----------
They were on the roof because Sene said the stairs felt "too enclosed today."
Mara didn't argue. She rarely did when Sene said things like that.
The roof was unfinished in the way most things in the city were—half-fenced, half-forgotten. Old satellite dishes leaned beside newer signal relays, their surfaces etched with weather and fingerprints. Someone had dragged two chairs up here years ago and never brought them back down.
They sat on the concrete instead.
The city stretched out below them, neon threading through antique facades like veins under skin. Somewhere far off, a tram screeched and corrected itself. The air smelled like dust, rain, and warm metal.
Sene lay back with her hands behind her head, staring at the sky. "You ever notice," she said, "that the city looks calmer from up here?"
Mara nodded. "It can't reach us as easily."
"That's not how roofs work."
"It feels accurate."
Sene smiled.
They were quiet for a while. Not awkward quiet. The kind that didn't demand to be filled.
Mara broke it.
"Why do you tolerate me?" she asked.
Sene blinked. Then turned her head slowly. "Wow. No buildup. No warning."
"I'm serious."
"I can tell. You didn't soften it."
Mara picked at a crack in the concrete. "You talk to people. You like noise. You… care about things." She hesitated. "I don't."
Sene rolled onto her side, propping herself up on one elbow. "That's not true."
"It is," Mara said. "You're just used to it."
Sene studied her for a long moment, eyes tracing Mara's face like she was assembling something from parts.
"You know what you do?" Sene said finally.
Mara tensed. "What."
"You stay," Sene said. "Most people don't."
Mara frowned. "That's not—"
"You don't leave when things get inconvenient," Sene continued. "Or boring. Or difficult. You don't perform care, but you do it anyway."
Mara looked away. "That's just efficiency."
Sene snorted. "Sure. And I bathe because it's strategically advantageous."
Mara almost smiled.
"Look," Sene said more softly. "You don't demand anything from me. You don't need me to be louder or quieter or better." She tapped Mara's arm lightly. "You just… make space."
Mara swallowed. "That seems like very little."
"It's not," Sene said. "It's rare."
The city hummed below them, distant and steady.
Mara hesitated, then asked, quieter, "You don't get tired of it?"
Sene smiled, small and certain. "No."
"Why not?"
"Because," Sene said, leaning closer, close enough that Mara could feel her warmth, "you look at the world like it might betray you at any second—and still choose to be here."
Mara didn't know what to say to that.
Sene leaned back again, stretching. "Also, you're terrible at pretending," she added. "Which is refreshing."
Mara exhaled slowly. "You could do better."
Sene tilted her head, considering. "Maybe."
She glanced back at Mara. "But I don't want to."
They sat there until the city lights shifted and the air cooled, neither of them in a hurry to leave.
Later, Mara would forget the exact words.
But the feeling stayed longer than it should have.
----------
Mara woke with the sharp certainty that something had gone wrong with her life.
Not in a dramatic way. No alarms. No screaming pain. Just the quiet, awful realization that whatever normal had been, it was already behind her.
Her head throbbed. Not splitting—dull, insistent, like a bruise inside her skull. She opened her eyes to the basement ceiling: low, stained, threaded with pipes that sweated rust. The music from above filtered down in fragments, a bassline losing its shape as it passed through too much concrete.
She sat up slowly.
Her body responded. That was good. No restraints. No immediate punishment. Just a lingering heat at the base of her neck—a reminder that the threat was still installed.
"You're awake," Gray said.
"Did i die?" Mara asked.
"No, unfortunately."
"Disappointing."
He was leaning against the table with the map, arms folded, posture loose in a way that suggested he was anything but. He looked relieved, and that irritated her more than it should have.
"How long," she asked.
"Twenty minutes," he said. "Shock hit you harder than I expected."
"Lucky me."
She swung her body off the wall she'd been laid on. The floor was cold through her boots. Real. Solid. That mattered more than she wanted to admit.
For a moment, she just sat there, grounding herself.
"What's the date today?" Mara asked.
Gray looked at the modified regulator on his wrist. It had been rigged to prevent surveillance.
"Cycle 4129 / Segment 3" He replied.
"It's been two cycles..."
Two cycles ago, she'd been fixing a holosign and arguing with a vendor about payment. Sene had complained about her smell and sprayed her with citrus perfume like it was a personal mission.
Two cycles ago, she had not been planning to trespass into sealed infrastructure to retrieve suspicious cargo for a man who implanted a shock device in her spine.
Her stomach twisted.
"This is South Underline," she said suddenly, eyes on the map. "That's where we're going."
Gray nodded. "The edges of it."
"Why does it exist," she asked. "You said routes 'accumulated.' What does that actually mean."
He hesitated, then answered anyway. "When the city expands, it doesn't demolish everything. It redirects. Old transit lines get bypassed. Power gets rerouted. Maintenance schedules lapse."
"And nobody cleans it up."
"Not if cleaning it costs more than pretending it's gone."
She swallowed. "So people just… fall into it."
"Sometimes," he said. "Usually by mistake. Sometimes because someone sends them."
She looked at him then. "Like Dungle sends people."
"Yes."
"And you know him because—"
"Because I used to move things," Gray said. "Information. Hardware. People, once or twice. Anything that needed to pass through places the city didn't track well."
"That's not normal work," Mara said flatly.
"No. It's not. You're free to judge me. We all need to make a living."
Her jaw tightened. "And you owe him money because—"
"I took a job I couldn't finish."
She laughed, short and sharp. "So now I'm paying for that."
He didn't argue.
She stood, pacing once, then stopping because pacing felt like panic. Her thoughts kept circling back to Sene, but not cleanly—like the memory was starting to smear at the edges.
"I don't even know what I'm doing anymore," Mara said, voice low. "I should be looking for her. I should be checking records, breaking into archives, something. Instead I'm down here, planning a theft."
Gray watched her carefully. "This isn't a theft."
She rounded on him. "Don't soften it. We're going somewhere we're not allowed to go to retrieve something someone paid to keep hidden. That's a crime."
"Yes," he said.
"I hate this," she whispered. "I hate that I didn't even hesitate."
She gestured helplessly at the map, the basement, him.
"I don't even recognize myself."
Gray said nothing.
"And the worst part," she continued, voice shaking despite her effort to keep it steady, "is that the longer I stay down here, the further away she feels. Like every step I take in the wrong direction is making it easier for the city to forget her."
She pressed her thumb hard into her palm, grounding herself.
"The voice," she said suddenly. "In the Nursery. It said it was helping."
Gray's breath hitched—barely noticeable, but real.
"It changed timing. Delayed systems. Gave us margins we shouldn't have had. Allowed us to escape." Gray said, ignoring the point of the question.
"Why did it allow us to escape? Why do I matter?" she asked once again.
"I am familiar with that 'thing' but there is too much i don't know." he replied carefully.
"Then what do you know?" she demanded. "Because it sounded like it knew me personally."
Gray hesitated.
"That's what scares me," he admitted. "I don't know if you're being helped—or positioned. I've learned not to trust that 'thing' too much. It only interferes when its beneficial to it."
Her stomach dropped. "You're not comforting."
"I'm not supposed to," he said quietly.
She stared at the ceiling again, blinking back tears she refused to let fall.
"If I'm doing this wrong," she said, "if I'm chasing the wrong thing and she fades because of it—"
"You won't lose her because you tried," Gray said.
She turned toward him sharply. "You don't know that."
"No," he agreed. "But doing nothing would lose her for sure."
"As promised, I'll tell you everything i know after this job is over...if we make it out alive."
"That's reassuring."
She closed her eyes.
For a moment, she saw Sene clearly—sitting on the bunk, swinging her legs, humming badly off-key. The image flickered, like a bad signal.
Ever since she found the keepsong and a note which had appeared out of thin air, supposedly, in her pocket, a bizzare turn of events had taken place in her rather ordinary life.
No,
Ever since she had met a peculiar hooded man named 'Gray'.
She could never go back to normalcy now. No matter how hard she convinced herself. It was far too late. She remembered her daily banter with Sene which seemed like routine.
Fear shot through her.
"When this is over," Mara said quietly, "I'm going after her, Sene. Not routes. Not cargo. Her."
Gray nodded. "Alright."
Mara hesistated slightly before she spoke her next words.
"And...you'll help me. You owe it to me. For all this mess you've put me in."
Gray agreed hesitantly. "That's great attitude. You're not as bad as i thought you were at getting favours where it's owed"
"You learn a thing or two living where I do."
Mara swallowed before asking one final question for now.
"And you," she said. "You still haven't told me why you're here with me at all."
That was when the silence shifted.
"Why do you care?"