"Good evening. We begin with developing stories from District Seven, where witnesses reported an 'earthquake that only hit one block' and 'air that tasted like batteries.'
City Defense confirms a contained infrastructure incident. Unconfirmed footage appears to show a red-lit object levitating inside a subterranean lab. Officials declined to comment, citing security.
If you were in the area and experienced dizziness or ringing in your ears, the Department of Public Wellness recommends hydration and rest.
In unrelated news—"
[anchor smiles like someone just slid a gun under the desk]
"—we're told a civilian rescued multiple bystanders before authorities arrived. That civilian has not been identified."
[Cut to phone video, vertical, breathless]
> "I'm telling you, the window bowed, like, inward, and the guy just—he was holding nothing and then it was like the nothing was holding him and—
No, I'm not drunk, Mom."
[Clip ends.]
---
[Private Channel — SAH Unit Internal Chat: #ops-debrief-7]
ITO: We'll do a proper AAR on paper. For now, two lines: Harrower extruded and disengaged on command. Subject issued said command.
SATO: Heard it like a pressure drop. Same as the first one.
REY: Kneel. It knelt. Are we pretending we didn't see that or do I sign some form where I agree I didn't see it?
ITO: You saw it. Don't post about it. Drinking water is not a security clearance but do it anyway.
KWAN: I require a larger lab, more power, and a bucket of high-resolution lies for Command. Also the subject's blood. A lot of it, if he has extra.
ITO: Denied. Denied. …Table the third one.
REY: Ma'am, does he have a last name?
ITO: He has a name. Don't strip it down to make it easier to move.
SATO: Seconding that.
KWAN: I would just like to point out you all are sentimentally anthropomorphizing a resonant interface.
REY: I would just like to point out you say that like you're not making it worse.
ITO: Thread muted until we're upstairs. Command wants him moved to Central. We have ten minutes before the elevator arrives with a smile.
---
[Excerpt — District Seven Neighborhood Network, Public Forum: "WHAT JUST HAPPENED??"]
LoafOfWar: wall wobbled like jelly, then two vans showed up and a woman with a bob told the street to behave. I obeyed
breakfastruin: 6/10 earthquake. points for taste (copper) and theme (apocalypse) but too short
puddinglevel: my dog is still hiding in my shower and i'm making bad decisions about snacks. if this is the end please bury me with the snacks
argonautica: i saw a guy in an unbranded coat go down the service stairwell two steps at a time carrying a case he could barely lift. I don't need to be a writer to tell you that's a foreshadowing
modnote: this thread is for neighborhood safety info, not fanfic. also please stop posting the video of the window "breathing." it's already down twice, it will go down a third time, we live in a society
---
[Audio Log — City Defense, Observation Suite C, transcript auto-generated, edited for clarity]
KOMMANDER HALE: Ito. Explain why I'm reading that you opened a hatch during a deviation.
LIEUTENANT ITO: Because closing it got us to forty percent. Opening it ended in zero mouths in my building.
HALE: You disobeyed Central.
ITO: I prioritized geometry and outcomes.
HALE: You gambled with a civilian.
ITO: He gambled with us. I picked the table where everyone could get up afterward.
[Pause.]
HALE: Does the thing recognize him?
ITO: Recognition isn't the word. Alignment is closer. It didn't obey him because it likes his face. It obeyed because he pointed the shortest line.
HALE: And you believe he can do it again?
ITO: I believe he'll try if I ask and that is a resource that gets people killed if I don't spend it carefully.
HALE: Central still wants him.
ITO: Central can wait until he can stand.
---
[POV: THE MAN IN THE GLASS OFFICE]
He watched the clips twice: the pane flexing like a lung; the boy's face when the thing kneeled; the woman with the bob making space with her voice.
He muted the sound the third time and watched lips.
The boy said go. You could read it as any word with one vowel. You had to want 'go' to see it. He wanted it. He wanted a lot of things he never put on paper.
On his desk, six windows showed six versions of the story—District Seven's news, the neighborhood forum, a blurred drone feed someone was supposed to have erased, an internal memo from an Institute director who had thrown their last scruple into the sea at dawn and come to work lighter, a budget spreadsheet that insisted the city could not afford another incident, and a draft speech labeled PATHWAYS TO COOPERATION.
The speech said the city was safe, the institutions were strong, and anomalies were rare and well-managed. He almost smiled. He admired fiction when it sold.
On the glass, the sky tried to be evening and failed. The world was redder than it should be. That color had a way of sticking.
"Sir?" his assistant asked from the doorway. "Central has an escort on the way to take custody of—" she glanced at her tablet "—Subject Ryo."
"'Subject,'" he repeated, the word like lemon in a cut. "Lieutenant Ito?"
"Stalling. Politely."
He considered the map of District Seven until the streets rearranged in his head into something that made more sense—lines, angles, angles that bent where they should not, a new corridor through concrete that shouldn't exist but intended to.
He had once, when he was a student, loved the way geometry gave clean answers to ugly questions. He had then learned what power did to answers.
"Let her stall," he said. "Have Central slow-walk the elevator permissions for safety review, order a bolted check on the counterweight, anything plausible. Meanwhile, schedule a meeting in the small room, no cameras."
"Tonight?"
"Now."
"And Subject Ryo?"
The man in the glass office rubbed a thumb where a ring used to be. "We give him water," he said. "And a choice he'll think he made."
---
[POV: MARA]
They put Ryo in Recovery Three. She hated the name. There was nothing about this room that invited recovery. Everything was the color of hospitals on television meant to reassure viewers who'd never been inside a real one. Sato stood outside the glass, a squared figure in the corner who made his shape into an answer to danger. Rey sat cross-legged on a stool with his tablet balanced on one knee, writing a report he'd later have to edit four times to remove the feelings.
Ryo slept like someone who had fought a building and negotiated a treaty with a monster. Kwan had argued to draw blood; Mara had said no, then yes, then yes only with Ryo awake and consented, then no again when the lights dimmed without anyone telling them to.
"Do you name your bed, too?" she asked the room, deadpan, when the hvac sighed in a way she recognized from people.
If any god lived in the wiring, it was the petty kind concerned with thermostats and occasionally the fate of cities. It did not answer.
She clicked the glass to privacy and let the fog roll over it. Sometimes leadership was about doors. Sometimes it was about letting people think a door was closed so they could take their first good breath in hours.
She watched the boy sleep. The cut on her cheek itched, and the itch was honest work, so she let it.
She thought of the word the thing had used—kin—and she put it in her pocket like a stone. If you carried a heavy word, you either built muscle or you limped. She had practice with both.
Her earpiece buzzed. Hale. Her mouth tightened. "Ito."
"Elevator's late," Hale said, bland. "Engineering loves safety."
"Bless them," Mara said, unblessed. "What does Central want from me that they didn't want an hour ago?"
"Optics," Hale said. "And something resembling a plan."
"I have a plan," she said. "It starts with not lying to the boy when he wakes up."
"Can you afford that?"
"Can we?" she asked back.
Neither of them said what they both knew: if she lied and he felt it, he would go to someone who lied better.
"Bring him up to Meeting B when he can walk," Hale said. "Small room. No press. The Institute will send a representative."
"Kwan already counts as two," Mara said. "Who else?"
"Someone from Procurement," Hale said, tone wry. "When the world breaks, budget shows up."
Mara looked at the sleeping boy and thought about how much everything costs.
---
[POV: KWAN]
He wasn't supposed to be this happy, not in a professional capacity, not with a harrower nearly making a mouth and a building remembering it had bones, but wonder had rules and one of them was that it didn't check if your paperwork was filed.
The component — the pin if you were a poet, the bone-crystal vector key if you were the kind of person who wanted tenure — floated an exact two centimeters in its chamber and argued with gravity like a couple who would never actually divorce. The sensors lied, then admitted it, then lied more precisely. The hum was not sonic, not electromagnetic, but if it wasn't, then what was it? He didn't have the instruments and he didn't have the language and he wanted both like thirst.
He had put his face too close to the observation glass and the glass had put a memory into him: the boy's hand, the way the thing had risen toward it not like a tool to a user but like a word to a mouth.
"Tell me what you are," Kwan told the chamber. "Tell me and I'll spend the rest of my life saying it back correctly."
The chamber said nothing. It had been promised silence.
Kwan's tablet vibrated. Meeting B. He groaned. Meetings were where you put truth so it could tire itself out without hurting anyone.
He glanced once more at the hovering miracle. Its red edged brighter, the way an idea looks brighter when someone you respect understands it.
Kwan smiled and ran to be late.
---
[POV: RANDOM CITY — 2:13 AM, A BATHROOM FLOOR, A TILE WITH A CRACK LIKE A RIVER]
She didn't sleep well before anomalies; now she didn't sleep at all. The tinnitus never left after the first time her block tasted iron in the air. The city posted tips about mind hygiene like washing your hands would keep shapes out of your skull.
Her brother sent her a text that said u ok? with the question mark like a hand extended from far away.
She typed yeah and then yeah again because the first one didn't look convincing.
She had seen a video. She had seen a boy. He had been holding something you couldn't film. He had been standing the way you stand when you are the fulcrum and the world forgot to be a lever. She put her phone down and threw up in the sink. Fear was a weather; it burned off eventually. On her floor, dawn never quite arrived, but the light tried.
When she could stand, she brushed her teeth until mint erased copper and told herself she would be okay. The city taught you to narrate your own survival like you were writing it into existence.
She saved the video before it vanished.
---
[POV: RYO]
When I surface, the room pretends it's been here all my life. Ceiling. Lights. A chair that thinks its job is noble. The immediate neighborhood of my sternum hums like a mosquito that has learned self-control.
I do not move. I do the inventory Mara taught me without meaning to: hands, feet, name.
"Ryo," I say out loud, to prevent losing my place in the book that is my head.
The hum approves. The red isn't a color; it's a decision I remember making.
The door opens. Not dramatically—competently. Mara enters with two cups. Her cheek is a clean slash with no apology in it. Sato posts up outside like a habit. Rey follows, then pretends he didn't.
"Water," Mara says. "Electrolytes."
I drink both. The second one tastes like someone powdered a traffic cone and told it to be cherry. It helps.
"How long?" I ask.
"Three hours," she says.
"Did you lie to me while I slept?" I ask, because the question is simpler than all the others.
"I thought about it," she says. "I decided not to."
In my chest, something sits down in a chair that faces her and folds its hands.
"They want you upstairs," she says. "The people who have meetings about where the money goes. And the people who have meetings about which stories we tell when the world tries to be a different shape."
"Do I get a lawyer?" I ask, serious.
"You get me," she says. "Which is worse for them and better for you."
Rey coughs into his knuckle. Sato doesn't smile, but the air near him does.
"What do they want?" I ask.
"To own the part of you that owned the thing that knelt," Mara says. The sentence is a clean cut. "And to pretend that's the same as keeping everyone safe."
"What do you want?" I ask.
"Alive," she says, like the answer is a coin and she doesn't like the other side. "And to see if you can do what you did again without paying a price you can't afford."
"The price was a memory," I say. "I don't know which one I'll give up next."
"Then we make it not worth the trade unless we choose it," she says. "Can you walk?"
I stand. The room helps. It tries to do it politely. I let it.
The hallway to the meeting room has too many cameras and the wrong amount of air. The lines in my head, the ones that show me the shortest path, sketch routes I could take if I wanted to leave. They are accurate and uninteresting. Going is easy. Staying is a choice.
Outside the door, Sato stops. "Sir," he says to me, using a word that doesn't belong to me and makes everyone uncomfortable. He clears his throat. "Don't shake hands with anyone in there."
"Is that a security protocol?" I ask.
"It's a church protocol," Rey mutters, then pretends he didn't say it.
Mara touches the panel, and the door agrees to be a door. We enter.
---
[Meeting B — Small Room, No Cameras, Eight Chairs That Think They Know Who Sits In Them]
There are four of them already inside.
Hale, who always looks like a man who gave up on sleep as a hobby. Kwan, vibrating at a frequency only dogs and disasters hear. A woman whose suit costs more than my old life and who wears her smile like a budget line item: controllable. And a man with a neutral tie and a face like a watermark—there, but only if you tilt the page the right way.
"Ryo," Hale says, as if he's known me since childhood. "Thank you for coming."
"As if I had a choice," I say, not unkindly. I sit where Mara stands behind my chair like gravity with teeth.
"Let me introduce—" Hale begins.
"Procurement," the woman says, not extending a hand. She has a name. She doesn't give it. "We handle… resources."
"Legal," says the watermark. No name either. His voice does not attach to any impression in your memory; if you tried to describe it later, you would say voice-like.
"Doctor Kwan," Kwan says, like you could forget.
Hale steeples his fingers because that's what men like him do when they want you to believe they are capable of tents. "You can do something we can't," he says to me. "Something we need."
"You don't know what I can do," I say.
"True," Hale says, and earns points for the word. "But we know what happened and we know who didn't die because you were there. We would like to formalize that."
Mara's weight behind me shifts. Not warning—reminder.
"What does 'formalize' cost?" I ask.
Procurement smiles. "Support," she says, meaning ownership. "Stability," she says, meaning surveillance. "Resources," she says, meaning resourcing but also leashes.
Legal adds nothing. Silence is cheaper.
Kwan leans forward until his curiosity has to tilt its chin up to stay in his throat. "If you'll permit guided exposure," he says, "we can map the vector field with you present and determine resonant thresholds. You could choose when to engage and when to hold. With training, you could—"
His words blur past a place in me that is tired of people saying could.
"What if I say no?" I ask.
Hale nods like he rehearsed only this part. "Then we ask you to leave and to keep your distance from any active sites. We will try to prevent the city from dying without you. We will probably fail more than we would have with you. That is not a threat. It is a line on a graph." He folds his fingers. "But I will still ask you to say yes."
Mara doesn't touch me, but the air does. I imagine her face behind me: tired, cut, stubborn.
"What do I get if I say yes?" I ask.
Procurement opens her mouth. Mara beats her to it. "A room that isn't a cell," she says. "Training that doesn't treat you like a trap. A say."
"And a salary," Procurement says, sweet as poison. "We're not monsters."
The word puts the harrower in the room like a shadow you notice at the edge of a mirror. It knelt. It would kneel again. The fact climbs onto the table and sits there, legs swinging.
If I close my eyes, I see the not-place, the map with its bright scars and its mountain calling kin. My name lives like a rock in the current. If I pick up the component again, another memory will float away, waving politely.
I think of apples and chlorine and the way that empty space in my chest makes room for choices.
"Terms," I say. "I pick when I engage. I pick which memories are acceptable prices. If I say stop, you stop. If you lie, I leave."
Hale considers. Procurement considers how to write lie into a policy. Legal considers the color beige.
Mara's voice is a knife she keeps sharp so she never has to use it. "And he keeps his name," she says.
"That one is free," I tell her. "I'm holding it."
Kwan looks like he wants to say kin and name in the same sentence and bind them with math. He doesn't.
Hale nods once. "Agreed, with caveats I can live with," he says. "There's one more piece. We want to put you on the periphery when we approach a dormant site outside the city. Low risk. Observation, not engagement. If anything changes, you will be here"—he taps here in the air—"behind three doors."
"Where?" I ask.
"An old subway curvature near the river," Hale says. "We've had… readings. Faint. Think of it as a controlled walk to the edge of a cliff while we hold your belt."
"Who else knows?" Mara asks.
"Us," Hale says. "And anyone who can do subtraction inside Central. Choose your team."
Mara doesn't ask me if I want to. She looks at Sato. She looks at Rey. She knows they will say yes and so do they and so do I.
Legal clears his throat into a decibel no one will remember. "There's a signature page."
"Throw it away," Mara says. "He said yes."
"I didn't," I say.
Silence ripples. Hale smiles, small, real. "Then say it."
I think about whether saying yes is the same as opening something.
I say it anyway.
"Yes."
Kwan exhales like a worshipper. Procurement types like a pest control company about to get a contract. Legal's watermark face enjoys how much paper can do to a human shape.
Mara speaks last. "We leave at dawn," she says. "He sleeps first. If anyone moves him without telling me, I will make sure the next doors you open are the wrong ones."
Hale lifts his hands. "Lieutenant," he says. The word means please remain a problem but one I am allowed to have.
The meeting ends the way good ones do: not with relief, but with a job. We stand. The room forgets we were here.
Outside, Rey bounces once on his heels. "Field trip," he says and then, reading the air, adds, "Quiet field trip."
Sato grunts, which means I will bring extra of everything.
We walk back down the hall. The lines in my head redraw themselves to include a place by a river and a cliff with a belt.
The building hums underfoot, annoyed and proud and not finished.
When we reach the recovery room, Mara pauses with her hand on the panel. "When we go out there," she says, "do not try to impress anyone. Especially yourself."
"I rarely manage to," I say.
Her mouth does a thing it only does when she's too tired to prevent it. "Good," she says. "Stay bad at it."
I lie down because she asked and because tomorrow is a cliff. The ceiling stares back the way ceilings do when they have seen people bleed and people laugh and all of it looks the same from up there.
I close my eyes and practice keeping my name weighted in my mouth.
The hum under my sternum mirrors me.
And somewhere else, at the edge of the city, under the river, among the bones of a subway that never learned to be born, something brightens by a fraction. Not yet a mouth. Something like the idea of one.
It feels me feeling it.
I say my name again.
It waits.