Mira Han didn't sit.
She stayed standing at the foot of Haneul's bed, like a teacher watching two students she wasn't sure she trusted.
Kael hated it.
"Tower Research Institute," he said. "That's… official?"
"Official enough to get this machine on loan," she replied, nodding toward the soul scanner in the corner. "Not official enough to have budget for decent coffee."
Haneul snorted.
"Relatable."
Mira flicked her wrist. The holo-slate image above the bed shifted—now a simplified diagram of a Tower, its floors stacked like a translucent spine. Small red markers blinked here and there.
"These," she said, "are documented anomaly clusters. Places where the System's behavior diverges from its own declared rules. We spend most of our time around them, trying to keep them from becoming mass casualty events."
"Doing great so far," Kael said. "Floor glitches, unsynced patches, invisible hitboxes…"
Mira's gaze sharpened.
"You've noticed," she said.
"I'm an Analyst," Kael said evenly. "Not a good one. But I pay attention when the thing running our lives stutters."
"Do you notice more than other people?" she asked.
Careful, he thought.
"I notice enough to survive Seventeen's first floors," he said. "Most days."
She watched him for a beat longer, then turned back to the shard projection.
"This," she said, tapping it, "is a different category. Not a bug. A… surgery. Someone cut into the System's root and smeared bits of it into human souls, then left no manual."
"That sounds irresponsible," Haneul said.
"Welcome to Towers," Mira replied dryly.
Doctor Cho hovered near the door, obviously feeling out of his depth but unwilling to leave.
"What do you actually know about these shards?" Kael asked. "Not theory. Data."
Mira considered him.
"Less than I'd like," she said. "More than most. We have records of a handful of cases. People whose soul scans showed similar signatures—Root-adjacent fragments, unusual instability. They tended to be…"
She paused, searching for a word.
"Bad at staying in their lane," she settled on. "The System behaved strangely around them. Quest rewards skewed. Monster behavior off. One of them walked into a D-rank gate and walked out with three S-rank guild offers and a cult trying to crown them."
"Alive?" Haneul asked.
"Last we checked," Mira said. "But not… well."
Kael felt his jaw tighten.
"And your job when you find someone like that?" he asked. "Tag them and hand them off? Contain them? Study them until something breaks?"
"Depends," Mira said. "On whether they're more likely to stabilize things or destabilize them. The System is already creaking. The wrong shard host pushing in the wrong direction could crack it worse. The right one might keep people alive."
"Neutral, pragmatic," Haneul murmured. "I give that speech a six out of ten."
Mira's mouth quirked.
"I'm not here to drag either of you into a lab," she said. "I don't have that authority. And even if I did, the System already marked your profiles 'high noise – do not propagate.' If I push too hard, it'll start lying to me."
Kael pretended to be hearing that for the first time.
"'Do not propagate'?" he repeated.
"A strange label," Mira said. "Usually reserved for data it doesn't trust itself with. Things that would break too much if they got duplicated."
Her eyes met his.
"You wouldn't happen to know why the System considers you… noisy?" she asked.
Time to lie.
"Because we're statistical freaks," Kael said lightly. "One of us got saddled with permanent low HP, the other got mystery soul syndrome. Maybe the System flags us as outliers so we don't mess up its pretty graphs."
"Cute," Mira said. "But I suspect there's more."
Her gaze dropped to Haneul's chart.
"The shard in you," she said, "is anchored to something labeled 'Core Intent Routine.' If that means what I think it does, you're sitting on a piece of whatever passed for the System's conscience. Or its mission statement."
Haneul shifted, suddenly uncomfortable.
"That's a lot of pressure for somebody who can't climb stairs," she said.
"We don't know if it's functional," Mira said. "Right now it looks dormant. But even dormant, it's destabilizing your bio-arcane systems. Your body is trying to reconcile two different sets of rules."
"And losing," Haneul said.
"For now," Mira replied.
Kael forced himself to breathe slowly.
"What do you want?" he asked again.
Mira didn't flinch.
"To keep you both out of the wrong hands," she said. "To learn enough that if this shard wakes up, it doesn't take half a city with it. And—if possible—to leverage whatever you are into making Tower runs less murderous."
"You're very casual about admitting you want to use us," Haneul said.
"I didn't say it would be free," Mira said. "If I help hide you and keep the cults and corps off your back, I expect cooperation."
Kael lifted his chin.
"What kind of cooperation?" he said. "You want me to run mazes? Let your machines poke holes in my head? Fill out surveys about my favorite loot drops?"
Mira studied him.
"You've never stepped onto a sealed floor," she said. "Right?"
"What's a sealed floor?" he countered.
"A Tower layer that's been walled off," she said. "Too unstable. Too weird. Officially marked as collapsed, but actually quarantined. We monitor some of them for emergent patterns. One of them just started spitting out log fragments mentioning 'ADMIN_0' and 'FRAGMENT HOST.'"
Kael's pulse ticked up.
"And you want us to… go in," he said.
"Eventually," Mira said. "Very carefully. With support. I am not in the habit of throwing glitch-marked civilians into sealed anomalies with a pat on the back."
Doctor Cho made a strangled noise.
"Is that really necessary?" he asked. "They're my patients, not… not test subjects."
Mira's expression cooled.
"Right now, doctor, they are walking around with a piece of the System's dead brain embedded in one and tethered to the other," she said. "If that 'brain' decides to wake up with its original priorities intact, it might decide cities are acceptable losses for 'stability.' I would prefer to have at least one shard-host on our side before that happens."
Haneul raised her hand weakly.
"Hi," she said. "Theoretically on your side. Also theoretically very squishy."
Mira looked at her.
"You're the one I'm most worried about," she said. "Your shard's anchor is exactly the sort of thing zealots dream of controlling."
She let that hang in the air.
Kael wanted to argue, to tell her they'd handle it themselves. That he didn't trust any institution with the words "Tower" and "Research" in its name.
Then he thought about cults.
The ones that camped outside Tower plazas, chanting about "ascending into pure code" or "returning to Source." The ones that attacked hospital convoys, hoping to kidnap half-dead Hunters for sacrifice. The ones that would absolutely disassemble his sister for scrap if they thought it would put them closer to their imaginary god.
"How many groups are we talking about?" he asked, voice low.
Mira didn't sugarcoat.
"Half a dozen major cults with enough funding to buy mid-tier guilds," she said. "Two megacorps with Tower-adjacent research wings who would love exclusive access to a Root shard. A handful of black-budget state programs. And the System itself, which doesn't like unknowns."
Haneul whistled softly.
"So… all of them," she said.
"Pretty much," Mira said.
Kael rubbed his temples.
"You said the System denied your metadata request," he said. "Called us 'high noise' and refused to propagate our data. That… buys us time, right?"
"Some," Mira said. "It means you don't show up cleanly in standard reports. But anyone with a soul scanner and the right licenses could still see the shard. That's why I told Cho to keep outside requests away."
Cho nodded, looking queasy.
"I've already had two inquiries," he admitted. "One from Pan-Tower Holdings offering free 'advanced care' if we sign over data rights, and one from a… religious charity I've never heard of."
"Burn the charity's pamphlet," Mira said. "And if Pan-Tower calls again, you tell them the patient's condition has stabilized and we no longer require external consultation."
Cho swallowed.
"And if they push?" he asked.
Mira's eyes were very flat.
"Then you let me know," she said. "I can leak an inspection request to a regulatory board they don't like."
Kael exhaled slowly.
"Say we agree to… limited cooperation," he said. "What happens next?"
"Next?" Mira said. "We test. Carefully. On something small. And we see if the shard in your sister is really dormant."
Haneul paled.
"You want to poke it," she said.
"I want to see if it can poke back," Mira corrected.
Kael's shoulders tightened.
"No," he said. "Not yet."
Mira arched a brow.
"You'd prefer to wait until it wakes on its own?" she asked. "Perhaps during a soul scan you don't control?"
"I'd prefer to wait until I know more about what 'redefine worth' actually means," he snapped. "I've seen enough of the System's idea of acceptable sacrifice. I'm not letting that logic boot up in her head by accident."
Mira studied him.
"You've seen logs," she said slowly.
He froze.
Haneul jumped in.
"Everyone's seen logs," she said quickly. "System bug reports. Error codes. That soul scanner was practically spitting debug text."
"Not the same thing," Mira said, eyes never leaving Kael's face.
He forced his expression blank.
"I've spent years watching Tower runs and reading every scraped System message I can find," he said. "Analyst class, remember? My idea of fun is spreadsheets."
Mira let the silence stretch.
Then she nodded, once.
"Regardless," she said, "you're right to be cautious. We'll start with observation only. I want to monitor Haneul's shard during low-level System interactions and see if it reacts at all."
"Like… tutorial quests?" Haneul asked.
"Or carting around a status effect," Mira said. "Anything non-lethal. No direct activation attempts. For now."
Kael unclenched his hands.
"That, I can live with," he said.
Mira inclined her head.
"Good," she said. "Then I suggest we begin with something simple. A vending Node. Or a low-tier Tower kiosk. Somewhere the System assigns trivial 'worth' all the time."
Haneul muttered, "You two and your vend-o-cults…"
Mira actually smiled.
"You'd be surprised how much philosophy is baked into snack pricing," she said.
Kael sighed.
"Fine," he said. "We run a test. Somewhere I can control the flags. And if anything feels wrong, we stop."
"You can control the—" Mira began, then stopped herself. "Of course. Analyst."
He met her gaze, unblinking.
"Analyst," he agreed.
For the first time, he wondered who exactly was lying to whom more.