He woke up in a city that ran on schedules and good engineering.
No gunfire. No smoke. Just the low hum of transit lines and the steady blink of maintenance lights. The ceiling above him was opaque glass with a few hairline cracks. A status strip along the wall pulsed a calm green: BUILDING SYSTEMS NORMAL.
He sat up on the cot. New body, same brain. Taller. Healthier. No old back ache. No scar on the knee. He took inventory like a mechanic.
"Okay," he told the empty room. "New start. Don't be an idiot."
He found a locker, found clothes that fit, and found a passcard whose chip blinked when it touched his skin. The name on the pass was blank. The system still let him through the door.
Outside: Haven City. Not a utopia—he could hear the hiss of steam valves that needed new seals and the rattle of an older tram motor—but everything worked. Towers wore terraces. Sidewalks recycled rainwater into channels that fed pocket parks. Drones handled deliveries without crowding people. The sky had a traffic pattern that stayed inside its lane.
He needed a paycheck and a place not to be noticed. He took the first job that fit: night maintenance at a district utility spine. Filters. Pumps. Ion exchangers. Names he could hold.
He told himself it was temporary. Then he told himself to shut up and do the work.
—
Three months later, the routine had sunk its teeth in and he didn't mind.
He clocked in at 18:00. He took the elevator down into Level -3, scanned the console, pulled work orders. The spine served eighteen mid-rise residential blocks and three small clinics. If the filters failed, people couldn't shower or drink without boiling. If the ion columns went offline, the chillers ran hot and buildings sweated. The whole place was both boring and critical. Perfect.
He wore a headset. He talked to himself because it kept him from overthinking.
"Column A4 delta pressure five percent high," he said, voice low, as he stepped out onto the mesh walkway. "Probably buildup." He looked over the guardrail. Two levels down, coolant lines ran like veins. He could feel the system in his hands and in the back of his teeth. That was new since he'd woken up here.
Don't use it, he reminded himself. Do it the regular way first.
He pulled the housing, slid the filter cartridge out, checked the gauge. The cartridge was half-choked with gray paste—microparticles plus this week's pollen. He swapped it for a fresh one, sealed the housing, bled the line, watched the gauges settle.
"Better," he said. "See? Wrenches work."
The headset clicked. A dispatcher's voice came through, clean and bored. "Spine Ops to Night Two. You're on A4?"
"Yeah."
"Good. Flagging a nuisance alarm on B7, sensor drift. After that, swing past the heat exchangers on C-level—someone complained their showers ran lukewarm."
He marked the tasks on his handset. "Copy."
He liked the work because it had edges. A job started. A job finished. People got clean water and hot showers. Nobody asked him to stand in a spotlight, fire a weapon, or give a speech. He could show up, fix things, and go home.
He took a left, jogged a flight of grated stairs, and stopped in front of B7. The status diode blinked yellow.
"Nuisance alarm my ass," he said. The pressure tracing jittered. "Okay, buddy. Tell me what's wrong."
His hands warmed without touching anything. That wasn't temperature; that was the other thing—the thing he didn't like naming. He ignored it and tightened a coupling. The tracing smoothed out for a second and then jittered again.
"Fine," he muttered. "Half-measure won't cut it."
He closed his eyes, just for a breath, and put his palm an inch from the housing. He didn't push. He listened. The flow wasn't laminar; it was catching at a hairline defect in the cartridge's inner mesh. The defect wasn't on spec. Someone shipped a bad run to the city or a technician rushed a QC check.
He opened his eyes and did it the normal way anyway: shutoff, relieve pressure, pull cartridge, verify defect, replace, restart, confirm. The alarm cleared. He logged the lot number. No magic in the paperwork.
He moved on, humming under his breath just to occupy that part of his brain that wanted bigger problems.
Don't get comfortable, the cautious part of him said. This is borrowed quiet.
Shut up, he told it. Let me have one normal shift.
—
The name he used was Eiden Vale. It came easy now.
He rented a small unit three stops from the spine. Bed by the window. Shelf with the four books he'd bought since waking up here. Two plants he tried not to kill. He cooked. He ate. He slept. He kept his head down.
Haven had military forces—the Aegis Union Defense. Everyone knew the name. Bands of navy blue on helmets and shoulder plates. Clean insignia. Their public feeds showed rescue drills, logistics runs, wildfire response. The city wasn't at war, but Aegis trained like they were allergic to surprise.
He watched those feeds sometimes after shift. Not for the gear. For the faces. For her, if he was honest.
Commander Sera Lin didn't need introductions. Media liked her. Aegis put her on panels when they needed credibility without swagger. Calm voice. Direct answers. No slogans. "We serve the city," she'd say, and then she'd explain what "serve" meant in simple steps that sounded like work orders.
He'd never met her.
He didn't plan to.
—
The incident came on a Wednesday. Mid-shift. No special weather. The city clock ticked along like a metronome.
Eiden was under a manifold with a flashlight in his teeth when the spine's main board croaked.
The croak wasn't dramatic. It was a single deep beep and a red text strip: TIDELOCK SYNC WARNING — WESTERN RING.
He spat the flashlight into his hand. "Nope. Not my lane."
The tidelocks weren't his problem. They were city-scale systems at the water's edge, huge rings that rotated to coordinate with tides and storm pulses. He touched them only when their power draw spiked the spine's supply. That happened maybe twice a year.
He clicked his headset. "Ops, Night Two."
"Go."
"I'm seeing a tidelock sync warning on my board. Is that a broadcast?"
"Yes," Dispatch said. "We're receiving it across five spines. Citywide notice. Resonance Corps is already on it."
"Copy," he said, mostly to himself. Resonance Corps: the engineers who kept the city's big systems in tune—locks, shield lattice, transit harmonics. Smart people with a console wall and a lot of alerts.
He stared at the red strip. The back of his teeth buzzed.
Don't, he thought. It's not your problem. Finish the manifold. Log the nuisance. Check C-level showers.
He turned back to the job. He tightened the last bolt, marked the work order complete, stood, and froze.
He could feel it now, low and weird, like a bicycle wheel with one bent spoke. The city's hum had a wobble. Not dangerous, not yet. But if the wobble hit the wrong resonant frequency, the locks would compensate hard, exchange more energy with the grid, and the district would brown out. Clinics. Night shift wards. People trying to sleep before a morning shift.
He closed his eyes again. "You're a maintenance tech," he told himself. "You're not on the locks team. You don't get to touch that."
The wobble ran through his bones like someone tapping a tuning fork against them.
"Damn it."
He put his palm flat on the panel. He didn't push. He tuned. Small, careful. He nudged the local phase on Spine Four's distribution waveform by a fraction, just enough to make the ring's compensation curve—at least the part it pulled from this spine—land a degree off the problem peak. It was a trick, not a fix. The lock would still need a real adjustment at the source. But the brownout wouldn't happen on his blocks, and the clinics would keep their lights.
He stepped back. The wobble in his teeth eased.
"Temporary bandage," he said, and turned away. "Back to work."
He made it fifteen meters before two Aegis Union soldiers in navy plates appeared at the far end of the catwalk.
They weren't pointing weapons. Good. They were looking around like the world had just gotten louder and they were trying to find the speaker.
Eiden kept moving. He was just a guy with a tool bag. If he didn't make eye contact—
"Sir," one of them called. "Hold up."
He stopped. He turned slowly. Calm face. Hands visible.
The soldier's visor retracted. She was maybe twenty-five. Tired eyes. Polite voice. "Utilities flagged an anomaly from this spine during the tidelock sync. Commander requests a quick word if you're the on-duty tech."
Eiden's first thought was: Utilities can see me. Second thought: Of course they can. The grid logs everything. Third thought: Commander?
"She's here?" he asked.
A new voice answered before the private could. "Closer than you'd think."
Commander Sera Lin stepped onto the catwalk behind them, helmet clipped to her belt, hair braided neat and out of the way. Field jacket with the Aegis crest at the shoulder—spiral, sun, wave. No camera crew. No PR shadow. Just her, two soldiers, and the spine.
Up close, she looked like someone who slept when the work allowed and ate what was put in front of her. No extra shine. Her eyes were direct but not aggressive.
"Eiden Vale," she said.
He didn't ask how she knew his name. There were headcounts, swipe logs, and a hundred tiny data trails.
"Commander," he said. "Can I help you find someone?"
"You, actually." She nodded toward the panel he'd touched. "Two minutes ago, the western ring started to drift. Resonance Corps sent the order to hold district loads steady. Your spine compensated in a way that's not in our library. It helped. It also set off every alert we have for 'someone did something they shouldn't be able to do.' I'm here to find out if that someone is you."
You could lie, he told himself. You could shrug and say the board glitched.
He looked at the soldiers. He looked at her. He hated lying. He'd done enough of that to last several lifetimes.
"I nudged the phase," he said. "Local only. It won't hold. It bought you fifteen minutes without a brownout."
Her face didn't do the PR smile he'd seen on feeds. She just took that in. "How?"
"Carefully." He met her eyes. "I don't want to be a problem."
"You're not," she said. "You're a solution with bad documentation."
One of the soldiers bit back a grin. Sera ignored it. "I have a listening room three blocks from here. The locks team is in the middle of an all-call. I want you on a spare console for an hour. You won't be asked to do anything flashy. Sit. Tell us what you feel in the signal. If you can describe the wobble you just damped, we can fix it at the source instead of asking six spines to brute-force it."
He didn't move. He could feel the shape of the decision like a doorframe.
"No uniform," she added. "No pledge. You leave when you want. But right now, fifteen minutes matters."
He glanced at the panel one more time. The wobble was still there, far off, a dog whining through a wall.
"Okay," he said. "One hour. Then I'm back on showers."
"Fair," she said. "Follow me."
—
The Aegis listening room looked like a repurposed community rec center—painted cinderblock, good chairs, a table with a battered kettle and a stack of protein bars. Six consoles in a curve. Four occupied. The wall screen showed a schematic of the western ring with a overlay of red and yellow that meant "annoying, not deadly."
A woman in her sixties with an orange sweater and a mug turned when they walked in. "Sera, you found your ghost."
"Found a maintenance tech who hates brownouts," Sera said. "Eiden, this is Yana. She knows more about locks than the locks do. Karo, Pip—same story." A broad-shouldered tech with a shaved head (Karo) raised two fingers without looking away from his panel. A wiry person with a pencil behind their ear (Pip) nodded once in greeting.
Sera gestured to the spare console. "Here."
Eiden sat. The surface recognized a new user and politely asked for a name. He typed: Eiden Vale. It glowed green and took him at his word. He placed his hands on either side of the screen, not quite touching.
The city's large systems came through as sound and motion. He could follow it even without the other sense. The ring's sync wasn't off by much. But there was a harmonic sitting on top like an unwanted guest tapping the table. The taps lined up with minor fluctuations on two power corridors leading to the ring's west face.
"It's not the ring," he said. "It's the feed. Corridor W-9 has a repeating dip every twenty-three seconds. W-11 tries to carry the difference and overcompensates. The ring reacts and that reaction looks like sync drift."
Karo frowned. "W-9 is clean on our end."
"Check the substation that ties W-9 and W-11," Eiden said. "Not the big one. The little kit in the junction alcove. There's a firmware patch waiting that never applied because the alcove didn't reboot clean last month. It's not reading a temp sensor correctly. It thinks it's hot when it's not, so it throttles, then releases, then throttles."
He didn't know how he knew that. He didn't like that he knew that. It felt like listening to a person talk in the next room and understanding both sides of the conversation.
Pip was already typing. "Junction Alcove 17-B," they said. "There is a patch pending. Why didn't it… oh, because the service timer's borked. Someone broke the chain with a manual bypass and never put the timer back in sequence."
"Who someone?" Sera asked.
Pip's expression said, "not throwing anyone under the bus unless we have to." Out loud: "We'll fix the timer. Not a big deal."
"Apply the patch," Yana said, unruffled. "Then drop and restart the junction in a quiet second." She looked at Eiden. "Can you keep W-9 behaved while we do that?"
Eiden kept his hands off the console. He didn't need contact. "I can keep it from swinging while you restart."
Sera gave a short nod. "On your mark."
He took a breath. Don't get fancy. Don't leave fingerprints.
"Go," he said.
The lights in the room didn't flicker. The city barely noticed. The wobble at the back of his teeth eased and then disappeared as the junction came back up with the right read on its own temperature.
"W-9 stable," Karo reported. "W-11 isn't leaning anymore. Western ring reading normal sync with slight improvement."
"Log the slight improvement," Sera said. "Send a friendly note to Utilities about 17-B's timer. Add candy to the note so they read past the first sentence."
Pip smirked. "On it."
Yana slid a mug toward Eiden. "Tea?"
"Thanks." He took it because it gave his hands something to do. "Lemon, if you've got it."
"We always have lemon," Yana said, pleased.
Sera watched the board for another thirty seconds. When nothing misbehaved, she let herself exhale. Then she looked at Eiden. "How do you feel?"
"Like I touched a live wire without getting shocked." He lifted the mug. "And like I'd like to pretend I didn't do that."
"You don't have to pretend with us," she said. "But you can pretend everywhere else if that's what you want."
He stared at the steam curling off the tea. His reflection in the surface looked like anyone's—tired, focused, trying.
"I don't fight," he said, and discovered he needed to say it out loud. "Before here… I used to avoid conflict. Now I avoid it on purpose. I'm not joining a unit. I'm not wearing a plate. I'm not getting a callsign. I don't want to be turned into a story."
"We're not at war," Sera said. "My job is to keep it that way. Sometimes that means people like you sit at a console for an hour so we don't yank power from a clinic at 03:00."
"That I can do." He set the mug down. "I'll help. But I won't be a weapon."
Her answer was simple. "Good. Weapons are bad at listening."
The line eased something in his shoulders. He hadn't realized how tense he'd been.
Yana slurped tea. "You've got the feel," she said. "Some folks do. If you want more shifts here, say so. We'll pay you and keep your name off anything public."
"I have a job," he said automatically. "Filters and showers."
"Keep it," Sera said. "We don't need you full time. We need you when the city hums wrong and our charts say 'huh?' You can set your own boundaries. If you ever feel pushed, you walk out. No hard feelings."
He believed her. He didn't know why that mattered as much as it did.
Pip nudged a small tin across the console. "Candy," they said. "Team tradition. For when things are boring or scary or both."
He opened it. Lemon drops. He took one. The taste was simple and sharp.
The board stayed quiet. The wobble didn't return. Ops chat calmed down to its usual level: a few complaints, a few jokes, a few requests for a tool someone forgot to return last week.
Eiden finished the tea and stood. "I said an hour. My shift still has work."
Sera stood too. She didn't offer a handshake like they were closing a deal. "Thank you," she said. "When I say that on a panel, it sounds like PR. In here, it's just me saying it."
"You're welcome," he said. The answer felt normal. He liked normal.
"Before you go," she added, "a question."
He waited.
"When you stepped in on the spine, did you know we'd notice?"
He thought about lying again, then didn't. "Yeah. I hoped you wouldn't send anyone."
"I sent myself," she said. "Because if we were going to scare you off, I wanted to at least do it politely."
He huffed a laugh. "You didn't."
"Good. If you ever want to help in a way that doesn't set off alarms first, come by. I can get you a temporary badge so the doors stop asking your name. Or don't. Your call."
"Temporary," he said. "Nothing permanent."
"That's how everything works," she said. "Even the permanent stuff."
He nodded once, took one more lemon drop for the road, and left.
—
On the walk back to the spine, he kept his thoughts in order by speaking them under his breath.
"Don't get pulled in," he said. "Do the work. Go home. Sleep. Repeat."
He reached C-level. He opened the panel on the heat exchanger. The shower complaint made sense now—air bubble in the line. He bled it, checked temp rise, logged the fix.
He considered what Sera Lin had actually asked. Not "join." Not "swear." Not "become our miracle." She'd said: sit, tell us what you feel, leave if you want. That was hard to argue with.
She's Aegis, the cautious voice reminded him. Famous face. People follow her. People also get used by people like her. That's not an insult. It's a job hazard.
"Boundaries," he said. "Keep them."
The spine's main board pinged. He looked up. All green.
He finished the last work order, closed out his shift, and rode the elevator to ground.
Outside, the city was the same. A tram glided past at the corner, full of commuters face-down in their handsets. A couple argued quietly about groceries. A kid zipped by on a board, laughing.
He headed home. He stopped at a corner kiosk, bought a small bag of lemons, and shook his head at himself.
"You're not joining," he told the street. "You're bringing tea."
His building's door recognized his card. The hall smelled like soap and something baking two floors up.
In his unit, he put the lemons in a bowl. He stood at the window. The city's lights pulsed in quiet cycles. Somewhere out there, the western ring turned on schedule. Somewhere closer, a commander who everyone knew by name probably took off her jacket and rubbed at the back of her neck and filled out three forms she didn't want to fill.
He didn't know how to love people. He didn't know if he wanted to learn. He did know how to keep things running. Maybe that was its own kind of help.
His handset buzzed on the counter. Unknown number. He almost ignored it. He didn't.
A text. Short.
SERA LIN: If you ever want the badge, ask for it. If not, I'll still send you the lemon candy inventory every month so you can judge us.
He stared at the message longer than it deserved. Then he typed back:
EIDEN: I'll stop by tomorrow. No promises after that. Keep the candy stocked.
Three dots. A reply.
SERA LIN: Understood. See you, Maintenance Tech. Bring a wrench. The doors respect those.
He set the handset down. He laughed once, quietly. Then he turned off the light, lay down, and let the city hum him to sleep.
Not a weapon, he reminded himself as he drifted. A wrench.
For now, that was enough.