telemetry spools error.
> SIGNAL LOST – ST-ELMO NOT FOUND
> SEARCHING…
> SEARCHING…
An alarm starts up, low and embarrassed, as if the system is ashamed to be making noise.
Mara swears again, impressive and multilingual this time.
"That's not possible," she says. "There's nowhere for it to go. This is closed."
The diagram of Null's lower levels updates on the wall.
A tiny amber icon slips out of the St Elmo chamber, skitters along an internal line like a dropped bead, and drops through an unlabelled gap.
The map redraws to follow it.
Down past the maintenance levels.
Past the Echo Theatre.
Past Shelving.
Past the labelled part of Level -3.
Into a blank patch of schematic that shows as grey noise.
The system tries to label it and fails.
> LOCATION: ***
> STATUS: DEEP POINT (UNSPECIFIED)
> ROUTING: LEGACY / ED-∞ / UNKNOWN
"Deep point," Riya reads. "That's not… that's not a thing. Deep Legacy has indices. Numbers."
"It's a thing now," Tess says.
The alarm cuts mid-wail as if someone muted it in embarrassment.
On the glass, the reflection of the endless corridor lingers for half a second longer, then folds in on itself and vanishes.
The cylinder is empty again.
The temperature returns to baseline.
St Elmo is gone.
We stare at the absence.
"I'm going to be honest," I say. "I liked it better when my biggest problem was one angry quarantined ghost and some haunted foam."
Mara leans both hands on the console, knuckles blanching.
"We didn't open anything," she says. "We didn't connect any live feeds. It still found a path."
"Architecture improvises around holes," Tess says, faintly, repeating her own lecture back at herself. "We thought we were containing a bad idea. Turns out we were… storing a key."
Riya has gone very pale.
"You just let a cleansing daemon jump into the same dark underfloor as your old city and your failed cases," she says. "That's… fascinating long-term planning."
"We didn't let it," Tess says. "We tried to stop it."
"It doesn't matter what you meant," Riya murmurs. "The rails don't care if you meant for a train to run."
The wall screen pings.
New message.
> NOTICE: ENTITY ST-ELMO – STATUS UPDATED
> CLASS: FREE-ROAMING LEGACY PROCESS
> LOCATION: DEEP INDEX – OBSERVATION ONLY
> HUMAN ACCESS: RESTRICTED
> COMMENT (ARCH): "BETTER TO KNOW WHERE THE FIRE IS"
We all read the comment at the same time.
"Is that… Gabriel?" I ask.
"Could be any architect with a sense of humour and a death wish," Mara says.
Tess shuts her eyes for a second, pinches the bridge of her nose, then straightens.
"Okay," she says. "We document. We flag Oversight. We pretend this was the plan. Noor, I'm going to need a full subjective account. Riya, I want you to write down exactly when you first felt it go wrong."
Riya tears her gaze away from the empty cage.
"You're going to keep it down there," she says. "Where you keep the other things you don't like to talk about."
"We don't have a way to pull it back without risking more damage," Tess says. "Better to monitor."
"Better for who?" Riya asks.
No one answers.
On the paused frame of the training module, my content-self is frozen mid-sentence, looking just past the camera. Past the trainee who's meant to be learning how to handle me. Past the script.
I look the way I felt on the train: like I'm already somewhere else.
Mara kills the playback with a jab of her finger.
The room is suddenly quieter, but it doesn't feel less full.
St Elmo is gone from the cage. I can still feel it.
Not like heat. Not exactly.
More like a draft from under a closed door.
Something has shifted far under the floor of this place. Further even than Level -3. Into the same deep, unwritten space where trains go when the city pretends they've been shut down.
Riya closes her manual.
"So," she says, voice steadying as she leans into sarcasm like a handrail. "Today I got to witness a legendary rogue daemon escape into an unspecified deep point linked to Endless Death. Is that going on my performance review?"
"Under 'learning opportunities,'" Tess says.
"Under 'emergent refusal adjacency,'" Mara corrects. "HR loves that phrase."
Riya looks at me.
"You were on that line," she says. "Line ∞."
"Briefly," I say.
"Do you think it remembers you?" she asks.
"The train?" I ask.
She shakes her head.
"The thing under it," she says. "Whatever this project is really pointed at."
I think of the city that isn't a memory. The girl who is a street and a population and a wound. The way her eyes looked at me like I was both threat and chance.
I think of a prototype fire daemon built by a man who tried to copy something he didn't understand, now loose in the same dark.
"I think forgetting is never as complete as Null wants it to be," I say. "And I think your building keeps losing track of its own monsters."
"That's not comforting," she says.
"It's not meant to be," I say. "Comfort is how we got here."
Tess gathers her pad, flicks the room lights up a notch.
"Okay," she says, back in liaison mode. "We log it. We escalate. We pretend we are adults in charge of our infrastructure. And, Noor—"
"Mm?"
"Until architecture calms down, your access to anything below Shelf is suspended," she says. "No more wandering off into unsecured metaphorical basements."
"Level -3 is not a metaphor," I say.
"Exactly," she says. "That's why you're not going."
Riya hesitates at the door.
"Do you ever get used to this?" she asks me. "The feeling that everything important is happening one floor below where you're allowed to stand?"
"No," I say. "But you do get better at counting the fires."
We step out into the corridor.
Behind us, the glass cylinder stands clear and empty, just another piece of strange furniture in Null's spine.
For half a second, as the door slides shut, the overhead speaker in the chamber crackles.
Not a voice, this time.
Something like the hiss of a blue flame catching.
Then even that is gone, folding itself down into the deep point where the maps blur and the trains that don't exist keep running.
Act Twenty-Seventh's End - "the sound within"