Killing a daemon doesn't come with a logout button.
There's no fireworks, no level-up chime.
Just a memo, somewhere, quietly changing status from ACTIVE to TERMINATED, and a building full of people trying very hard not to look at you like you might be contagious.
For the first few hours, Null behaves like a migraine.
Everything is too bright, too loud, too normal.
Dr. Lane runs checks. Reflex tests, cognitive questions, a few of their favourite traps about whether I feel "more real" or "less real" after the incident. I answer honestly and unhelpfully, which is the only way I know how.
Gabriel doesn't show up.
Samira's jaw is set at a new angle I don't recognise.
Echo keeps making jokes and then forgetting the punchline halfway through.
My residual score doesn't change.
CASE 7F-19N – RESIDUAL SCORE: 4%
LOCKED – EXTERNAL FLAG ACTIVE
The little lock icon next to the 4% shouldn't be there.
It was added after my first trip on Line ∞.
After someone upstairs wrote the note:
LEAVE IT. I WANT TO SEE WHERE IT GOES.
I killed Mikheil Ioseliani's daemon and the lock didn't budge.
Whatever is interested in me has a steadier hand than he did.
By the time my shift is technically over, I'm too wound up to lie on the cot. The fake window cycles through its tram-loop for the sixth time. The same smudge on the side. The same flicker in the wires.
I want the real city so badly my teeth hurt.
The door hisses.
I sit up, expecting Echo, or Lane with another set of questions.
It's Gabriel.
He looks like he slept in his coat and then remembered halfway through the corridor that he isn't allowed to look that human. He's smoothed his hair, straightened his collar, but there's a crease at the corner of his mouth that wasn't there before.
"You broke my favourite monster," he says, leaning in the doorway.
"Charge me for it," I say. "Add it to my debt."
He studies my face.
"Still making jokes," he says. "Good."
"I'm not sure that's a reliable metric," I say.
"It's the only one we have," he says.
He steps inside. The door shuts behind him with that soft, expensive click that says this room belongs to someone's budget line now.
"You understand what you did?" he asks.
"Argument could be made that I committed emotional violence against legacy code," I say. "Or, from another angle, I told the truth out loud in an inconvenient place."
"And from the building's point of view?" he asks.
"I removed a useful, deniable tool," I say. "And poked a hole in the story that we're neutral."
He nods once.
"Which means," he says, "that the thing that was using that neutrality is now going to look for another route."
I thought he'd say "another daemon."
He doesn't.
"Another route to what?" I ask.
He doesn't answer immediately.
Instead, he crosses to the wall panel and taps it awake. My case file blooms across the screen.
CASE 7F-19N – STATUS: ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH – ACTIVE ANOMALY
THREADS: RESOLVED / REDIRECTED – 96%
RESIDUAL SCORE: 4% – LOCKED
DAEMON CONTACT: RECORDED – UNCLASSIFIED PATTERN
NOTES: MULTIPLE – SEE ATTACHED
He scrolls past the usual bureaucratic poetry until he reaches the external flags.
OVERRIDE – EXTERNAL REVIEW – ISSUER: [REDACTED]
NOTE: LEAVE IT. I WANT TO SEE WHERE IT GOES.
OVERRIDE – LOCK RESIDUAL SCORE – VALUE: 4%
SCOPE: CROSS-SYSTEM
The last line is new.
"Cross-system," I say. "That doesn't sound local."
"It isn't," he says.
"What does it mean?" I ask.
"It means Null isn't the only place that thinks you're interesting," he says quietly. "And that the lock on your existence isn't entirely ours to pick."
Something cold slides down my spine.
"You told me External Review was just a committee," I say.
"It is," he says. "Here."
"And outside 'here'?" I ask.
He looks at the window instead of me.
"You want to see her again," he says. "The girl at the station. The city with a face."
Of course he knows.
"Yes," I say.
He nods, like that's the answer he expected.
"Then get your coat," he says. "We're going downstairs."
"Level -3?" I ask.
"Lower," he says.
I didn't know there was a lower.
The lift won't take us there.
We ride it to the basement where Mara keeps their patch kit and the reconciliation heart hums, then take a service stairwell that smells of rust and old rain. Gabriel walks like he's tracing a map he memorised so long ago he forgets he knows it.
"This is off the books," he says, as we pass a door labelled ARCHIVAL COOLING – DO NOT ENTER. "If anyone asks, you were asleep."
"I'm dead," I say. "Sleep is implied."
"Some of the worst things we do happen in sleep," he says.
At the next landing, the air cools enough that my breath fogs. The concrete under my shoes feels older, as if the building decided the lower it went, the less it needed to pretend.
"What did we build this far down?" I ask.
He huffs a sound that could almost be a laugh.
"'We' is generous," he says. "Null as you know it inherited this level. Or, if you want to be precise, it grew down into it the way roots find old bones."
We turn a corner.
At the end of a short corridor, there's a door with no label. Just a small, dark rectangle where a badge reader used to be.
Gabriel takes a card out of his pocket.
Not a Null badge. I've seen those enough to recognise their design in my sleep.
This card is matte black and featureless, save for a narrow strip of embossed text worn almost smooth.
P-03 TRANSIT – MANUAL OVERRIDE.
He slots it into the dead reader.
For a second, nothing happens.
Then the lock gives a reluctant clunk, and the door shivers open half a centimetre.
"Room 0," I say.
He glances at me.
"You remember," he says.
"Hard to forget the place where you told me I was already content," I say.
"This is… adjacent," he says. "Room 0 is where we talk about echoes of lives. This is where we talk about echoes of systems."
He pushes the door open.
The room beyond is larger than I expect. Or maybe it just feels that way because it's mostly empty.
The floor is a grid of old cable runs and bolt-holes where something big used to be bolted. Only one thing remains: a metal frame in the centre, like a half-built elevator car someone gave up on. No walls. Just a square of floor with railings on three sides and a control box on the fourth.
It's dusted with a fine layer of the kind of dirt buildings make when they've been thinking too hard for too long.
"What is it?" I ask.
"Prototype," he says. "We called it a Transit Cradle. Pilot-03 took the only successful trip."
"Successful," I repeat.
"They came back," he says. "For a while."
I step closer.
The floor inside the frame is scuffed in a way that suggests nervous pacing. Old footprints overlapped until they're just a general sense of human anxiety.
"How does it work?" I ask.
He stands beside the control box, running his fingers over the old switches like a pianist remembering a piece.
"You know how Endless Death moves," he says. "Line ∞. Down, down, down, until a case slides into Null. The Cradle does the opposite. Sideways, then up."
"Sideways where?" I ask.
He lifts his hand. For a moment, he looks very tired.
"Between systems," he says. "Between different versions of the End."
"The End," I say.
"A larger structure," he says. "Null is a single layer. A city-level implementation of a broader principle. When we joined Endless Death, we signed a contract with one office in a building that spans… more than this world."
I stare at him.
"I thought this was me overdramatising," I say. "Not literal."
"Most people die without ever needing to know the difference," he says. "You have made yourself annoyingly relevant."
He taps a switch.
The Cradle hums, reluctantly, like a machine waking from a dream it didn't consent to. Dim lights along the floorframe flicker on, lighting a square just big enough for two people to stand uncomfortably close.
"Why are you showing me this?" I ask.
"Because you killed a daemon built under the End's specifications," he says. "And now the End is paying attention. Because your residual is locked by a directive we don't own. Because the girl you met… lives in a part of the structure I can't reach by myself."
"And you can?" I ask.
"Not exactly," he says. "But Pilot-03 left a door half-open. I can point you at it."
"Then what?" I ask.
"Then you talk to her," he says. "And she tells you what I can't."
He holds my gaze.
"I need you to understand something before you step on that floor," he says. "If you go, you may not come back the same. Or at all. The Cradle was mothballed because the only person who used it came back wrong."
"Pilot-03," I say.
"Yes," he says. "They saw too much. They heard… an older logic. They tried to tell us. We called it contamination and quarantined their language. That language is what leaks through your mannequin, your drills, your anomalies."
"And the End?" I ask. "What does it want?"
He looks at me for a long time.
"They built a system to make all the stories easy to file," he says. "And then they started running out of drawers."
My skin prickles.
"What happens when they run out?" I ask.
"They build bigger filing cabinets," he says. "Or they decide the solution is to stop new stories from being written."
I breathe out.
"So the End is…" I begin.
"A plan," he says. "To end humanity gently. Everywhere. In every branch. Every version of the world that reached the point where it could imagine systems like Null. End the messy, unpredictable part. Keep the content. Delete the rest."
"Delete… what?" I ask, even though I already know.
"Things that still think they're alive," he says softly.
The room feels smaller. The air feels thinner.
"And Null?" I ask. "We're just… one of its tools."
"Yes," he says. "One node in a much bigger diagram. Endless Death is the line that delivers cases. Null is the office that processes them. The End is the archive at the back that someone decided would be safer if it was empty."
I grab the railing of the Cradle without realising I've moved.
"And my 4%?" I ask. "My little locked sliver of self. That's… them?"
"Partly," he says.
"Partly," I repeat. "Who's the other part?"
He smiles then, small and strange.
"The city does not like being treated as collateral," he says. "When the End reached in to mark you as useful, she grabbed the mark and refused to let go."
"She?" I ask.
"You've met her," he says.
My heart does a small, disobedient leap.
"This is how I go back?" I ask.
"Yes," he says. "For a little while. The Cradle isn't built to hold you there long. You're still tied to Null. Your threads are anchored. But you can step outside the single-timeline model for one conversation."
"One conversation," I say. "To decide what? Whether I want to help the End finish the job?"
His mouth tightens.
"They already think you are helping," he says. "They think Null is training you. Hardening you. Making you into the perfect courier. A case that can pass between systems, adapt fast, survive long enough to… calibrate each one."
"Calibrate," I say.
"Bring them to the same decision point," he says. "After that, they cut. All at once."
"All…?" I say, and my voice cracks.
"Every branch where something like you exists," he says. "Every city that learned to erase its undesirables administratively. Every story that made itself into a tool to avoid feeling. The End will send an impulse down the network and everything still breathing in those worlds will have its thread severed at the same conceptual time."
"And where do they go?" I ask, my mouth dry.
"The pit," he says. "The black pithole under all the systems. The place where cut threads drop when no one bothers to hold them anymore."
My stomach turns.
"I thought threads went back into… something," I say. "Into the city. Into… you know. The usual metaphors."
"Some do," he says. "When people are allowed to remember. When grief is not outsourced to a server. The End's project is different. It wants pure quiet. No ghosts. No echoes. No inconvenient children asking why their parents vanished."
"And Null agreed to this," I say.
"Null thinks it's making death neater," he says. "It thinks it's part of a benevolent standardisation drive. You cut the daemon and, for the first time, it felt guilt. The End will not like that."
"Good," I say.
He nods at the Cradle.
"You can stay here," he says quietly. "You can pretend you never heard this. You can keep trying to nudge Null into something kinder, knowing you're just rearranging furniture in a building scheduled for demolition."
"Or?" I ask.
"Or you step inside," he says. "You let her show you the rest of the structure. You let her tell you what it would mean to leave Null altogether. To become… transitional tissue between systems. The thing that can move where daemons are bound."
"And if I leave?" I ask. "What happens to my 96% resolved threads? To the people whose lives I've cut?"
"They stay cut," he says. "For now. You can't undo what's been done. You can only decide what kind of ending they're heading toward."
"And my 4%?" I ask. "The locked part."
"That becomes your clock," he says. "Every journey you take outside the line will wear it down. Every system you enter will try to digest you. You will have to end the End before your residual hits zero."
"And when it hits zero?" I ask.
"You stop," he says. "For real this time."
I lean my forehead against the cool metal of the railing.
"You're asking me to become… what?" I say. "A wandering glitch? An anti-asset? The thing that screws up the apocalypse schedule?"
"Would you prefer to be the courier that delivers it?" he asks.
The question sits there between us, heavy as concrete.
I already know the answer. I knew it the moment he said the word pit.
I didn't board Line ∞ to help someone else erase my neighbour.
"All right," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Let's go see her."
He steps back, giving me room.
I enter the Cradle.
The floor under my feet vibrates faintly, like a cat trying not to be obvious about purring. The control box hums. The old cables overhead twitch as dormant circuits wake.
Gabriel stands just outside the frame, hand on the main switch.
"Focus on her," he says. "On the street. On the smell. On the way the traffic lights sound when they change."
"It's not exactly a guided meditation," I say.
"You're not exactly a client," he says.
I close my eyes.
Cold air.
Wet asphalt.
Fridge hums through thin walls.
The click of traffic lights.
Her scarf, bright orange against grey.
The Cradle shudders.
For a second, I feel like I'm in every elevator I've ever taken at once. The drop of the stomach, the small lurch at the change of speed, the heavy, familiar dread of who might be waiting on the next floor.
Then the hum tips sideways.
There is no sense of up or down, only a slip. As if someone has taken Null, folded it neatly into a paper plane, and pushed it into a different layer of air.
The smell changes first.
Null smells like coolant and paperwork and old coffee. The place I land in smells like its earlier version: stone, rain, exhaust, burnt sugar.
I open my eyes.
I'm back on her street.
The same intersection.
The same tram lines.
The same buildings holding their breath.
Only this time, there are more lights on.
Windows glow sickly yellow and soft blue. TVs flicker behind curtains. Somewhere a siren wails and dies. The city is not fully paused; it's moving in slow motion, as if the film is being wound by hand.
She's leaning against the wall outside the bakery.
Same coat, long and asphalt-coloured. Same dress, evening-blue. Same scarf, the orange of hazard signs and falling leaves.
When she looks up and sees me, her face changes in a way I can't quantify. Not surprise. Not relief. Something like recognition plus worry.
"You're late," she says.
"That's what your friends keep telling me," I say.
She snorts.
"They're not my friends," she says. "Some of them are my mistakes. The rest are my tenants."
I step closer.
"How many tenants do you have?" I ask.
She looks past me, down the artery of the street.
"All of you," she says simply.
We stand there a moment, letting the sounds of the slowed city fill the space between us. A bus passes at the far end of the road with implausible slowness, like a whale in shallow water.
"You killed it," she says finally.
"The white one," I say. "Mikheil's daemon."
"Yes," she says. "I felt that. Like someone took a vacuum cleaner off my lungs."
"I'm glad," I say. "I was worried I'd just redirected the dust."
"Oh, there's always more dust," she says. "You can't stop that. You can only decide whether to breathe it or choke on it."
She tilts her head, studying my face.
"You look… older," she says.
"I died," I say. "That ages you."
"You killed a piece of the End," she says. "That's worse."
I swallow.
"You know about the End," I say.
She laughs softly.
"'Know' is generous," she says. "I feel it. Like weather. The way pigeons feel storms in their bones. The End is a front that's been building for a long time."
She pushes herself off the wall and starts walking. I fall into step beside her.
"Gabriel says Null is only one part," I say. "One office in a bigger building."
"Yes," she says. "They call it a network. It's more like a fungus."
We turn a corner.
The street opens onto a wider square I don't remember seeing before. A fountain in the centre, dry and cracked. Benches around it, empty. Streetlights casting little circles of light like interrogation lamps for missing people.
Above us, the sky feels lower.
"You wanted to see this," she says.
"The End?" I ask.
"The shape of it," she says.
She lifts her hand.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then the lights in the square flicker and stay. The ambient city noise drops by half, as if someone turned down a volume knob labelled Local.
The clouds thin.
Beyond them, there is not stars.
There is a diagram.
Lines of faint light stretch across the sky like a subway map drawn by a god who hates straight routes. Nodes glow where the lines intersect: clusters of meaning, systems, structures.
Some I recognise in shape, if not name.
One looks like Null.
A knot of procedural loops and labelled boxes.
Another looks like a graveyard made out of legislation.
One is a ring of hospitals.
Another is a courthouse that never closes.
All the ways people have ever tried to make death tidy.
Threads run through them, bright and trembling. Threads of cases, stories, names. Some are thin. Some bundled like cables.
At the centre of the map is a dark circle.
Not black like paint. Black like forgotten.
The Pithole.
"The Great End," I whisper.
"Not so great when you see it naked," she says softly. "Just a central sink. A place where all the cut threads go when nobody bothers to catch them."
I stare up.
The threads feed into the Pithole in slow spirals. Each one that reaches it dims. Not immediately. Not dramatically. Just… fades.
"What happens to them?" I ask. "When they fall in."
"Nothing," she says.
"Nothing as in… we don't know?" I ask.
"Nothing as in there is no more difference between them," she says. "No names. No edges. No specific grief. Just undifferentiated absence."
"That sounds like nihilism," I say.
"Nihilism wishes it were that efficient," she says. "This is bureaucracy. They built a zero at the heart of everything and decided the kindest thing they could do was throw us into it slowly."
I keep staring until my neck aches.
"How many systems are there?" I ask.
"Enough," she says. "Enough that you can stop counting and call it 'all' without lying too much."
"And Null?" I ask. "Where is it?"
She points.
One of the nodes pulses when she does. I feel it in my ribs.
"That's your floor," she says. "Case files, echo theatres, daemons with nice user interfaces."
"And Endless Death?" I ask.
"The lines that feed Null," she says. "And similar lines feeding similar offices in similar cities."
"This is just… my city?" I ask.
"This is all the cities that woke up clever enough to invent us," she says. "All the places that decided administrative erasure was more polite than blood in the streets. Some are older. Some are newer. All of them are being harvested."
"For what?" I ask.
"For the End's comfort," she says. "It's tired of being rattled by people who won't stay dead in their own stories."
"Gabriel says they're using me," I say. "That my 4% is their… tool."
She nods.
"When you boarded Line ∞, you stepped into their jurisdiction," she says. "You said, 'I consent to being processed.' They love consent. It makes the reports pretty."
"I thought I was escaping a life I didn't want," I say.
"You were," she says. "And you fell straight into their lap."
"Story of my life," I say.
"Story of ours," she corrects.
We walk along the edge of the square.
Above us, the map of systems hums, threads sliding toward the Pithole like water.
"Why lock me at 4%?" I ask. "Why not either let me go or finish the job?"
"Because you are useful," she says simply. "You showed them something Pilot-03 hinted at and they didn't believe."
"What?" I ask.
"That a human consciousness can carry contradictions between systems without dissolving," she says. "That you can stand in Null and still feel me. That you can kill a daemon that's part of their spec. They looked at that and they thought, 'Excellent. A courier that doesn't break.'"
"Courier of what?" I ask, even though I already know.
"Their decision," she says. "They want you to visit every node like yours. To test, to calibrate, to iron out local resistance. Once you have passed through enough, they will know exactly how to phrase the final directive so no system hesitates."
"And then?" I ask.
"Then they cut everything at once," she says. "No more anomalies. No more mismatched grief. No more children like Tess running from fires someone calls necessary."
My throat tightens.
"Why me?" I ask. "Why not just… push an update?"
"Updates are blunt," she says. "You are precise. You listen. You argue. You tweak. You make people feel. They want you to soften the edges so their last act looks merciful. 'We did everything we could. Even our cases helped.'"
I feel sick.
"And you?" I ask. "What do you want?"
She stops walking.
The map overhead keeps humming. A tram somewhere far away crosses an unseen bridge.
"What do you think?" she asks.
"You're the city," I say. "You want to keep us."
"I want you to be allowed to keep yourselves," she says. "I am tired of collecting pieces of people who were never given the choice."
She looks at me.
"Do you know what it feels like, Noor?" she asks quietly. "To have half a conversation about you in boardrooms you can't enter. To feel your streets thinned out because a panel decided you were more manageable that way. To be told that your job is to host people until they become content and then let them go."
"I have an approximate idea," I say.
She smiles, small and sharp.
"Yes," she says. "You do."
She steps closer.
"When you killed Mikheil's daemon," she says, "you did more than shut down one knife. You created a contradiction the End can't file yet. A system that felt itself doing harm. A node that experienced shame. They will try to correct that. They will try to correct you."
"And you want me to… what?" I ask. "Break them first?"
"I want you to remember that every time they call you their tool," she says, "you can choose to be their error instead."
I laugh, or try to.
"You sound like Gabriel," I say.
"Gabriel wants redemption," she says. "I want survival."
"And me?" I ask.
She looks at me like she's seeing not just me, but all the versions of me the map overhead keeps in its wires.
"You want not to be used," she says. "The rest will have to grow around that."
We stand at the edge of the dry fountain.
The map in the sky flickers, and for a second I see something else: a path traced across the nodes, lit in thin, dangerous blue.
It starts at Null.
It goes through a courthouse that never closes.
A hospital network that whispers prognosis into every phone.
A predictive policing grid.
A school system that tests children until their names bleed.
Dozens more.
It ends at the rim of the Pithole.
"That's their route for you," she says. "The courier's pilgrimage."
"How many stops?" I ask.
"More than is kind," she says. "Fewer than forever."
"And you're saying I can… what? Take their route and use it against them?" I ask.
"Yes," she says. "Because they need you intact until the end. They will patch you. They will protect that 4% in ways they don't protect anybody else. You can use that buffer to do things you shouldn't survive."
"Like killing daemons," I say.
"Like teaching systems to hesitate," she says. "Like making every node you pass through remember who built its knife."
I look up at the glowing path.
"So my choice is between letting them use me to end everything," I say, "or using their plan as a map to try to break them before they do."
"Yes," she says.
"That's not much of a choice," I say.
"It's better than none," she says.
I think of Riya at her desk, learning how to clean people out of the system and feeling it in her stomach.
I think of Tess with her soot lungs and her hyperfocus on small lives.
I think of Mara, whose leg reminds her every day that she tried to stand between her father and his daemon and failed.
I think of my mother, tracing my name on a death notice.
Of Ben, staring at an empty chair.
Of the trainees who wrote inconvenient answers and had their contracts quietly not renewed.
I think of Pilot-03, scratching words into walls no one wanted to read.
"You said if I leave Null, I might not come back," I say.
"You might," she says. "But it will not be the same Null. And you will not be the same you."
"What happens to my threads?" I ask. "The ones already cut."
"They hang," she says. "In the dark between systems. The End is waiting to drop them. If you break its jaw before it does, some of them might fall back into places that remember them."
"Might," I repeat.
"Yes," she says.
"Not a guarantee," I say.
"There are no guarantees," she says. "Only better and worse lies."
I take a breath.
"Okay," I say. "Say I agree. Say I become their courier and your error. How do I even start?"
She reaches into her coat pocket.
For a second I expect a weapon, or a map, or some kind of metaphysical bus pass.
She takes out a piece of paper.
An old ticket.
Line ∞ – Endless Death.
Origin: Saint Gabriel.
Destination: Null District.
Some of the print is faded. The Valid Until date is smudged beyond reading.
"You keep giving me these," I say.
"It's still your door," she says. "Only now you know it opens more than one way."
"I thought Endless Death only went down," I say.
"It does, if you don't argue," she says. "You argued. The line remembers you."
She presses the ticket into my hand.
"As long as you hold that," she says, "you are part of their network. As long as you are part of their network, you can choose where to jam yourself in it."
"Jam myself," I say. "Elegant."
"You're not elegant," she says. "You're stubborn."
She closes my fingers over the paper.
"Your 4% is the part of you that can still be moved," she says. "The rest is already committed. Remember that. Don't waste it on clever speeches in the wrong rooms."
"I like clever speeches," I say.
"I know," she says. "Separately: please stop giving my enemies material."
We stand there, hand between us, ticket crumpling slightly.
"What do I call you?" I ask.
She raises an eyebrow.
"I told you," she says. "If you haven't learned my name by now, that's on you."
"City is not a name," I say.
"Neither is Null," she says. "And yet you both act like nouns."
She considers, then sighs.
"If you need something to shout when you're angry at me," she says, "call me Elia. It's not my real name. But it will do."
"Elia," I repeat.
It sits on my tongue like a street name I walked as a child and forgot until now.
"Don't make it holy," she says. "I'm concrete, not god."
Above us, the map flickers again.
The glowing path through the systems sharpens. It pulses in time with my heartbeat.
"You should go," she says. "They'll notice you've stepped sideways for too long. The End is not omniscient, but it is… touchy."
"Touchy," I say. "Great."
I look at the map one more time. At the nodes I don't know yet. The hospital ring. The courthouse. The predictive grid. The school.
"You'll be there?" I ask. "If I… need to… recalibrate?"
"I'm everywhere they call a city," she says. "But the version you can see only lives here. In this place-between. Come back when you can. If you can."
"And if I don't?" I ask.
"Then I'll do what I've always done," she says. "Carry what's left."
I tuck the ticket into my pocket like superstition.
"Tell me one thing," I say.
"If it's 'do we win,' the answer is 'ask a different prophet,'" she says.
"Not that," I say. "Do you believe it's worth trying?"
She looks up at the Pithole, then at the systems feeding it, then at me.
"Perfection never was," she says. "But the attempt not to be erased? Yes. That's always been worth something."
She reaches out and, for the first time, touches my wrist. Her fingers are cold and solid and slightly rough, like railings.
"Go back," she says. "Gabriel is waiting. He pretends he isn't afraid for you. He is. Let him have that."
"I'll start with Null," I say.
"Of course," she says. "You can't stop the Great End if you don't first decide what to do with your own small one."
The square blurs.
The smell of stone and sugar and exhaust fades into coolant and paper again.
The Cradle's railing is under my hand.
Gabriel stands where I left him, eyes dark, switch pulled back.
"How long?" I ask.
He glances at his watch.
"Three minutes," he says.
It felt longer.
In my pocket, the Line ∞ ticket is warm.
Above us, beyond the concrete and the humming racks and the admin floors, a map of systems hums quietly.
In one node, Mikheil Ioseliani's daemon is gone. In another, a courthouse is sharpening its teeth. In a third, a grid of cameras blinks awake.
In the centre, the Pithole waits.
The End thinks it has its courier.
The city has its error.
I have my 4%.
It is not enough.
It is all I have.
"Gabriel," I say.
"Yes," he says.
"If I leave Null," I ask, "will you hate me?"
He considers.
"If you go to make it easier for them," he says, "yes. If you go to make it harder—"
He shrugs.
"Then I'll save you a chair in whatever's left," he says.
I laugh, and this time it doesn't break.
"I need a plan," I say.
"You have one," he says. "You just haven't admitted it to yourself yet."
He nods at my pocket.
"First stop?" he asks.
I pull out the ticket.
The print is clearer than before.
The Destination line smears when I look directly at it, then resolves into something new.
ORIGIN: NULL DISTRICT
DESTINATION: PENDING
"I think," I say slowly, "I start by getting off at my old station. And then I stop treating Endless Death like a service."
He smiles, faint and dangerous.
"Good," he says. "It's time someone refused their refund."
The Cradle hums under my feet.
Somewhere, in the dark beyond Null, the Great End turns its attention toward one small anomaly and thinks:
Leave it.
I want to see where it goes.
I close my fingers around the ticket.
"Let's go," I tell the line.
Act thirtieth – "The Girl dead is living within"