They found a room with a kettle and a table that had seen too many hands.
It was not a proper kitchen. It was a borrowed backroom above a print shop—smell of ink and old paper—two folding chairs, a lamp with a crooked shade.
Kaito brought rice in a dented tin. Zane carried a pot someone had lent, steam fogging the rim. Rio held a bag of skewers and a tub of chili paste like contraband.
They set the things down as if setting down armor.
Kaito ladled rice into three bowls and the sound of it on metal was plain and private.
"This will do," he said.
"I'm starving," Rio said.
"Me too," Zane said.
They ate in a comfortable silence that was its own small ritual—two spoons, a shared plate of pickles passed like an offering.
Kaito watched them through the steam and felt something loosen inside him he hadn't noticed tightening all week.
"You remember when we first fell into this?" Kaito asked, more to fill space than to be clever.
Rio dipped a skewer and bit; she shrugged.
"Our first patch was a power loop in sector three," Zane said.
"We thought we were heroes," Kaito said.
"We were clumsy," Rio said.
They laughed, short and brittle, then softer, until the sound folded into the room and stayed there like a good object.
Zane reached across the table and knocked a grain of rice off Kaito's sleeve with careful fingers.
"You always have rice on your shoulder," he said.
Kaito swatted his hand away and smiled too fast.
The lamp threw a warm circle. Outside the window, the city's neon was a dull bruise; inside, the room felt like a patch from old life—simple, salvageable.
They told small stories. A printer who once printed a pamphlet by hand because the queue system failed. A nurse who kept an extra blanket in her locker for people who had forgotten how to sleep. A busker who hummed the same three notes every day in winter and never took a coin. The stories were small treasures, and they passed them around like bread.
Rio wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said, "We should sew up that east loop next week. Schools and clinics."
"We will," Kaito said.
"Paper first," Zane said.
"Paper and pockets," Rio added.
There was a lightness in the room then, the kind you get when tired people make small plans that mean work but not collapse.
Kaito pushed his bowl back and looked at the two of them properly—their faces soft in the lamp.
"You ever think about leaving?" he asked.
Rio's fork paused in midair. She considered the question like a small weight.
"Sometimes," she said. "But where would I go? Streets have problems everywhere."
Zane set his spoon down very carefully. "I think about it the way people think about old towns. Not because I want to be nostalgic. Because some things are yours—no matter how broken."
Silence again, the kind that keeps a room honest. The kettle clicked as it cooled. The lamp buzzed faintly. A siren wailed far off and then receded.
Kaito felt a squeeze in his chest that was almost gratitude. He reached into his jacket and took out the child's sun drawing and laid it on the table between them.
"I keep this with me," he said. "Like a map."
Rio leaned forward and traced one of the ink rays with a fingertip. "It's clumsy," she said. "But it's human."
Zane touched the paper without asking and then folded his hands around his bowl like the motion might keep something from floating away.
They talked about the work in the safe ways: schedules, printers, shifts. They rehearsed logistics like prayers. They made lists on a scrap of paper—contact names, drop times, clinic liaisons. Work that would look dull in a file but that, when done, felt like saving something.
Then Kaito said the word that turned the room hard: "fragments."
Rio's hand went still. The spoon clinked against the bowl and rang like a bell.
"Fragments?" Rio repeated.
Kaito swallowed. "Little files. Tiny modules. They show up in kid devices. Soothing bits. They train attention away. Eiko wrote about them."
Zane's face tightened so that the skin at his temples moved. "We patched relays, Kaito. We starved signals."
"Not all," Kaito said. "Some fragments are buried in edu‑packs, in bedtime overlays. Small functions that don't need relays to spread. They get installed and people think it's an update. They teach outcomes slowly."
Rio's jaw worked. "That's…worse."
"It's stealth," Kaito said. "And persistence."
Zane put a hand to his forehead like he could press the problem into a flatness. "If fragments are the vector, tracing the initial injection is going to be impossible without court orders and subpoenas."
Kaito's voice hardened in a quiet way. "Maybe impossible if you play it neat. But someone seeded them. Someone with Foundry access knew how to fold them into mundane packages."
Rio's eyes flicked to him and held slightly longer than before. The lamp's light caught the edge of her cheek and left the rest in shadow.
"You mean someone who used to—" she started. Her sentence thinned out. "You mean a person who remembers how to make the machine sing?"
He didn't answer. He felt a heat move up from under his ribs, the feeling of a name lodged hot and untouchable. It was not professional anger; it was not the clean fury of policy. It felt like a wound that remembered being pressed.
"You're not talking about empathy anymore, Kaito," Rio said. Her voice was careful because she was balancing something fragile.
"What else is there?" he asked. "If you see a child humming at night and you know what taught them to hum, don't you feel something deeper than pity?"
Zane closed his eyes and drew in a breath. When he opened them the lines in his face had steeled. "We are not judges," he said. "We are responders. Don't let the anger rebrand itself into something that will burn what we're trying to protect."
Kaito found his hands empty on his knees. He watched the paper sun like a small altar. The room held its breath and waited to be broken or bolstered.
"I didn't come here to judge," he said. "I came here because I can't pretend those drawings are just noise. They are instructions someone fed into lives. Someone thought smoothing people into an easy pattern was charity. Maybe it was charity, but it was charity that killed choice."
Rio's mouth moved around the word choice as if testing its weight. "If there is a person—if there is a hand—then the problem is not only technical. It's personal."
Kaito looked at them both and did not say the thing he'd been thinking. He did not say Foundry and the alley where he'd once traced names into a notebook and pretended it was research. He did not say which child had taught him to hate the heat of solder. He did not say the exact shape of the promise he had once wanted to keep.
The silence grew dense with unspoken maps. He realized, with something like cold clarity, that his compassion might be threaded with an old ambition—an ambition that predated the team and existed in the flat places of his memory where a younger boy had wanted to be useful and had been asked instead to be quiet.
"You're thinking in circles," Rio said softly, as if to a friend who had started pacing in their sleep.
"Maybe," Kaito said. "Maybe I am."
Zane looked between them and then offered something like a bridge. "We stop calling it fragments when we mean people," he said. "We name it for what it is—design choices with moral outcomes. Then we make a record."
"Records exist to be read," Rio said. "And read aloud."
They finished the meal like that—words then tasks, tasks then small silences. The night pressed against the window and the lamp hummed in answer. For a while they were just three people who had shared a plate and remembered how to laugh.
Kaito wrapped the child's drawing back into his jacket and felt the line in him tighten into a rope that could be used for climbing or strangling.
He did not know which. He only knew he would carry it anyway.