The damage was not announced.
There was no alarm, no siren, nor a sudden collapse that could be pointed to as the beginning.
There was only a moment when something worked too well.
Marikka felt it from a distance.
Not a violent vibration, but a wrong continuity. An urban flow that should have oscillated—people, vehicles, signals, surfaces—and instead proceeded smoothly, uniformly, without micro-errors.
Arcanum was executing a global correction.
"It's not here," she wrote, still sitting against the wall, before Cedric could say anything.
She nodded upward, toward the upper districts. There.
Aurelian stiffened. "It's a compensation."
The term was precise. Terrible.
When a system is locally frozen, the load shifts.
Serian reacted with a faint, almost absent pulse. He wasn't getting worse. He was... not participating. Like a note excluded from a chord to keep it stable.
Cedric stood up abruptly. "What kind of compensation?"
Marikka didn't answer immediately. The vibrations now arrived with a constant delay, as if they had to pass through a denser medium. She chose carefully what to read.
Then she wrote a single word:
URBAN.
The Lower Steps district had not been evacuated.
There hadn had been no time.
And above all, there had been no need, according to the parameters.
People were still moving when they arrived. Walking, talking, working. Everything seemed normal until Marikka leaned her hand on the stone railing that gave the place its name.
The vibration was perfect.
Too much so.
"Here," she wrote. "Nothing goes wrong here."
Cedric looked around. "And should it?"
Aurelian nodded slowly. "Yes."
A healthy system has friction.
A system that doesn't err is hiding something.
Marikka took a few steps forward. Every surface responded with the same stable frequency, as if the entire district had been rewritten to hold up.
And then she felt it.
A void.
Not under her feet.
Among the people.
A woman was standing still in the center of the staircase, a metal basket clutched to her chest. She wasn't crying. She wasn't screaming. She was looking at her hands as if they were performing a gesture that no longer had meaning.
Marikka approached slowly. The world around her continued to function, impeccably.
The woman spoke, but Marikka caught the words only halfway. Too late.
"...I keep doing this," she was saying. "But I don't remember what comes next."
Cedric swallowed. "What does that mean?"
Marikka rested her fingers on the step next to the woman.
The stone responded with a neutral vibration. Local cancellation.
She wrote, her hand trembling:
SHE HAS BEEN SIMPLIFIED.
Aurelian closed his eyes. "They removed a bifurcation."
"A what?" Cedric asked.
"A possibility," Aurelian replied.
The system had made the district more stable by removing what introduced variability. Not people. Not buildings.
Passages.
The woman looked up at Marikka. "You..."
She paused. The name did not come.
Marikka felt the blow with a delay that hurt her. That void, that simplification, was the price of the suspension.
Isaak had isolated the error.
The world had paid elsewhere.
A child stumbled two steps down. He fell, got up immediately. Nothing serious. But the gesture was identical to the one another child had made shortly before. And another one before that.
Repetition.
"This place—" Cedric began.
"—can no longer deviate," Aurelian concluded. "It has become a corridor."
Marikka felt the anger become sharper. Not explosive. Directional.
She wrote:
IT IS NOT AN ACCIDENT.
A man in a civic uniform was talking to a group of residents nearby. His voice was calm, reassuring.
"A flow anomaly," he was saying. "Already resolved."
Marikka moved close enough to lean her hand on the metal post beside him.
The vibration told another story.
Internal attribution completed.
Cause: Unidentified interference.
She wrote, quickly:
THEY HAVE GIVEN IT A NAME.
Aurelian looked at her. "Not yet."
Marikka shook her head. Almost.
The system needed a coherent cause. And now that the error had been contained, it could afford to explain it.
The woman with the basket sat down slowly on the steps. The pose was wrong, as if her body were following an incomplete instruction.
Marikka knelt down in front of her. She placed her hand on the stone between them.
For an instant, she forced the reading.
The pain arrived immediately. A dry blade behind her eyes. But she saw enough.
A memory that should have chosen between two paths... and no longer had the option. A gesture that no longer led to anything.
Marikka withdrew her hand, gasping.
Cedric supported her. "Hey—"
She wrote, with difficulty:
THIS IS OUR FAULT.
Aurelian shook his head slowly. "No."
A pause.
"It's the fault of a system that decided that the error was less costly than the complexity."
The civic voice continued to speak. The crowd was dispersing, reassured.
The damage remained.
Marikka watched the Lower Steps district functioning too well.
She then understood what Isaak had done, unintentionally.
He had demonstrated that suspension does not protect.
It only shifts the cost onto those who cannot defend themselves.
She wrote the final sentence in the notebook, with a clarity that frightened her:
IF THE ERROR GROWS, IT GROWS HERE.
Aurelian read it. He turned pale.
Cedric looked at the stairs, the woman, the child repeating the same gesture.
"Then..." he said softly. "We cannot stop."
Marikka closed the notebook.
The city had already paid a first time.
And when the damage becomes public,
there is nowhere left to hide it.