Back outside, she heads toward the line where Soup District mutates into something else. The signs start lying around here. What looks like a kombucha warehouse with a wall of bubbly, lit tanks is a patent troll's office. A storefront with smiling girls on the decal is a parts printer for teeth. The rain smell goes metallic. The air acquires that strange hover of antiseptic over rot, like someone sprayed the surface and forgot death was heavier.
The Glass Orchard doesn't announce itself. Its facade is all fake beauty: stacked greenhouse panes like facets, armatures of brass and wire, trailing vines that glimmer faintly as if they've been programmed to impress. Underfoot, the sidewalk shifts from chipped municipal aggregate to inlaid glass pebbles that catch the light, tricking the mind into thinking of a river. A frosted logo ghosts one of the panes—a stylized tree whose branches end in small circles instead of leaves. Fruit, if fruit were petri dishes and scientific testing.
She stands on the opposite sidewalk and drinks it in. She starts counting. One, two, three—there it is—a drone completes a lazy rectangle under the eaves. It has that psychopathic appeal all Pouuer drones have—rounded corners, soft LEDs, a murmuring whirr instead of a buzz. The front doors cycle open without sound whenever someone with the right wristband approaches—white coats mostly, some with those high, sheenless ponytails, two in suits with thick collars.
Ira draws on her wrist with the graphite: a box for the building, trailing lines for the alleys, small asterisks where eyes are. She counts again, letting breaths be seconds: drone every forty-five, front door stays open seven, deliveries at the side hatch happen every hour on the half. She watches long enough to catch a shift change—loosened chatter and a palpable sense of relief.
She circles to the back where the public-facing design didn't bother reaching. Here the glass gives way to matte panels that look like stone. The waste outflow is disguised as a garden bed—black river rock, ferns that are a little too green. She kneels. Beneath the ferns is a grate pressed tight to the earth, and beneath that a duct the size of her shoulders. She palms the grate. Warm. Breathing.
"Hello," she whispers. "Is anyone down there? Can you hear me?"
She presses her ear to the grate. There's nothing. Complete silence. Excellent. A point of entry.
A woman pushing a cart on the service road glances over and doesn't register a person kneeling by plantings as unusual enough to bother with. Ira notes the cart's path. The service hatch pops for precisely five seconds, then shuts and locks with a magnetic click you can feel in your fillings if you stand close enough.
She steps back into the alley shadow and lets the talons slide out. Listen—that's the trick. It isn't just cutting. It's hearing what a thing wants to do. The grate here isn't thick but stubborn—cheap metal made arrogant by clever screws. She presses, finds the seam. There's the grain. She scores it at four corners, shallow lines that look like scratches from a groundskeeper with a lazy rake. She tests one corner with a wedge of pressure. The grate lifts a hair—a tomorrow possibility. Not today. She lets it settle and smudges dirt back over the lines.
A sound to her left: thin wheels chattering, a small curse. She turns. A kid about thirteen rounds the bend, pushing a bin almost as big as he is. His ears are leaf-tipped; his eyes swing wide when he sees her. He's got that look so many people in this district have—spooked animal on top, exhausted citizen underneath.
"Hey," she says.
He freezes.
"Sorry," she adds, and makes her posture smaller. "You know if the Orchard throws their organics in with general, or do they separate?"
He stares, suspicious, amused despite himself. "Lady, nothing that goes in there is organic."
"Fair," she says.
He jerks his chin at the greenhouse facade. "They grow cartilage in there. And skins," he adds, like a dare to see if she'll flinch.
"Thank you," she says, and fishes in her pocket. She's not loaded, but she has something. She palms him a coin and two dumplings, still warm in their wax paper. "For the road."
He hesitates, then takes them, suspicion losing out to hunger. He backs away with enough emphasis to remind her not to follow.
She continues walking, and turns a corner to find an alley where The Glass Orchard workers take their breaks. Once a delivery bay, now a subculture. There's the ashtray—a drum of sand with nicotine constellations poked into it. There's the makeshift shrine someone's started for a coworker who didn't come back—battery candle, three wilted flowers, a photo whose edges have begun to curl. She stands near the mouth and listens. Two techs talk in low bursts around the corner, words enough to be good data, not enough to be gossip yet.
"…shifts got longer since the audit…"
"…boss says the model isn't predictive enough…"
"…who'd you get assigned… orchard or nursery…"
Nursery. Her stomach tightens. She shouldn't be surprised. They name things to make them friendly. She pictures again those cages in the Bone Collector's penthouse. She breathes, slow and deliberate. Not yet. Plan first.
She spends the rest of the late morning drawing a web of places and times on cardboard scavenged from a bin: arrows, little clocks, notes that would look like nothing to anyone else. She circles vents twice and underlines ladders the way J's voice did. She throws in the pattern of the drones purely because patterns soothe her.
Lunch is a bao eaten walking, mind still marking time. She accepts a sample cup of broth from a street stall, nods at a tired harpy balancing a bag of produce, adjusts her pace so she doesn't fall in step with anyone long enough to be remembered. It is astonishing how invisible you can be if you seem like you are in a hurry to be kind elsewhere.
The testing gets bolder as the day drops a shade. An abandoned substation—locked gate, chain thick as a wrist. She learns that steady pressure is her friend; force is not. She learns not to rush the last millimeter—that's where mistakes live. She replaces what she cuts with a zip tie from the bottom of her bag so the gate looks shut to anyone who doesn't pull. She learns to breathe through the cut, not at it. She learns to wipe the talon edges on her jeans, because metal dust leaves a glitter that might be poetic in a different life and is evidence in this one.
She realizes—only then—that she hasn't thought of Cobalt in hours.
The thought stings a little. Not the memory of him, but the memory of what she thought he might lift off her. The light under the streetlamp by her building. The way he made coffee taste like belonging. She lets the ache be part of the weather. Not now, she tells it, the way she told her wings last night. You can be real and still wait your turn.
Dusk deepens. She heads home not to rest, but to stage.
Her apartment greets her with the familiar heater thump and the smell of damp fabric. She sets the cardboard map on the floor and weights the corners with whatever is heavy: the cut lock, a jar of coins, her one good boot, a cracked bowl of loose screws. She pulls a short list onto a second scrap, printing in block letters:
Dark clothes (no logos)
Gloves (close fit) Water bottle Hair tie Spare socks Knife
She packs with ritual. She has nothing fancy, but she has enough. She uses an old bike light and wraps it in a scarf so it will glow without shining. She rethreads her hoodie's drawstrings. She chuckles to herself when she remembers the time she saw a movie where the hero wore all black leather to sneak, as if squeak weren't a sound.
She eats again—rice with leftover broth and a sliced egg—and sits by the window with the lights off to let her eyes learn the dark. The city outside has switched to its night voice. Sirens flatten into distance, a couple argues two floors down, someone drags something heavy across a balcony. She lets her breath match the radiator's tick. She practices the talon extension and retraction without looking—the blind movement of a violinist finding the string.
At midnight she tries something she's been ignoring all day: she kneels on the rug and leans forward until her forehead touches the floor and she breathes into the pressure beneath her shoulder blades. The ache is not the hungry bite from last night. It's a patient ache, tidal, waiting for an honest invitation. She doesn't give one yet. "Soon," she tells that part of her. "But I need my center of gravity where it is tonight."
She naps in ten-minute slices, a trick learned on busy double shifts. Every time she wakes, she pictures the grate under the ferns, the shallow scores she left, the service hatch's five-second grace. She pictures herself not as a savior but as a system moving through another system—small but precise, stubborn and exact, like the way water finds a line in stone.
At 01:50 she slides her bag over her shoulder, lifts the lock from the counter like a talisman, and steps into the hallway. The stairwell smells like damp concrete and cheap paint. She takes the stairs on the balls of her feet, letting each landing become a breath. On the street, the rain has returned. It beads on her sleeves in a fine constellation.
Head down, pace purposeful, hands quiet, she walks. The city is generous with cover—awnings, scaffold tunnels, the skinny shadows between dumpsters. The Soup District is asleep enough to be fierce; Pouuer is awake enough to make her heart beat faster. Her hands are steady when she ducks to the ferns. The drones make their lazy squares above. The service road is momentarily empty. She presses her palm to the grate and it answers like a living thing that remembers being cut.
The talons slide out with the silent intimacy of habit.
Score. Lift. Catch.
She tips the grate and sets it into the ferns without a sound. Warm air breathes in her face from the duct; it smells like bleach and something that once had blood. She lowers herself into the rectangle and lies prone, shoulders brushing metal, cheek against damp earth. It will be tight, but she's built a life in tight places.
She slides forward and freezes at the first obstacle in the duct: a crossbar mesh. Cheap and new. She smiles into the dark because now she's in a conversation she understands, her practice paying off.
She places the tip of her right index talon against the mesh and breathes. The cut she makes is curved, not straight—she's learned already that circles are kinder to structure. She draws an oval, lifts the cut piece, tucks it back like a hinged lid so it can be replaced later. She pulls her bag through, rolls her shoulders, keeps going. The duct hums. The building breathes. Her heart counts.
At the next bend she hears it—the faint, unmistakable sound of water moving in glass. Not much. Enough. The duct opens into a cavity and a second grate looks back at her like an eye. Beyond it: a corridor in shadow, a bank of pipes, a stack of crates with that glossy, expensive cardboard finish that screams special handling.
She whispers to herself, "First look. Get in and out."
She doesn't believe herself. Once she starts, she won't be able to stop. It's risky. She knows this and keeps going anyway.