The figure in the doorway wasn't what he expected. Not a tactical team. Not even an intermediary's enforcer. It was a woman, dressed in the drab, durable coveralls of a municipal sanitation worker. Her face was pale, her features ordinary, her eyes holding the flat, focused emptiness he recognized immediately. It was the same look he saw in his own reflection on the rare occasions he caught it. The look of someone performing a function.
She held a compact scanner, not a weapon. Her gaze swept the room, passing over him pressed against the wall as if he were part of the architecture, before settling on the empty cot. "Unauthorized occupancy detected in a decommissioned unit," she stated, her voice monotone, filtered through a cheap vocoder in her collar. "Clearing protocol initiated."
She wasn't here for *him*. She was here for the room. The Curator's one-week lease had expired, or had been voided by the system. She was the clean-up crew. A municipal drone, following a work order generated by the somatorium's decaying management AI. She had no idea who he was.
Kael remained still, a statue in the shadows by the door. His pistol was aimed at her temple. The choice was binary: silence her and create a body that would trigger a much more serious response, or let her complete her function and hope she remained blind.
She took a step into the room, her scanner beeping as it registered the residual heat from the cot. She pulled a small spray canister from her belt and began misting a chemical sterilant into the air. The sharp, astringent smell filled the cubicle.
Her back was to him. An easy, silent kill. His finger rested on the trigger.
He watched her work. She methodically sprayed every surface—the cot, the sink, the floor. She was thorough, efficient. She wasn't thinking about who had been here. She was thinking about completing her task, clocking out, collecting her pay. She was Lin, before he grew a conscience. She was the bank teller, choosing not to see. She was himself, on a thousand jobs, before the locker, before the sequence.
She was a face that worked without remembering.
He lowered the pistol.
She finished spraying, gave the room one more scan with her device, and turned to leave. As she passed back through the doorway, her eyes passed over his position again. This time, they stopped. For a fraction of a second, true perception broke through the functional glaze. She saw a man, armed, hiding in the dark.
Their eyes met.
In her eyes, he saw no fear. Only a profound, weary recognition. A fellow professional acknowledging a breach in protocol. She gave an almost imperceptible nod—not of complicity, but of mutual understanding of the game. *I didn't see you. You didn't interfere with my work.*
Then the glaze returned. She stepped out into the corridor. The door slid shut behind her. He heard her footsteps recede, followed by the scrape of her tool at the next door.
Kael let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. The encounter left him more unsettled than a firefight would have. He had been seen and deliberately unseen. His survival had hinged on the calculated indifference of another cog. The system's true strength wasn't its hunters, but its infinite supply of faces that chose, every day, to forget what they saw.
He couldn't stay. Her report might flag an anomaly, even if she didn't personally escalate it. He had to keep moving.
He waited an hour, listening to her work her way down the hall and vanish into a service lift. Then he slipped out, moving back up through the somatorium's layers into the damp evening.
He needed a new plan. The city was a machine, and he was a faulty component rattling inside it. To survive, he needed to either jam the gears completely or find a way to be ejected. He thought of Dr. Thorne. She had tried to jam the gears with truth. She had failed, and was marked. But her attempt had created ripples—the sample, Lin's log, his own deviation.
He found a public data-terminal in a library annex. Using his generic ident, he accessed open news feeds, filtering for obituaries, industrial accidents, unexplained outbreaks. He was looking for her name, or for the story of a tragic fire in an old textile mill. He found nothing. The silence was holding. For now.
But if the intermediaries hadn't yet sterilized her, it meant they were being careful, or she was better hidden than they thought. Or his refusal had caused a delay, a recalculation.
A new idea, dangerous and ill-formed, took root. What if he didn't just run? What if he used the only weapon he had left—the knowledge he was supposed to erase? He couldn't tell the story himself; he was a ghost with no credibility. But he could find the person who wanted to tell it. He could deliver the one piece of evidence he'd memorized: Lin's story, from the logbook. The origin. Not to save her, but to… complete the transaction he had abandoned. To give the trace to its intended recipient.
It was a terrible plan. It was walking directly towards the epicenter of the containment zone. It was the opposite of survival.
He accessed a city archive, searching for the textile mill's address. It was in a decaying manufacturing zone slated for "aesthetic renewal." He memorized the route.
As he turned from the terminal, a flicker on a public security feed monitor caught his eye. It showed a plaza he had crossed an hour ago. The footage was sharp. And there, moving through the crowd with a predator's grace, was a man he knew. Sol. A freelance operative like him, but one who specialized in high-value, complex terminations. Sol didn't do retrievals. He only did clean-up. He was efficient, creative, and famously devoid of hesitation. He was the kind of tool that never questioned its use.
Sol was looking for someone. His head turned, scanning the crowd with a systematic, sweeping gaze.
They had upgraded the response. They were no longer just locking doors. They had sent a hunter who remembered everything.
Kael melted back into the stacks of the library annex. Neutrality was gone. Hiding was temporary. The faces that worked without remembering were everywhere, but they were not a shield against a face like Sol's, which remembered only the target.
He had two choices now: run deeper into the city's forgotten cracks, or move towards the mill, towards the source of the story, and risk drawing Sol's attention there.
He thought of the woman sanitation worker's nod. The recognition. He was not like her anymore. He could not unsee. And Sol was coming for those who saw.
He left the library by a rear exit, pulling his collar high. He did not head for another hiding place.
He began the long, careful walk towards the old textile mill. He was walking into the trap, but he was no longer the bait. He was a different kind of variable. A contaminant, moving towards the source of the leak.