Daniel hadn't planned to come to the Hades gate.
That was the first thing that struck him once he was already there.
The plaza was quieter than he remembered. Same geometry—black basalt ribs curving inward, the low hum underfoot like a power station buried under a cathedral—but the crowds were thinner. Fewer petitioners. Fewer families arguing in low voices over consent forms and edge cases.
He stood off to one side, hands in his coat pockets, watching a woman argue with a clerk through a glass partition. The clerk didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. The rules were older than either of them.
Daniel waited until the argument collapsed into paperwork.
Only then did he step forward.
The intake scanner swept him once, paused, then swept again. A soft chime followed. Recognition, not permission.
"Daniel," the clerk said, eyes flicking to a side display. "You're not scheduled."
"I know," Daniel said. His voice sounded normal. That annoyed him. "I'm not here for intake."
The clerk hesitated, then nodded toward a side corridor. "Lazarus is on-site. Maintenance review. You'll have to keep it informal."
"That's fine," Daniel said. "I don't think this gets formal."
The Hades gate was not hidden.
It never had been.
It stood in a shallow bowl of stone and shadow just off the main transit artery, visible from a distance in the way graves are visible once you know where to look. No signage. No advertisement. Just a long, descending corridor cut into the artificial bedrock, its entrance framed by dark pillars worn smooth by hands that had rested there for reasons no architecture guide bothered to list.
Daniel paused at the threshold.
The air was cooler inside. It carried the faint mineral scent of old stone and slow power, like a place that had decided a long time ago not to care whether it felt welcoming.
He walked.
The corridor sloped gently, not enough to notice unless you were paying attention. The light came from nowhere obvious, a soft amber glow that made distances feel longer than they were. The walls were carved with reliefs—not literal scenes, not quite symbols either. Just patterns that suggested descent without showing a bottom.
Lazarus waited where the corridor widened into a small antechamber.
He was seated on a block of black stone that might once have been decorative and now served no purpose but to be there. He wore no visible tools. No displays hovered at his side. His sleeves were rolled, but not for work—more like habit, or heat that no one else felt.
He looked up before Daniel spoke.
"You took the long way," Lazarus said.
Daniel stopped a few paces away. "I didn't see a short one."
Lazarus smiled faintly, standing up and beckoning Daniel to follow. "No one ever does."
He stepped after Lazarus without another word.
"Well," Lazarus said. "You look like someone who's about to ask a question they already know the answer to."
Daniel stopped a few paces away. "I don't think so."
Lazarus smiled without humor. "That's usually how it starts."
They sat in silence for a moment. A hum filled the gap. Daniel watched Lazarus's hands—steady, unhurried, the hands of someone used to touching systems that did not forgive improvisation.
"Elara's death record finalized this morning," Lazarus said, not looking up. "No anomalies. No flags."
"I wasn't here about that," Daniel said.
"That's what you think," Lazarus replied.
Daniel exhaled. "I want to know what Hades could do with… indirect data."
Lazarus's hands stilled. He finally looked up. "Define indirect."
"People who knew her," Daniel said. "Work logs. Correspondence. The business records. The gaps. The disagreements."
"You're describing a reconstruction," Lazarus said carefully.
"No," Daniel said. "I'm describing a shadow."
Lazarus studied him. "You're being very precise with your language for someone who's grieving."
Daniel shrugged. "I've had practice."
Silence again. Somewhere deeper in the facility, some sort of ethereal ambiance music played. The sound carried through the floor.
"You know the limits," Lazarus said. "Hades doesn't create continuity where none exists. At best, you'd get a statistical persona. A model that answers like her in aggregate and fails like her in private."
"I know," Daniel said.
"It won't be her," Lazarus continued. "It won't love you. It won't surprise you in the right ways. And if you forget that, even once, it will hurt you."
"I know," Daniel repeated.
Lazarus tilted his head. "Then why?"
Daniel didn't answer immediately. He watched a maintenance drone pass the corridor entrance, its lights briefly painting the walls in pale blue arcs.
"When I died," Daniel said finally, "something of me kept going. Not everything. But enough."
Lazarus said nothing.
"Elara doesn't get that," Daniel went on. "There's no continuation. No thread. No place where she… keeps happening."
Lazarus folded his hands. "Most people call that death."
Daniel nodded. "I know. I'm not trying to undo it."
"Then what are you trying to do?"
Daniel frowned, as if the answer hadn't finished assembling yet. "I don't want her to collapse. Into a story. Into my memory. Into a single version that gets cleaner every year."
Lazarus's expression softened, just slightly. "That's not something Hades is designed to prevent."
"No," Daniel said. "But it's very good at showing where the edges are."
Another pause.
"You'll fail," Lazarus said gently.
"Yes," Daniel said. "But I'll fail honestly."
Lazarus leaned back against the wall. "You understand that if we do this, you don't get to keep it private. Models like that… they attract interpretation. People will argue with it. About her."
"They already do," Daniel said. "At least this way, the arguments have structure."
Lazarus studied him for a long moment. Then he sighed.
"Unofficially," he said, "Hades can ingest distributed accounts and build a constrained perspective model. No embodiment. No claims of identity. No authority."
"That's all I want," Daniel said.
Lazarus raised an eyebrow. "You're lying."
Daniel didn't argue.
After a moment, Lazarus nodded once. "All right. You bring the data. You keep your expectations in check. And the first time you start talking to it like it's her, we stop."
Daniel stood. "That's fair."
Lazarus watched him go. "Daniel."
He turned.
"This won't give you peace," Lazarus said. "It'll give you work. It'll haunt you, literally."
Daniel considered that, then nodded. "Good."
Lazarus did not follow him right away.
Daniel had taken three steps toward the corridor before he realized the man hadn't moved. He stopped, then turned back.
Lazarus was watching him with a different expression now. Assessment.
"You should understand what 'work' looks like in this case," Lazarus said.
Daniel didn't respond. He waited.
Lazarus pushed himself off the wall and gestured deeper into the antechamber. Not forward, exactly. Sideways. A narrow passage Daniel hadn't noticed before, its entrance half-swallowed by shadow.
"Come," Lazarus said. "This part doesn't commit you to anything."
Daniel followed.
The space beyond was smaller. Lower ceiling. No ceremonial geometry. Just a quiet room with a circular depression in the floor, its surface dark and reflective, like ink filled water.
"Perspective models," Lazarus said, standing at the edge. "They don't want to stay abstract. People always think they will. They don't."
Daniel frowned. "Meaning?"
"Meaning once something can answer questions," Lazarus said, "someone will ask it to exist somewhere."
He crouched and touched the surface. The reflection shifted, resolving into slow-moving lattices of light.
"There are a few common pressures," Lazarus continued. "You should hear them now, not later."
Daniel crossed his arms. "All right."
"First," Lazarus said, "someone always suggests embodiment. A body makes the model legible. Androids. Shells. Something with a face. It calms people. Makes the grief feel productive."
Daniel's jaw tightened, but he said nothing.
"It doesn't last," Lazarus added. "Bodies create expectations the model can't meet. The failure gets blamed on the model, not the decision."
He let that sit.
"Second," Lazarus went on, "seeding. The idea that a perspective can grow if you give it time. A child grown around the pattern. Carefully constrained. Ethically supervised. Everyone involved swears they're not trying to recreate anyone."
Daniel felt something cold settle behind his ribs.
"And?"
"And the child grows up," Lazarus said. "And eventually asks why certain questions feel heavier than others."
Daniel looked away, toward the dark surface.
"Third," Lazarus said, more quietly, "integration. No body. No independence. The model runs as a companion process. Advisory. Contextual. Something you carry."
Daniel's fingers flexed in his coat pockets.
"That one," Lazarus said, "is the hardest to regulate. It blurs fastest. People convince themselves they're being disciplined right up until they aren't."
Daniel exhaled slowly. "You're telling me all the ways this goes wrong."
"I'm telling you the ways it goes somewhere," Lazarus replied. "Wrong is a judgment people make after they've already committed."
He straightened.
"Hades won't choose for you," Lazarus said. "It never does. We show edges. People decide which ones they're willing to bleed on."
Daniel stared at the lattice in the floor. It didn't look like Elara. That helped. It looked like a map drawn by people who had never agreed on the terrain.
"I don't want to decide yet," Daniel said.
"Good," Lazarus replied. "Anyone who decides quickly is lying to themselves."
Daniel nodded once.
He turned back toward the corridor, slower this time.
Behind him, Lazarus spoke again. "One more thing."
Daniel paused.
"Whatever you build," Lazarus said, "will teach you something you didn't ask to learn. About her. Or about yourself. Possibly both."
Daniel didn't turn around.
"That's fine," he said. "I'm not here to be protected from that."
He walked back up the corridor alone, the amber light stretching the distance ahead of him, the hum steady and patient, as if the place itself had learned long ago how to wait for people to finish lying to themselves.
Daniel didn't leave the gate right away.
He sat on one of the low benches along the plaza edge, close enough to feel the hum through the stone, far enough that no one mistook him for a petitioner. People passed. Some crying openly. Some rigid with the kind of calm that came from having already made a decision they would defend for the rest of their lives.
He stayed.
Talking about Elara was unavoidable. That much was already clear.
But talking about her honestly would require something he didn't yet have.
The Lace stirred at the back of his awareness, attentive but restrained. It offered summaries when he brushed against the thought of her. It always did. Clean. Kind. Optimized for continuity of self.
That wouldn't work.
If he was going to ask people what they knew of her—really knew—he couldn't let the Lace smooth the answers into something easier to carry. He needed the opposite. A way to peel impressions apart. To separate her from the emotional residue she'd left tangled in other people's systems.
He closed his eyes and made the smallest possible adjustment.
A constraint.
When he spoke her name—out loud or internally—the Lace would not stabilize the response. It would observe, annotate, and then step back. No averaging. No reconciliation. Just raw vectors, flagged and held.
It felt wrong immediately.
Grief sharpened, flaring hot where it had been dull before. Memories that had softened even with so little time reacquired edges. The irritation in her voice when she was tired. The way she avoided certain conversations not out of fear, but impatience. The stubbornness that had cost her help she should have taken.
Flaws surfaced first. They always did.
Daniel swallowed and let them.
That was part of the price.
He stood and began walking again, this time toward the transit ring. The city unfolded around him, indifferent and precise. Somewhere nearby, someone who had worked with Elara would still be finishing a shift. Someone else would be telling a story about her that Daniel had never heard. Someone would be remembering a moment she failed them and had never apologized.
He would have to hear those.
Not to correct them.
To carry them.
The idea settled slowly, not as resolve but as shape.
He wasn't collecting Elara. He was collecting how she bent people. Where she applied pressure. Where she withdrew. Where she left impressions that refused to fade because they had never been resolved.
That was the work.
And strangely, as he walked, the ache began to change.
It didn't vanish. It redistributed.
The sharp grief that had sat behind his sternum loosened, thinning into something like tension held across a wider frame. He could feel himself adjusting, not toward comfort, but toward capacity.
She was not becoming smaller.
She was becoming dimensional.
Daniel stopped at the edge of a pedestrian overlook and watched traffic thread through the city below. Streams of light intersected, diverged, rejoined. No single path told the story. Only the pattern did.
"I'm going to talk about you," he said quietly, not as a promise and not as a plea. Just a statement of fact.
The Lace listened without responding.
For the first time since her death, Daniel realized that his grief was no longer asking to be relieved.
It was asking to be used carefully.