"Behave," she said, but she didn't mean it harshly. His jokes put a cloth over sharp edges without dulling them; she could admit to herself that sometimes she liked it.
Two skeletons at the back adjusted their grips on the litter frame together. The soft wood creak and the low hum of the Choir braided into something that felt like a normal morning in a city that didn't exist.
Rodion worked. He didn't wiggle. He didn't hum. He just made a neat little flood of calibration grids and test swatches slide across the box feeds. One screen showed a grayscale ant leg; next to it a small color bar—red, green, blue—moved like a ruler and then snapped into place as if it had found home.
Little circles traced the edges of light sources in each feed: glowcaps, shards of crystal, a worker carrying a bead of fungus jelly. Rodion marked each with a ring, then dialed a slider. The rings stopped flaring.
