The Wisdom path put me down on a pavement in the rain.
It was the edge of a city I didn't know. Somewhere in the Empire, by the look of it: the same grey transit rails, the same holographic ward signs flickering over every crossing, the same clean, cheap Imperial housing you could find in any province. Six residential blocks stood around a small paved square, with a shuttered noodle stall on one side and a district clinic on the other. Half the windows were dark. Above the clinic doors, a public screen showed the date and the temperature and nothing else.
Somewhere above me, a child was coughing. The deep, wet, tearing kind that doesn't stop.
An old woman was waiting under the clinic's awning, with a rain shawl over her head and a cane in one hand and a tablet in the other. She looked at me the way people look at a doctor who's arrived too late.
"You're the one the district office sent," she said. "Good. You'll choose."
"Choose what?"
