The light over the crossing clicks from red to green.
No cars. No people. Just me and the sound of a system keeping time for a city that forgot how to move.
The last time I was here, the world had been peeled away from around me by a daemon. This time, it was the Great End's idea of a joke: step into a transfer, come out in a place that isn't supposed to exist.
Somewhere, Echo and Samira are in other branches of the same bad joke.
I stand in the middle of the intersection and wait for panic to arrive.
It takes its time.
The air smells like before: wet concrete, old smoke, grease from a kitchen that hasn't closed properly, sugar turned slightly sour. A tram bell rings once in the distance and doesn't ring again.
The bakery is still on the corner.
Shutters half down. Flour dust on the glass. The low brick wall outside it, where she sat the first time, is exactly where it should be.
Empty.
"Of course," I say. "Of course you're late."
Nobody answers.
I walk to the wall anyway and sit. The brick is cold through my borrowed clothes. A cracked packet of sugar lies by my shoe, bloated from damp.
Traffic lights cycle through their little religion.
Red. Green. Yellow.
Repeat.
I wait long enough for the loop in the fake window of my old office to run twice in my head. Nothing moves except wind and a plastic bag trying very hard to be a ghost.
"Okay," I say, to the absence. "Here's the situation. The Great End's pet transit device had a nervous breakdown. It split us three ways. I got dropped on your doorstep. Echo and Samira went… somewhere. I don't know where. Null-01's under quarantine. Mara—"
My throat clicks shut on her name.
"I'm supposed to be fixing something bigger than cities," I go on, because if I keep talking I don't have to feel the vacuum eating holes in my chest. "But right now I'd settle for a map. Or a sign that my friends aren't dead."
"You always open with the light requests," a voice says.
She's on the wall beside me, like she'd been there the whole time and only just decided to exist.
Same coat, the wet-asphalt one. Same dress, twilight blue. Same orange scarf, frayed a little more at the edges since last time, like warning tape that's seen too many construction sites. Her boots are still scuffed white at the toes, as if she's been walking through everyone's memory of this place for years.
Her eyes hold the street. All of it. As if every window in the blocks around us borrowed a piece of her gaze.
"You could say hello," she adds.
"I keep hoping I'll arrive somewhere else," I say.
"You're not the only one," she says.
We sit there for a moment with the familiarity of people who have only met twice but have been thinking about it in between.
"You look worse," she says eventually. "Thinner. More noise around the eyes."
"I've had a busy afterlife," I say.
"I noticed," she says.
Her gaze traces the air around me, like she's squinting at something only she can see.
"You brought friends this time," she says.
"Not here," I say. "We got separated. Split in transit."
She makes a small, thoughtful sound.
"I meant the threads," she says. "They're louder."
I resist the urge to look down at myself.
"What do they look like to you?" I ask.
"Like someone tried to erase a sentence in pencil and gave up halfway," she says. "Lines running out of you in three directions. All of them tugging."
"Echo and Samira," I say.
"Two of them," she says.
A chill runs down my back.
"And the third?" I ask.
She tips her head back and considers the traffic lights.
"You," she says. "If you'd stayed in Null and done what they wanted. That Noor is short and already burning out."
"Great," I say. "So I'm late to my own funeral in three timelines at once."
"You're not late," she says. "You're misplaced. It's different."
She swings one leg idly, heel knocking the brick. Up close, I can see the flour streak on the cuff of her coat again. It makes her real in a way Great End diagrams don't.
"You know what happened, don't you," I say. "To the transfer."
"The same thing that always happens when someone tries to run more than one sentence through the same throat," she says. "It choked."
"Can my friends get here?" I ask.
She shakes her head, gently.
"Not yet," she says. "Their lines bent different ways when the device broke. You ended up on a crossing. They landed on rails."
"Where?" I ask.
She gives me a look that's almost apologetic.
"I'm not a map," she says. "I can feel them pulling, but I don't see the names of the places they're in. Just pressure."
"Can you tell if they're alive?" I ask.
She considers the question properly, not flinching from it.
"One is in a system that thinks it's alive," she says. "One is in a system that hasn't decided yet. Both still make ripples."
"That's your way of saying 'yes, sort of'," I say.
"That's my way of saying 'you don't get certainty from a city that exists between drafts'," she says.
I press my hands together, hard enough that my knuckles hurt.
"I left Mara," I say. "Null-01 is quarantined and I'm out here roaming the infrastructure like a glitch tourist."
"You didn't leave her," she says. "You were removed."
"Feels like the same thing," I say.
"That's because you mistake guilt for control," she says calmly. "If it hurts, you think it must be your fault. That way you don't have to accept there are forces in the world that don't answer to you."
"That's flattering," I say.
"It's very human," she says.
We sit in the sound of the fridge hums and distant tram.
"You warned me," I say. "About the Great End. About endless death. I went and joined it anyway."
"You went into it," she corrects. "Not the same as joining. Joining is what the architects did, back when they decided there shouldn't be a single version of anyone left uncounted."
The phrase makes my stomach turn.
"Back when?" I ask.
"Before Null had a name," she says. "Before Mikheil wrote his first daemon. Before Angelus started signing directives. Long before you were born and long after your city already knew this was coming."
The name hits the air between us like dropped metal.
"Angelus," I repeat. "What is he?"
She smiles, small.
"A job title," she says. "People wear it like coats. Some coats fit better than others."
"Is Gabriel—" I start.
She cuts me off with a tilt of her head.
"You don't want that answer yet," she says. "Knowing it now just makes you bleed in the wrong places."
"I am very tired of everyone deciding which wounds I'm ready for," I say.
"You gave them that right when you let them kill you on paper," she says. "Null. Great End. Oversight. The only way to get it back is to start deciding which wounds you walk toward."
The traffic light flips to red.
"Let's talk about endless death," she says.
"I thought we already were," I say.
"We brushed it," she says. "You need more than metaphors now."
She leans forward, elbows on her knees, hands clasped loosely.
"Imagine," she says, "that every version of you across every branch is a candle. Noor who stayed. Noor who left. Noor who died in a different hospital. Noor who never existed because his parents never met. Tiny lights. Some go out quickly, some burn long."
"Okay," I say warily.
"The Great End's designers had a problem," she goes on. "They hated waste. All that grief, all that story, all that labour just… diffusing into private memory and soil. They wanted something tidier. So they built systems that would, in their words, 'capture value' from death."
"Null," I say.
"And its siblings," she says. "Null-002, Null-03, all the numbered cousins stitched into different cities. Every time someone dies, or is removed from the ledger, the system catches a fraction of their pattern. A thread. A statistic. They call it compassion data. It was supposed to make the living kinder."
"It didn't," I say.
"It made the living efficient," she says. "Those candles? They take a scrape off each one. They wire those scrapes into instruments. Then they ask the instruments what kind of city they should build."
"Endless death," I say slowly. "Because it doesn't stop at one version."
She nods.
"Once they realized they could move sideways along timelines," she says, "they got greedy. Why stop at one city, one world, when you can harvest every branch? Why let any Noor burn without being measured?"
"So they built the Great End," I say. "A big machine to collect every possible us."
"And to align them," she says. "No orphans. No outliers. No one left unmodeled."
The phrase makes me feel small and furious at the same time.
"And me?" I ask. "My death. My threads."
"You didn't fit," she says. "You were supposed to be a clean demonstration case. A man whose removal made the world neater. Instead you kept rupturing the narrative they wrote for you. Loving the wrong way. Refusing to be content. They got interested."
"Angelus wrote 'leave it'," I say bitterly. "I saw the note."
She nods.
"You became a test," she says. "A way to see what happens when a piece of noise is given enough rope to tangle their own math. That's why they left you at four percent. Enough of you to be interesting, not enough to threaten the equation."
"And now?" I say. "Now that I've touched their daemon, ridden their transfer, started prodding at their old Nulls?"
"Now you're more interesting," she says. "Which is dangerous for everyone."
I laugh, once. It doesn't sound right.
"I don't want to be interesting," I say. "I want my friends back and a world that isn't made of paperwork."
"Then stop trying to save 'humanity' as a concept and start saving actual people," she says.
Her words land heavier than any sermon.
"I thought that's what I was doing," I say quietly.
"No," she says. "You've been trying to save the idea of yourself. The one who fixes things. The one who refuses to be content. It's an attractive story. Heroic. Self-sacrificing. As long as you're busy auditioning for it, you don't have to sit alone in a room and ask what you are without the mission."
"Samira said something like that," I mutter. "She told me saving the world doesn't give my life meaning. If my altruism is this selfish, I could just go die instead."
"Samira is rude in the most useful ways," she says.
"You're saying don't save the world," I say.
"I'm saying save it for the right reasons," she says. "Not because you're afraid of being meaningless. Because you love someone enough to want them to live in a world that isn't a machine chewing on their ghost."
Echo's face flashes in my mind. Their stupid remarks in disaster drills, their hands hovering near my shoulders when I come back from a daemon. Samira's steady fingers on my arm in the reconciliation chamber. Riya's ink-smudged frown over a report. Mara's tired eyes staring at ceilings.
"That sounds like a lot of love," I say.
"It doesn't have to be grand," she says. "You already do it. You made space for Pilot-03 in a mannequin. You argued with a daemon instead of letting it chew anonymous statistics. You're terrible at being a good citizen of the Great End, which is a compliment."
"So what now?" I ask. "I'm stuck in a city that isn't supposed to exist, my friends are on rails, Mara's possessed by her father's daemon, Null-01 is in quarantine, and the Great End is adding my split to its case studies."
"That's one way to phrase it," she says.
"Give me a better one," I say.
She looks down the street, toward the tram wires.
"Now," she says, "you stop trying to climb back up the same burning staircase."
"Meaning?" I ask.
"Meaning you stop aiming for Null-01," she says. "The Great End just proved it can kick you sideways every time you try. It has that channel blocked. If you throw yourself at it again, you'll just get more broken. Let Samira and Echo run their lines for a while. Trust that they stepped onto that circle knowing it might throw them somewhere bad."
"That feels like abandonment," I say.
"It's respect," she says. "You're not the only person allowed to be brave."
I stare at my hands.
"What do I do instead," I ask.
"You walk into the parts of the Great End it's forgotten about," she says. "Systems that failed quietly. Nulls that never went live. Places where endless death tripped over its own feet and left gaps."
"Like the ruined Null we visited," I say. "With the dead daemon."
She nods.
"That was a corpse," she says. "There are others. Early prototypes. Abandoned pilots. Side projects. All threaded into the Great End, all ignored because they don't produce clean numbers. They're weak spots."
"And from weak spots," I say slowly, "you break things."
"From weak spots," she says, "you make different stories possible."
I let that sit.
"You said this corner hurts when they pull," I say. "Is this one of those weak spots."
"It's a scar," she says. "An intersection from a city that lost its Null halfway through construction. The great architects erased it from the official map. The people who lived here remembered anyway. That's why it's sticky. That's why you keep falling through it."
"Can I leave?" I ask.
"You can," she says. "But not the way you came in."
"Not through the Pilot-03 device," I say.
She shakes her head.
"Once a line is cut, you don't splice it back together by yanking it harder," she says. "You braid it into something else."
She stands, the coat falling around her in a soft, asphalt wave.
"Come on," she says. "You've been sitting at the crossroads. Time to see the rest of the bruise."
She walks into the intersection without looking up at the lights.
I follow.
The air thickens as we cross. For a second, the sound of distant fridges and TVs fades, replaced by something else: the hum of servers, the click of Null relays, the low rumble of the Great End's arteries.
At the exact centre of the intersection, she stops.
"Here," she says.
The tarmac under our feet shivers.
Lines appear, faint at first, then sharper, drawn in light instead of paint. Not just the crosswalks, but circles, spirals, little branching paths that ignore traffic laws. Diagrams bloom on the road surface, overlapping like someone spilled a hundred transit maps and they all tried to occupy the same space.
Each line has a feel.
Cold river fog. Stale office air. Dust from a server rack. The particular sour-metal taste of Null's reconciliation heart. The too-clean chill of Great End architecture. The damp warmth of a thousand human lungs in a crowd that thinks it's safe.
My head hurts.
"What is this?" I whisper.
"Routes," she says. "Some used to be yours. Some still are."
One circle glows a little brighter than the rest. It feels like an old bruise pressed from the inside.
"That one," she says, pointing with the toe of her boot, "goes to a Null that never learned how to finish what it starts. Endless intake. No severance. People go in, nobody gets declared dead. They disappear in other ways."
"That sounds…" I start.
"Familiar?" she suggests.
"Wrong," I say.
"Same thing," she says.
Another line flares, thin and sharp.
"That one goes to a city where they built the Null entirely in people's heads," she says. "No servers. No daemons. Just belief. Every time someone says 'he's dead to me', the Great End gets a little stronger."
I stare down at the glowing mess.
"And you want me to pick one," I say.
"I want you to stop waiting for permission," she says. "You're not going to find a gate marked 'this way to final boss.' All you get are bad options and the people you bring with you."
"I don't have any people with me," I say.
She looks at me like I've said something very stupid.
"You're talking to someone," she says. "You're tethered to two others. You're haunted by the words of a pilot who refused to be content. For a dead man, you're very crowded."
The tiniest smile tugs at my mouth.
"I meant physically," I say.
"You know that's not what matters here," she says.
She steps back, out of the web of lines.
"I can't tell you which path to take," she says. "If I did, I'd be no better than your project managers."
"You're worse," I say. "You're honest."
She inclines her head, accepting the insult as the compliment it is.
"But I can tell you this," she says. "Wherever you go next, it will be easier to become what they want you to be than to stay yourself. Every Null along this spine will offer you a version of peace in exchange for a little more of that four percent. Don't give it to them."
"How?" I ask. "Do I just… say no?"
"Say no," she says. "And remember why you're saying it."
She looks down the street toward the tram tracks.
"And when you meet him," she adds, "don't let the daemon convince you that he's the only monster in the room."
My skin crawls.
"Which daemon?" I ask.
"All of them," she says.
The wind lifts the corner of her scarf. For a moment, the orange is all I can see.
"Wait," I say. "Before I go. Your name."
She smiles, tired and beautiful and older than any city.
"You've walked my streets," she says. "You've been filed in my drawers. You're building your war on my ghosts. Call me whatever lets you remember that I am not on their side."
"That's not an answer," I say.
"It's the only one I trust," she says.
The street diagrams pulse once, as if agreeing.
I look at the lines, at the small, stubborn circle she pointed out first. Endless intake. No severance.
It feels like a place where endless death miscalculated. A place where they tried to build a clean system and got stuck in their own mercy.
It feels like a good place to start breaking things.
I step onto that circle.
The world lurches.
For a moment, the city that waits stretches thin, all its windows going dark at once. The girl's face blurs into a smear of light and brick; the traffic lights freeze mid-change.
Then the circle under my feet drops.
I fall without moving.
The last thing I hear before the Great End catches me again is her voice, very close to my ear.
"Don't let them count you twice," she says.
Then the lines go out.
Echo – misdial
Echo wakes up laughing.
It's not a good laugh. More like a bark torn in half.
They're in a chair. An unfamiliar office. A stack of training manuals on the desk opposite, all with their name on the cover.
Echo Hale, it says, in respectable print.
Narrative Compliance Consultant.
"Oh no," they say, aloud, to nobody. "They gave me a job."
Samira – off-book
Samira comes to on cold tile.
Overhead, fluorescent lights hum. The air smells of paper and old coffee and fear.
She pushes herself up. Her badge is gone. Her name is still in her mouth.
At the end of the corridor, a sign hangs crooked.
WELCOME TO NULL PROJECT – FEASIBILITY STUDY, it says.
Below, in smaller letters someone has tried to scratch out, another line remains visible.
Sponsored by the Great End Initiative.
She closes her eyes for a second.
"You left everything," she reminds herself. "So start here."
When she opens them, the sign is still crooked. The corridor is still too long. The future is still a machine chewing.
Somewhere very far away, at a dead intersection in a city that isn't on any map, a man steps onto a glowing line and disappears.
The Great End hums, faintly pleased with its own cleverness.
For the first time, it is wrong about where the story goes next.
Act Thirty-Fifth's End – "the angel is now here, he is about to visit the city."