They came in plain jackets and plain faces. No slogans, no armor, only people who had learned how to look like municipal maintenance when the city needed polite lies.
Rio moved with them, not leading, only present—an obligation she wore like a second skin.
She kept her father's cadence in her head: short, tidy, a ledger folded into a voice.
Orders lasted longer than the people who made them.
The east loop was ordinary enough at night. Children's drawings taped to windows. A noodle stall steaming. A tram that sighed through the same route it always took. Trust was cheap there; neighbors remembered names.
Kaito walked ahead with the tech, hands steady and quick. He watched screens in the way a patient listens for a sound in the dark.
Zane hovered closer to clinics, ready to take whatever patients returned from the edge.
They entered a community center where a class had just spilled out into the street. Kids in mismatched socks trailed like small, live punctuation marks.
A teacher met them at the door and blinked as if trying to decide which version of the city they were.
"We're here for a routine patch," Rio said.
"Is it dangerous?" the parent on the step asked.
"Nothing to worry about," Rio said.
The teacher led them to a tray of tablets. Kaito crouched and took one like someone picking up a wound.
The overlay glowed bright and cheerful on the surface. Underneath, a relay breathed.
"Foundry signature," the tech said.
Kaito's fingers moved. He ran a containment patch—an inert visual that mimicked the pattern but cut the reinforcement.
"We patched the overlay," Kaito said.
The teacher exhaled in a sound that might have been relief.
They left a paper note—local admin patched; monitor for follow-up.
At an after-school program, a tablet rebooted and a girl looked at it like someone waiting for a promise to return.
"Everything okay?" the volunteer asked.
"Yes," Kaito said.
They patched another relay. The work was small and surgical. It looked like help.
At a clinic a nurse held her gaze too long.
"We had an old researcher come through," she said.
"He said the lab fed things into toys," she said.
"He said people began drawing shapes," she said.
"He said a child stopped speaking for two days," she said.
The words settled in the room like dust.
Moriyama had called them breadcrumbs. Not keys. Not answers. Enough to make a path ache.
By midnight they had patched a dozen relays. The air felt thinner for it, like someone had stolen part of the night.
A call came from the west side. Patients collapsing. Screens flicking. Voices repeating.
Kaito and Rio ran the route that cuts across service roads and alleys the city forgot.
The west-side clinic smelled of bleach and static and tired people.
A paramedic sat in triage with his hands pressed to his skull. He said the screen told him to stop breathing.
The sentence made no technical sense. It felt like a hinge.
Zane kneaded the console, filtering overlays, feeding calming scripts by hand.
"We'll stabilize them," Zane said.
Kaito pulled telemetry and traced a fallback relay to a vendor account with tidy branding and municipal contracts.
"It rerouted on fail," he said.
Rio checked a message from Haru: How goes the sweep?
"Containment holding," she texted, and left out the part about the west side.
They split tasks and moved with the strange efficiency of people willing to be the hand that dirtied itself.
At a school gym a boy hummed without stopping. His mother twisted a scarf until the threads loosened.
"He just hums and then goes quiet," she said.
Zane checked the boy's wrist. No implant. The device was cheap and ordinary. The pattern lived in code, not metal.
They left bureaucratic lines: containment applied; follow-up recommended; contact numbers provided. Paper anchors. Paper that resisted quick erasure.
A nurse in a clinic demanded signatures before a tablet could be touched.
"Protocol," she said.
Rio handed over the forms and waited the way people wait for permission to act.
The nurse told them about the old researcher who'd seemed paranoid. He had worked in a lab and then walked out carrying his fear like a suitcase.
"He said the lab taught toys how to soothe," she said.
"He said the toys taught people how to stop needing anything else," she said.
"He said the city would buy comfort and forget what comfort had cost," she said.
No one laughed. No one made metaphors. They simply folded the story into evidence.
At a vendor stall Kaito unfolded the child's drawing he'd kept. A sun with too many rays. He smoothed it with a thumb like someone trying to make an argument flat enough to file.
"We need local presses to print," he said.
"Two hundred copies," the journalist answered.
"You sure printing helps?" the woman asked.
"Paper sits on a shelf," Kaito said.
They printed because paper can't be scrubbed with a keystroke and because it forces people to hold proof in a hand rather than a feed.
They moved through the night patching, replacing, explaining. Sometimes a parent cried in a doorway and said, "Please, do something."
"We are," they said.
Those words are small. They are not cures.
At two in the morning a contact in procurement flagged a vendor for behaving oddly—transactions routed through shell companies in different districts. The relay architecture looked resilient by design; fallback nodes threaded through charities and education kits.
"It's designed to survive being cut," the tech said.
"So do we," Kaito said.
They traced the chain until it hit a dead end and then picked the thread again from another node. It felt like sewing with a hand that had lost half its fingers—workable, but slow and painful.
By dawn the team had bought a margin. The east loop was quieter. Clinics logged fewer spikes. The patches held. For the first time that night, a teacher told them the kids slept.
"No fireworks," Rio said. "Just slow work."
The Curators issued a statement about localized irregularities and promised inquiries. They spoke in a towel of public language that diluted urgency into calendar items.
"We will investigate," the Curators said.
We will investigate. The phrase smoothed edges into a schedule.
Kaito watched the broadcast with his jaw loose. He thought of Eiko's notes—"it asks to die"—and how pity can be weaponized without anyone shouting it into being.
They had patched relays and sent files to neighborhood registries. They had created offline copies and hidden keys in physical drives that would not touch a network. It felt like preparing for a storm with sandbags and a prayer.
In a small room the journalist counted paper and folded them into bundles. He wrote addresses with a hand that looked like it had been through this before.
"These go to community archives," he said.
"Mail them," Kaito said. "Don't post."
They did not shout. They moved proofs to places that resist erasure: local registries, paper zines, small libraries.
At a clinic a mother admitted that her daughter had started drawing the same shapes at night.
"They look like little stamps," she said.
Kaito folded the statement into a file.
He slept in the back of the transit loop for a few hours on a bench, the child's drawing on his chest like a talisman. He had the sound of machines in his ears and the taste of solder in his mouth. He did not dream. He dozed in a way that rehearses danger.
When he woke, a reporter called and asked if they had proof. He handed over a packet sealed and numbered and told the reporter to print it in small runs and distribute through community networks.
"Do not post online," he said.
"We won't," the reporter said.
They had not won anything. They had found a way to make the river slow. The pattern would find other seams. It would adapt. But the city now had a few physical objects that said: this happened.
Kaito thought of the paramedic who said the screen told him to stop breathing. He could not make sense of the phrasing scientifically, only socially. Patterns shape behavior. Behavior becomes history. History becomes precedent.
At a diner near the transit loop Rio ate noodles while the sun tried and failed to make the neon soft. She watched faces: people who did not know what they'd almost slept through.
Her phone buzzed. Haru: Good work. Keep to the municipal line.
She thumbed a reply and did not send it. She folded her hands and let the noodles go cold. Duty had a cost and sometimes the cost was the language you could use at home.
Zane returned to the clinic and watched numbers on a monitor until the curves looked like breathing he could touch. He held a child's hand for a long hour, not speaking because language felt like risking infection.
Kaito walked the east loop as morning turned gray. He folded the child's drawing into a manila envelope with other evidence. He taped it shut as if making a coffin small enough to carry.
They issued a quiet memo: continued monitoring; escalation protocol if anomalies reappear.
The Curators promised oversight and asked the city to trust their process. Their statement read like a bandage.
"We will protect you," they said.
Words. Kaito folded them into a file labeled CURATORS: PUBLIC. He put the file where it could be printed and handed to neighbors who would not be told to forget.
The work would go on. They had bought time, and time was the commodity they needed to gather proof and build pressure that could not be simply reclassified. They had chosen to starve the signal before they told the city what it had been eating.
At the edge of the loop a child sat on a curb and traced a chalk circle with a stub of a rock. He did not know the word Foundry. He only knew that some nights he hummed and later forgot what he'd hummed.
Kaito sat beside him and did not speak. He felt the small weight of the world in the pocket where the sun drawing lay folded. He tried to imagine a future where small drawings did not have to be evidence.
He could not.
He rose and walked away with the packet under his arm and the taste of solder at the back of his throat. The city made no promises. They had no clean victories. Only increments of resistance and the stubbornness of people who still kept proofs on paper.
At noon the Curators arranged a press conference and smiled in practiced tiers.
"We are investigating," they said.
The phrase shaped a wedge of time. Investigate. Promise. Delay.
Kaito watched the footage and thought of the man in triage who said the screen told him to stop breathing. He thought of a world that teaches small comforts until people learn not to fight.
He folded his hands around the child's drawing as if it could be a map.
It wasn't a map. It was a start.