The first sign something had changed wasn't dramatic.
It was annoying.
Mina sat down, logged in, and her queue was already a mess — three urgent requests stacked on top of each other, all stamped manually instead of flowing through the normal intake stream.
Manual meant someone had gone out of their way.
Mina stared at the list for a second, then did what she always did: started working.
No sighing. No complaining. Just task one, then task two, then task three.
Still, the pattern sat in the back of her head like a pebble in a shoe.
By mid-morning, Cora swiveled toward her chair like she'd been waiting to explode.
"Okay," she said. "This is officially weird."
Mina didn't look up. "What is?"
"You." Cora pointed at Mina's screen with the end of her pen. "People don't route things through Corridor Seven unless they're forced. Now they're routing through you like you're a cheat code."
Mina frowned. "Maybe they clicked the wrong name."
Cora made a face. "Girl. They're not accidentally clicking you three times in one hour."
Mina kept typing. "It'll stop."
Cora stared at her like Mina had just said the sky would stop being blue.
"You really don't see it," Cora muttered.
Mina finally paused. "See what?"
"That people trust you now," Cora said, quieter. "Not the friendly kind. The stressful kind."
Mina didn't know how to respond to that, so she went back to her work.
Because work was simple. People weren't.
⸻
The second sign came from Tomas.
He didn't walk up like he had something important to say. He walked up like he was checking the wall display and happened to stop beside Mina's terminal.
"You're going to start keeping notes," he said.
Mina blinked. "I already keep notes."
"No," Tomas said, still facing forward. "Not notes for you. Notes for them."
Mina's fingers slowed. "Did I do something wrong?"
Tomas glanced at her for half a second. "No."
That should've been reassuring.
It wasn't.
"You did something right," he added. "And now people are going to pretend they had a hand in it."
Mina stared at him. "That makes no sense."
"It will." Tomas's voice stayed calm, but there was a sharpness underneath it. "Document your discretionary decisions. Keep your timestamps clean. If you think something is going to collide, write down why you moved it."
Mina swallowed. "So I should stop making decisions."
Tomas shook his head. "No. You should stop making them silently."
Then he walked away like that was a normal conversation to have at ten-thirty in the morning.
Mina sat there for a moment, staring at the cursor blinking on her screen.
Her stomach felt tight in a way it hadn't yesterday.
⸻
After lunch, her workstation got moved.
Not closer to the heirs. Not into the inner corridors. Just… closer to the flow that fed the building's important schedules. The desk itself didn't look special, but Mina noticed what it meant the second she saw it.
People passed this station without stopping unless they had a reason.
And now she was sitting there.
Nessa walked by once, glanced at Mina's terminal, and said, "Make sure your timestamps are exact."
"They always are," Mina said automatically.
Nessa looked at her for a beat. "I know."
Then she kept walking.
That was the thing about Nessa. When she said something obvious, it was never just obvious.
Mina felt her shoulders go stiff.
This wasn't a reward.
This was someone moving her into a brighter light.
⸻
By the time her shift ended, Mina's head felt full but clean. Everything was done. Everything was logged. Everything could be defended.
Cora grabbed her bag like Mina might try to escape.
"Food," Cora announced. "Not the staff lounge. Somewhere loud."
Mina blinked. "Why loud?"
"Because you need to remember people argue about stupid things," Cora said. "Not just priorities and corridors and whatever you did yesterday that made everyone start acting weird."
Mina hesitated, then nodded. "Okay."
Outside Helix, the city felt different. Looser. Less controlled. People walked too close. Laughed too loud. Didn't look like they were measuring every movement.
At the restaurant, Cora talked enough for both of them. Mina listened, ate, and felt her shoulders slowly drop.
Halfway through, Cora paused, fork mid-air.
"You know what's funny?" she said.
Mina looked up. "What?"
"No one here is looking at you like staff," Cora said. "They're just… looking."
Mina stiffened. "They aren't."
Cora lifted her brows. "Mina. They are."
Mina glanced around without meaning to. A couple at the next table looked away too quickly. A man near the counter glanced, then glanced again. Mina's face warmed immediately.
"I'm wearing the same thing," Mina muttered.
Cora smiled like she was trying not to scare her. "Yeah. That's the point."
Mina looked down at her hands. She didn't know what to do with that information. She didn't know how to hold it without feeling like she'd done something wrong.
They finished dinner and walked back toward Helix.
Mina kept her eyes forward.
Still, she couldn't shake the sense that the air around her had changed, not because she was trying, but because she wasn't.