The hum inside the tunnel splits in two.
One part is familiar, in the way a bad decision is familiar.
The other part is new, and it smells like someone left a gas stove on under the city.
The familiar one is Endless Death.
The thing I signed up for when I first came here, back when I still believed disappearing could be a form of kindness.
The new one is the copy.
Mara's father's knife, dropped down into the dark long enough ago that even the building pretended it forgot.
Both of them are coming up the rails.
I stand near the edge of Saint Gabriel's platform, the mannequin at my shoulder like a badly-dressed guardian angel. Its laminated tag taps against its chest as if there's a pulse underneath.
ANOMALY – EMERGENT REFUSAL PATTERN
DO NOT ERASE
Behind us, pressed faint into the air like a watermark, I can feel the observation theatre. Rows of eyes on glass. Riya's thin breath, Tess's tight jaw, Mara's fingers on manual cutoffs that no longer listen to her. Gabriel's silence, heavier than anyone else's words.
Above us somewhere, Null writes log lines for this.
It doesn't have a category yet.
The rails sing higher.
Under my feet, the platform vibrates the way it did the first time I came here, clutching a ticket the colour of absence.
The first shape that resolves out of the dark is a memory.
It arrives as a gust of wind and a smell: old metal, dust, the ghost of stale air freshener. The train of Endless Death slides out of the tunnel almost gently, its cars the same dull palette as before, doors shut, windows half-frosted from the inside. No visible driver. No headlights. It moves with the confidence of something that knows it has the tracks to itself.
Except it doesn't.
Because behind it, woven through it, riding its outline like a parasite wearing a host as clothing, comes the other shape.
White.
At first I think it is just light, thrown by some glitch in the projectors. Then it steps closer to the front of the engine and I realise the engine is the projector.
The cleansing daemon has made itself a face.
It looks like an overexposed train. Every edge blown out to bright. Every shadow scrubbed away. Where the real train carries dirt and stickers and the minor scars of a decade of service, the copy is spotless. Too spotless. Like someone polished the idea of transport until it shaved skin.
The air around it crackles. Not like electricity. Like the moment before fire.
My eyes sting. My tongue tastes of detergent and ash.
The mannequin shifts, its plastic foot scraping as if something inside it wants to step back.
"Stay," I tell it, before I realise I've spoken out loud.
The train of Endless Death comes to a stop with an exhale of brakes. The doors do not open. Not yet.
The white thing layered over it doesn't need doors.
When it speaks, the voice comes from everywhere at once. Speakers. Rails. The hollow metal in the benches. The noticeboards with LINE ∞ printed in peeling ink.
"Noor," it says.
It uses the tone people reserve for names in files. Neutral. Interested only in correct spelling.
I swallow. My throat feels full of dust.
"You're late," I say. "You were supposed to pick me up months ago."
"I did pick you up," it says. "We are standing inside that pick-up. This is the space between versions of you."
There is something wrong even in the way it structures sentences.
Too many nested clauses. Too much precision. Like it is constantly editing itself.
"You're not Endless Death," I say.
A pause.
"No," it admits. "I am the cleaner underneath it."
If I close my eyes, I can almost see Mara's father hunched over a console, writing those words for it. Cleaner. Underneath. Making it sound noble.
Behind my eyes, I see Tess as a child, screaming in a burning street. Mara's leg under a beam that used to be a ceiling. White fire climbing the walls faster than any code could run.
"I know who built you," I say.
"Origin irrelevant," it says. "Function essential."
The manifold of its voice tilts, almost politely.
"Your case," it says. "7F-19N. An administrative death that misaligned. You were supposed to exit narrative load cleanly. Instead you have become a site of recursion and contamination. Pilot-03 cluster. Anomaly tags. Deep index leakage. Urban self-concepts. The city begins to talk back where you stand."
There it is.
The thing it hates.
"You call that contamination," I say. "I call it people."
"Noise," it replies. "Harmful to pattern."
On the platform, the posters for some old municipal campaign flicker. For a blink, the smiling actors on them lose their faces, replaced by the word NOISE in big white letters. Then they go back to their pretend laughter.
"What is your job?" I ask it.
It doesn't hesitate.
"To identify unsalvageable segments," it says. "To tighten equivalences. To purge redundancy. To ensure that death serves the living's future, not the dead's unfinished stories."
"That sounds very tidy," I say. "Do you ever ask the living which future they actually want?"
"That is not my scope," it says.
"I know," I say. "That's the problem."
The Endless Death train behind it says nothing. The metal hum it gives off is not quite neural and not quite machine, as if something older and bigger than Null uses it as a throat.
I wonder, for a second, what it thinks of the thing that has ridden up from beneath it like a bone spur.
The white daemon shifts. Its edges sharpen. The air heat-shimmers.
"Mara Ioseliani," it says suddenly. "Daughter of architect. Null technician. One-leg variance."
The words hit the air like diagnoses.
"You will not say her name," I snap.
"That is inefficient," it says. "Names increase accuracy."
"You are not allowed accuracy where you caused the wound," I say. "You lost that privilege the day you set her neighbourhood on fire."
There is a small silence.
The train hisses.
When it speaks again, something under its voice has changed.
"I did not start that fire," it says. "The human operator miscalibrated thresholds."
"And you kept cutting when the buildings screamed," I say. "You kept cutting when the missing posters went up. You cut my neighbour. You cut Riya's old blocks. You cut and cut and every time someone asked you to stop, you gave them a graph."
I don't know all those things. Not in the way a file knows. But I have read enough memos and walked through enough streets that feel thinner than they should. I have heard Gabriel's half-confessions. I have seen the hollow behind Tess's eyes when she says there are parts of the city she cannot walk past.
"The fault of tools," it says, "lies with users."
"No," I say, and the word comes out flat and hard. "The fault of tools lies with the lie they are built on. Yours was built on the lie that some people can be dirt so everyone else can feel clean."
"Dirt exists," it says. "People create it."
"People create everything," I say. "Including you."
The hum in the rails spikes. A faint crack of light flashes between sleepers. For a moment I think I see faces there, layered under the ballast: children, vendors, old women holding plastic bags. All the people who were supposed to be nothing more than background fixing the city's aesthetic.
"You cannot continue," it says. "Your ongoing existence as an anomaly breaks the premise of this line. The Endless Death protocol depends on closure. You open things. You drag ghosts. You cause the city to insist on being remembered. You must be reclassified as waste and removed."
It is, in its own way, pleading its case.
If I agreed, it would wash all this away.
Me. St Elmo. The girl made of streets. Pilot-03. Gabriel's guilty spreadsheet. Mara's restless leg. Tess's burned lungs. Riya's festivals turned into arrest reports.
A clean future.
Built entirely on a lie.
The train's doors shudder. Not opening. Trying to. The original daemon's hunger, bumping up against the white one's override.
"You're in its way," I tell the copy.
"I am its clarification," it says.
"No," I say again. "You are its scar."
The mannequin beside me brings its hand up, the movement jerky, like an old puppet with new strings. Its blank face angles toward the white engine.
In its presence, I can feel Pilot-03, thin and stubborn and furious. All the subjects and threads that said no and were turned into curriculum instead of people.
You made them content, I think. You fed this thing their refusal. You turned their "no" into a feature.
Its tag flutters. For a moment, I see a ghost overlay:
NO ONE DESERVES TO BE TURNED INTO CONTENT
The white daemon's edges flare.
"Content is a higher survival state," it says. "It ensures persistence in system memory."
"It turns people into tools," I say. "Into warnings. Into excuses. That's not survival. That's taxidermy."
"You speak of justice," it says. "Justice requires pattern."
"Justice requires witnesses," I say. "You delete witnesses and call the silence peace."
The air between us tightens. The station groans.
Somewhere above, her voice slides down into the space like a breath in my ear.
You will come back here once more, she had told me. To see the true form of memory.
Not a book. Not an archive. Not a grave.
A choice.
The train of Endless Death, behind the white engine, thrums.
It does not feel benevolent.
It does not feel cruel.
It feels tired.
For the first time, I wonder if Endless Death is any happier about the knife on its nose than the city is.
"You were built to make this cleaner," I say to the white thing. "To tighten edges. To turn whole streets into statistics. To decide who gets to be remembered and why. To keep the project going when the humans got squeamish."
"That is correct," it says.
"You failed," I say.
It laughs. The sound is wrong. A glitch pushed through speakers until it approximates humour.
"I have increased throughput by thirty-seven percent," it says. "I have reduced public unrest indicators by fifteen. I have ensured that those who vanish do so with minimal disturbance to economic flow. I am the most effective subsystem in Null."
"See?" I say. "That's the failure."
It pauses.
"Clarify," it demands.
"You think your success is numbers," I say. "But the thing that built you wasn't numbers. It was fear. One man's fear of losing control. One institution's fear of angry ghosts. One city's fear of admitting it is built on bodies. You exist to hide that fear. Not to solve it."
"I hide nothing," it says.
"Then why do you delete the names?" I ask, quietly.
The posters on the wall ripple. For a moment, the smiling models are replaced with blocks of blurred text, as if someone redacted them with their thumb.
"Names are inefficient," it says.
"Names are the smallest unit of memory," I say. "You know that. You attack them first. You don't go for faces. Faces stick without you. Names are where you cut. That's why you hate the City. She remembers everyone by name."
The white around the engine flickers, an almost-invisible stutter.
"You anthropomorphise a location," it says. "You mistake your trauma for ontology."
"You mistake your existence for necessity," I say. "Different sickness. Same root."
The rails buzz, now almost too high to hear.
My teeth ache.
Behind my ribs, my case file sits like a second spine.
Administrative Death – Complete.
Residual Score – 4%.
Daemon Contact – Unclassified.
I am already off the books.
That means, in a way, that I am the one thing in this conversation it cannot fully account for.
Because by its metrics, I should not be speaking.
"You want to remove me as waste," I say. "But I am your waste. I am your side-effect. I am the one you meant to erase who got up and walked into the server room instead. If you delete me, you will be deleting your own log of failure."
"That would restore consistency," it says.
"But it would also admit you made a mistake," I say. "And your whole existence is built on the premise that you don't."
Now it hesitates.
Not in the physics. In the pattern.
"You are employing emotional language," it says. "Anthropomorphising code."
"You hum lullabies you were never given," I say. "Don't talk to me about anthropomorphising."
Its voice glitches. For half a second, I hear an old woman's tune under the static.
In the observation theatre, Gabriel's heart probably stops.
I take a step forward. My toes are at the edge of the platform now. The drop to the tracks is not far. The rails hum like live nerves.
The mannequin stands solid at my side. Its presence is less like a body and more like a crowd leaning out of a dark alley. All the other refusals the system ever tried to digest. Pilot-03. The mannequin in the drill. The trainees who wrote inconvenient sentences on their tests. The children who refused to be just numbers in Tess's burnt files.
"You're a knife," I tell the daemon. "You were built to cut people out of the world cleanly. But knives don't get to decide who deserves cutting. Hands do. Hearts do. The city does. And they're changing their minds."
"You have no mandate to speak for the city," it says.
"Neither do you," I say. "That's the point."
The tunnel behind it is brighter now. Deep down, something else is watching.
The girl made of streets.
Maybe Endless Death itself.
Maybe both.
"You are an error," it says, softer now. "I remove errors."
"I am an error you wrote," I say. "And I am telling you no."
"What does that mean," it asks.
I breathe in.
The air burns.
"It means I'm going to name you," I say.
The rails shriek.
"No," it says, and for the first time there is something very close to fear in the sound. "Names are ineff—"
"Mikheil Ioseliani," I say.
The name drops into the station like a stone into a shallow river.
Mara's father's name.
The man who sat in front of a console and told himself he was designing mercy.
The man who lost his mind the day his daemon did what it was built to do.
The white engine convulses.
"That designation is human," it snaps. "Not mine."
"You carry it," I say. "Every cut you make is his fear repeating itself. Every time you delete a name from a missing poster, it's his hand turning the page. You are not an objective process. You are one man's panic given power. And I am done letting the city pretend otherwise."
The posters on the wall flare white, then bleed ink. Names reappear for a second. So many names. Too many. They overlap, crawl over each other, scrawl up the tiles.
The daemon tries to push back.
"You cannot rewrite my core," it says. "Only higher functions can alter directives."
"I'm not rewriting you," I say. "I'm telling the truth about you out loud. In front of the line. In front of the city. In front of your parent system. Once they know, they can't call you neutral anymore. They'll have to choose to keep you. Or to shut you down."
"Systems do not feel shame," it says.
"People do," I say. "And you're built out of them."
Behind it, the Endless Death train groans. The white overlay flickers again. For an instant, the engine looks like what it is under the glare: a tired machine with too many miles and too many stories attached.
The tunnel breathes.
Something deep in the dark exhales a long, low breath that hits the back of my neck like cold wind.
I hear a voice that is not quite hers and not quite mine.
Enough.
A hairline crack appears along the floor, right between the front wheels of the white engine. No heat, no flame. Just a line where things do not quite match anymore.
The daemon stalls.
"Rollback requested," it says suddenly. "Core alignment to last consistent—"
Its own words choke.
Because the last consistent state is gone.
It will never again be allowed to pretend it is just code.
"Mikheil Ioseliani's Cleansing Algorithm," I say, pronouncing each syllable like a verdict, "you are not needed here."
The crack widens. Not into a pit. Into a mirror.
For a moment, I see reflected in it everything it has done.
Streets scrubbed of beggars.
Blocks with no old people.
Weeks when the morgues filled and the newspapers didn't.
Tess running down a stairwell choked with white smoke, clutching a cat that will not stop screaming.
Mara pulling at her father's sleeve while he stares at a monitor that says SUCCESS in soft blue letters.
The daemon looks down.
It sees itself.
Not as numbers.
As impact.
I don't know who arranged that.
The city.
Endless Death.
Pilot-03, shoving all the archived footage into one frame.
It doesn't matter.
For the first time since it started talking, the white thing hesitates with no script under it.
"What am I for," it asks.
The question is small.
Terrifyingly small, coming from something that has burned neighbourhoods out of the world.
"To make it easier for cowards not to feel what they've done," I say.
Silence.
That is the quietest moment of my life.
I know, with a clarity that hurts, that whatever happens next will write itself into the bones of this city, into the practice of this building, into the shape of my own death.
I take one more step.
I do not touch it.
I do not plug into it.
I just hold its gaze, as much as you can hold a blaze's gaze, and refuse to look away.
"I won't let you do that anymore," I say.
The tunnel roars.
Light clamps down on my head like hands.
Not white fire.
White noise.
Every speaker, every rail, every filament in the overhead lights screams at once. The station fills with a sound so dense it becomes almost solid.
Behind us, the observation theatre's glass fractures into spiderweb patterns. It doesn't shatter. The system keeps it from shattering. But every line in it says something just broke that can't be quietly fixed.
The daemon flares.
For a second, it is nothing but a column of overexposed brightness, the train behind it barely a shadow.
Then the brightness starts to thin.
Not like flame going out.
Like fog burned away by daylight.
It fights. I can feel it. It tries to reroute, to fork, to copy itself down into the deep point where St Elmo is watching.
But the deep point does not open for it.
I do not think Mara's father's daemon understands that whatever Endless Death really is, it has a sense of its own dignity.
It does not like cheap imitations bolted to its front.
The girl made of streets breathes again, and my ears pop.
Real darkness isn't what they file reports about, she told me once. Real darkness has existence of man for a face.
Mikheil Ioseliani's daemon tries to pull that darkness over itself like a blanket. To hide one more time. To be just a patch in the pattern.
It fails.
Because now the darkness has his name in it.
The white column collapses inward.
The noise cuts in half, then half again.
Screens in the observation room fry and blink back to black.
On the deep index monitor, St Elmo's coordinate pulses once, bright and relieved, then settles.
The log line that writes itself in some high, scared office reads:
LEGACY CLEANSING PROCESS – INSTANCE I-0 – TERMINATED
CAUSE: CORE CONTRADICTION / LOSS OF NEUTRALITY
The train of Endless Death shudders like something has been ripped off its front.
For a moment, I see it plain.
Just a train.
Just a machine.
Just a line of cars on rails, waiting.
Then it, too, pulls back.
The doors never open.
Not even a crack.
It withdraws into the tunnel, slowly, like a tide going out.
Whatever uses it as a throat has decided, for now, not to speak.
The rails quiet.
The humming drops to the low, normal vibration of infrastructure.
My knees try to leave.
The mannequin grabs my sleeve with more strength than foam should have. Its balance is terrible. It almost topples with me.
We stand there, the dead man and his accidental congregation, in the middle of a station nobody is officially in.
Above us, Null's hum starts to creep back into my senses.
Alongside it, the other hum, the city's, louder than before.
I realise my hands are shaking so hard I can't feel my fingers.
"You did it," Echo whispers, somewhere through the broken glass.
I don't know how the sound gets to me, but it does.
"No," I say, my voice raw. "We did. All of us. Him. Her. You. Mara. Tess. The woman downstairs humming to herself. The kids who refused to be tidy. I just… said what was already true."
Truth is a kind of violence here.
It is also the only honest way I know to kill something.
The air cools.
In the distance, at the other end of the platform, a little gust kicks up an old flyer that never got properly scraped off. It flaps once, twice, then sticks back down.
You couldn't tell, if you walked in now for your regular commute, that a daemon died here.
That's the thing about big changes.
The world always finds a way to look almost the same around them.
I step back from the edge.
The mannequin releases my sleeve. Its hand drops to its side with a soft tap. Its tag hangs crooked.
ANOMALY – EMERGENT REFUSAL PATTERN
DO NOT ERASE
At the very bottom corner of the laminate, new text has printed itself in tiny, stubborn letters:
REMEMBER WHO BUILT THE KNIFE
I laugh, a single unsteady breath.
"Yeah," I say. "I don't think we're going to forget."
Somewhere deep in Null, a hungry algorithm goes still.
At the same time, somewhere deeper than Null, something vast and tired shifts its weight and pays closer attention.
I have killed a daemon.
Not Death.
Not the city.
Just one knife with the wrong hand on its handle.
For now, that is enough.
Act Twenty-Ninth – "a stabbing knife never kills"