(Florence's Point of View)
The night took the city into its lungs and held it. From my window, Tokyo was a lacework of neon and late trains, a cardiogram that didn't know how to rest. Inside, the office hummed the way machines do when they are pretending to be asleep.
The old terminal by the window — the one that "wasn't connected" to anything — pulsed once. Barely there. A blink your average eye would forgive.
I didn't.
I crossed the room and set my empty coffee cup down beside it. The porcelain left a ring on the metal, a small moon around a quiet star. On my main desk, the Rhodes Island dashboard played at being well-behaved: logistics lanes, reagent inventories, a dozen flagged requests for field medics, all wrapped in tidy UI that told reassuring lies.
The older screen preferred honesty.
I keyed in. No theatrics — just the patient return of a heartbeat that wasn't supposed to exist.
Weir spoke.
On paper, Weir was a phantom utility node — part of the municipal pump grid, blink-and-miss-it, a mouthful of water in a river happy to be ignored. In truth, it was the decoy my other hands had planted three levels below the street, a false mouth whispering exactly the right mistakes into a cable that remembered too much.
Its packet log scrolled: cadence matched, variation seeded, the same polite nothing said fifteen slightly different ways.
Good.
Across the old glass, a second thread bled in — the real relay. Silent unless touched. Tonight it wasn't. An unseen listener had tugged once, twice, satisfied itself with the flavor of the line, and drifted back into the cold.
I let the respirations of that quiet thing settle in me, counting along until I could feel the intervals as if they were part of my own pulse.
"Curious," I murmured, because the room liked lines to carry sound.
The comm terminal chimed before I could enjoy the stillness. Einstein, because nothing gold stays.
Her hologram arrived crisp, hair neat despite the hour. Tesla was a corner thumbnail, yawning without remorse.
"Doctor Florence," Einstein said. "Apologies for the hour."
"Don't apologize for punctuality," I said. "What's bleeding now?"
"K-423," Tesla grunted. "Your favorite dead designation woke a few more ghosts. Our Kamchatka mirror picked up an auxiliary chant under the weather telemetry. It's… old. And not."
"Parasitic," Einstein finished. "Riding beneath legacy code, then breathing when the host is quiet."
I kept my face still. "You have a talent for ruining bedtime stories."
"We'll take that as consent to share more," Einstein said. "We've cross-checked the chant with Babylon-era checksums. There is congruence, but the signature isn't Schicksal's alone."
"Another listener," I suggested. "Cautious by habit."
"Precisely."
Tesla leaned in. "We'd like to place a sensor on your C9 line. Purely passive. If the humanitarian lanes are being sniffed, better we all smell the same cologne."
"That'll require threading a needle through our compliance committee," I said. "But if you send a technical spec and swear it doesn't sing, I'll… encourage the vote."
Einstein's eyes warmed a degree. "Thank you."
The call ended. The room, relieved, returned to its heartbeats.
I exhaled and let the mask slip — not the one on my face, but the one that keeps the lines from crossing where they shouldn't. It is a strange thing to talk to people you respect while knowing you are the thing they are circling.
I wasn't offended. It meant the camouflage was working.
In the corner, the newer terminal coughed. A status request from logistics: a convoy captain asking why C9's path now included a minor delay window at a service tunnel with no name.
"Because we're weaving a decoy so well even the fabric believes in it," I told the empty air, and approved the delay with an auto-reply about municipal maintenance.
On the old screen, Weir answered another tug with a sigh so perfectly boring it was art.
The second relay — the true one — remained quiet, but its silence was shaped. Whoever sat on the other end had the patience of a long winter. They would ring again. That was fine. I had always been better at stitching over hours than stabbing in bursts.
A muted knock. My door cracked. Assistant, careful and tired.
"Doctor Schariac? Einstein sent you a short technical brief. And, ah… you asked me to remind you about the St. Petersburg grants. Signatures due by morning."
"Leave them," I said, softer than my thoughts. "And get some sleep."
The door closed. Paper slid into the world like an apology. I glanced at the grants — money transmuted into bandages and fuel and a hundred thousand small mercies. I would sign them before dawn. Mercy was the only thing worth counterfeiting into quantity.
The old terminal ticked once more. A small packet emerged in Weir's throat, swallowed by the municipal heartbeat. Inside the packet: a checksum that implied a crate. Inside the crate: a story that ended in a locked room with nothing at all.
A courtesy.
It would keep our watcher polite.
I let the decoy run and opened a sandboxed pane to chase the other thread — not to pull, just to feel the current around it. North and down, as before. Undersea, under history. A disused listening post gnawing its own wires. Buried trunks left in the grid because ripping them out would make the city forget how to breathe.
"K-423," I said aloud, tasting the number. No magic in the syllables, just weight.
A list of cross-references floated up from earlier: trauma wards, drone manifests, convoy logs. The lattice pointed nowhere and everywhere, which meant someone had swept very well. I had done the same with other sins. I recognized the polish.
The comm chimed again. Not Einstein. Internal.
"Put her through," I said.
An ops supervisor materialized, hair hastily tied, badge blinking. "Doctor, we're seeing micro-spikes on the C9 diagnostics. They resolve as noise but… they pattern more like curiosity."
"I'm aware," I said. "A pump testing its own pressure. I've nudged a buffer in place."
Her shoulders dropped. "I knew you were already awake."
"Terrible habit," I said. "Log the spikes under municipal anomalies. If anyone asks, we blame the recent rains."
"Understood."
She hesitated. "Doctor… do we need to reroute C9?"
"Not yet," I said. "Rerouting frightens donors and excites bureaucrats. We stay boring. Boring saves lives."
She smiled — quick, grateful — and vanished.
I returned to the hum.
On the edge of vision, something else: a tickle in the Anti-Entropy bridge, a transient request pinging a passive sensor I'd never confessed to owning. Our friends had placed their own ear along the line already, faster than their politeness suggested. Good. We all wore masks, but not all masks were lies. Some were just armor for the same heart.
The old terminal flashed a soft amber. A timepiece in the machine telling me my other hands were moving.
A short burst arrived wrapped in a signature I had invented for nights like this — diffuse enough to be deniable, precise enough to be mine when I needed it. It spoke in clean,
professional lines:
— WEIR STABLE. LISTENER TESTED. INTERVALS RECORDED.— REAL RELAY UNPROBED SINCE T+12.— ARCHIVE RETURN YIELDED: "TESTBED: VESSEL STABILITY (REJECTED)."— RECOMMENDATIONS DEPLOYED: STAGGERED OBSERVATION, PHANTOM INVENTORY, TRIPWIRE.— HOLDING FOR NEXT RING.
I didn't smile. The sleeve of my coat warmed anyway, a phantom sensation where luminous markings sometimes pulsed. Muscle memory with nowhere to live.
I typed a reply in the shape of a directive that wasn't a directive, a habit that let me be two people in one room without making a sound.
— ACKNOWLEDGED. PRIORITIZE PATTERN OVER EVENT. IF RING DELAYS, ASSUME OBSERVER IS MEASURING OUR PATIENCE. MAINTAIN BOREDOM.
The old terminal accepted the thought and folded it into the dark.
I took a breath. Then another. The office smelled like paper and metal and the citrus cleaner procurement insisted on because donors liked hospitals to smell like hope.
The main desk pinged with a new mail: a junior analyst in logistics, very proud, had spotted a "possible correlation" between convoy pings and deprecated Schicksal inventories. He asked, politely, if he could escalate.
I read his message twice. He had good instincts. Good instincts get people promoted and killed in equal measure.
I wrote back: Excellent catch. Run your correlation across weather telemetry as a control and include Anti-Entropy's public ocean maps. 48-hour window. We'll review at noon.
Then, quietly, I set an alert to intercept any result that looked too right.
The city shifted. A train sang over steel somewhere out of sight. The old terminal's fan purred like a cat that remembered being a tiger.
I signed five grants in a row, the pen anchoring me to a world that bled for simple reasons. St. Petersburg, Rovaniemi, a clinic near Vladivostok that still called us Rhodes Island Pharmaceuticals on official receipts because they preferred lies in legal fonts.
When the last signature dried, my eyes returned to the old glass.
Weir breathed. The other line did not. But in its not-breathing I could hear the space that would one day hold air, and that was enough.
Einstein's brief arrived with clinical grace: schematics for a passive ear that promised not to sing, equations that tasted honest, a note in the preface: We would prefer to be wrong with you than right without you.
I saved it to a folder with no name.
"K-423," I said again, softer.
There were many ways to build a vessel. Some kept water out. Some kept something else in. Stability was a polite word for survival that people use when they are afraid to look a thing in the face.
I closed the old terminal's lid halfway, like tucking a child under a blanket but leaving enough light for the monsters to believe they were unseen.
On the main desk, I set a noon meeting with logistics and a separate one with compliance, because nothing says "I'm harmless" like paperwork. I greenlit a partial reroute of a single C9 drop two days from now — just enough to keep the stitches from lining up, just enough to remind any watcher that our patterns had healthy arrhythmia.
Then I stood and stretched until my spine remembered I was more bone than wire.
In the glass, my reflection blinked back: silver-blue hair a little unruly, blue eyes a little too awake. The woman in the window looked like a doctor who needed sleep. She was. She also looked like someone listening to a song no one else could hear. She was that, too.
"Next ring," I told her.
She nodded.
When the lights dimmed on their night cycle, the office returned to being a quiet room in a tall building. Below, Weir's heartbeat kept time with a pump that moved water none of us would ever drink. Far north, a cable in the black adjusted to pressure like an old scar testing the weather. Between them, a presence waited with an animal's patience, counting not just seconds but the spaces where seconds might have been.
I gathered the signed grants, set an alert that would vibrate the bone of my wrist without waking the rest of the floor, and finally allowed the chair to claim me for an hour.
Mercy first, I thought as sleep took the edge off my focus.
Curiosity could wait its turn.