The list blinked like a fever. Names scrolled in a thin column across glass the color of old teeth. Each name had numbers beside it — balance, arrears, time owed down to the heartbeat. People reduced to math. The room smelled of oil and bleach and the metallic smell that came up whenever a blade needed attention.
Kael stood with his back to the wall. The blade was folded against his thigh, silent inside its sheath. He liked the silence. It let the numbers speak for a while. Let the ledger be loud and his mouth shut.
A hologram floated at the corner of the board, a ribbon of blue that shivered and then steadied. The ledger parsed names, then priorities. Then it spat out an icon — a scorch mark, a status of threat. All very clinical. All very exact.
The image that flashed, though, did not fit the neatness. A face. Old photographs live in wrong places. This one pulsed like a memory someone tried to burn and the smoke refused to leave.
"Lyra Valerius."
He read it again because reading it once felt like a mistake. Because the name shouldn't have existed in the ledger. Because the ledger was neat and Lyra had never been neat. She had been a fracture. A small, focused kind of chaos that wouldn't let people finish sentences.
He had closed that chapter. Sealed it with the precision of a surgeon. You cut, you cauterize, you don't come back to check the wound. You certainly don't let it stare at you from a projection on corporate glass.
He did not move. The room hummed with other people doing their jobs — tapping, reporting, calibrating time-credit flows. Pauses measured in microseconds. He could feel the hum in his teeth.
"File shows corporate engineer. Architect of Chronos subsystems," someone said. Voice like a tray sliding across a table.
"Status?" another asked.
"High value. Recent activity flagged in peripheral networks."
The questions were slow. They were supposed to be. Protocol was a muscle that had to be exercised. Kael watched the list. The hologram of Lyra burned at the end of the column like a blue wound. Beneath her name, a bracketed token: LINKED — UNDERGROUND NODE.
"Lyra has a bounty," the voice said. "Scheduled for retrieval."
Retrieval. A soft word for the way bodies were unstitched and their seconds leeched dry. He pictured the machine mouths that drank. He pictured his sister, Elara, sleeping with the respirator's slow hiss and numbers dripping into a pool someone else called credit.
He had been the one to carve life into numbers. He had been the one to tell the ledger where to end and where to bleed.
He told himself he would not feel this. He told himself many things to make the mornings easier.
"Is she alive?"
No one expected a question, so it landed wrong. The room shifted.
"Unclear," the first voice said. "Last confirmed sighting two years prior. Logs show anomaly trace now."
Anomaly. A bureaucratic hospice for things that shouldn't exist. He wanted more than words. He wanted the way she moved when she was waiting for a code to fold, the way she clicked her tongue when an algorithm surprised her. He wanted proof that wasn't a feed's lie.
He thought he remembered the last time he'd seen her. It was noise, blood on the floor that dried like a lie, and a smell he could still taste when the ledger printed late at night. He had chosen efficiency then. Chosen the ledger's math over a voice that said this is family. He had done his job. He had been praised.
Praises sat like rust now.
"Pull the node," Kael said. His voice was flat. He didn't ask for permission. He did not like asking.
"Permission required."
The voice was automatic, good and obedient. The room was full of machines that did not have to apologize for what they did.
He almost laughed because he remembered crawling through vents once with Lyra, six years ago, when she taught him how to read the seams of walls like books. She threw a piece of scavenged candy at him and swore under her breath because the wrapper stuck to the panel. She lived like she could out-arrange fate.
He could not believe the ledger would be wrong about her. He could not believe she would haunt the underground network like a rumor. He could not believe she would be both a ghost and a target.
"Override," he said. Clear. Hard. The word cut the room into an immediate after.
"Override logged," the system replied. "Authorization: Level Alpha."
He had Level Alpha. That claim tasted like old metal. Level Alpha gave him access, gave him license, gave him absolution from asking. It gave him numbers that translated into teeth and sleep and the steady drip of Elara's machines. It gave him the thing that kept weight off his hands in the nights.
He moved toward the door. The blade was lighter than the ledger suggested. Weight was a comfortable, honest thing. He held it like guilt — snug, clumsy, inevitable.
Outside, Zone 7 smelled like wet concrete and time. People were awake because they had to be, not because they wanted to. Windows were curtains of plastic patched with instructions. Children played in the ledger's shadow; their laughter sounded like someone rubbing two rocks together for fire. Parents looked at them the way someone looks at a thing that could be sold for parts if they misplace the idea of tomorrow.
Kael walked. He watched faces flinch as the streetlights skimmed past his shoulders. The Blade at his side was not a rumor. It glowed faint blue; a small cold halo at its edge. He kept his eyes forward. Hands in pockets, fingers closed around the ghost of a coin.
At the node, the market smelled differently. More layered. People had put up small stalls selling time in jars; seconds trapped under glass like beetles. A boy tried to trade a minute for bread and the vendor refused with a pity that tasted like old rope.
"Anyone selling credits?" the vendor asked as Kael passed.
"No," Kael said. He didn't stop. He'd learned long ago that pauses gave people room to lie.
A screen flickered at the far end of the market. It showed a map with a pulsing dot. The underground node. The place where rumors died or started to live. He walked toward the dot as if the ground might ask him for license.
There were people guarding the node poorly. Guardians are often chosen because they are either thick with loyalty or thin with nothing left to lose. These were thin things. Teeth too bright, hands too quick; they tried to make themselves into men.
He approached. They saw the Blade. One of them laughed, a thin sound.
"You look tired," the laugh said.
"You look expendable," Kael said.
The laugh froze. Small hands reached for levers. A fight happened because fights should happen where there is profit or pride. Kael moved like a ghost that had been trained to haunt. Chronostasis peeled minutes off the air. The city exhaled and stopped, and in that silence the men jerked as if life had betrayed them and then they didn't.
He did not enjoy the cut. He did not take pleasure in how seconds shied away from the bodies. He did what needed doing. Practice made each harvest quicker, as if speed could make the rest go softer.
When the room started again, the boy who had laughed was on the ground. He still breathed, but his cheeks were hollow and his eyes had the slow look of someone who had watched their watch stop and had nowhere to put their fear.
"Scanners?" Kael asked.
"Not clean," one of the guardians said, wiping blood on a piece of cloth. "We expected more."
"Where's the node?"
"Through the back. Tunnel C."
He went. The tunnel smelled like cold and old promises. Hunching down, he moved through the concrete belly. He could feel the ledger's gears turning above him. He could feel the presence of watchers. He kept going.
The node was small, tucked into an old maintenance bay that hadn't seen an auditor in years. Cables hung like a hangman's noose. Monitors were patched together with duct tape and hope. A handful of people clustered around a mainframe that looked like a heart that someone tried to keep warm under a coat.
They looked at him like animals look at a predator that has not eaten in a while. There was a woman among them with a shaved head and a scar that made her smile crooked. She had a child's hand tucked under her arm like a secret.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Taxman."
Her jaw set. The child's grip tightened.
"Then you can take our time," she said. Voice even. Not loud. Not pleading.
He could have. He could have placed his blade on the table and turned them into calculus on a system report. He could have extracted their seconds with the polite ruthlessness of his training. He could have made the ledger sing and the city quieter.
But the ledger had already told him a name. Lyra. The idea of Lyra in this place felt like an insult and a comfort at the same time. He was a professional. Emotions are supposed to be irrelevant. He had sewn them away.
"Where's the node control?" he asked instead.
"We are it," the scarred woman said. "We aren't selling."
"All credits are forfeit to Kronos," Kael said. He felt his voice breaking on the word forfeit like an old tool that had been used too much. He said the rules because that was how he had been raised — in the grammar of debts.
"No." She sounded tired of words that settled men. "We don't trade our sleep."
A child behind her made a small sound.
He thought of Elara. His sister in a bed that measured exhaust in micro-intervals. He thought of the numbers that had become oxygen in their house. He thought of the ledger's small offers: a day for a day, a week for a week. Efficient equivalence. Keep your heart beating at the price of your child's first steps. It was a tax.
"You can't hold this place," he said.
"We can," she said. "At least until the next raid."
He could have burned them all. He could have harvested the credits right there and then. The ledger would have approved. It would have sent flowers, perhaps, in some corporate euphemism. His hands closed.
He found Lyra's face instead of her voice. A reflection on a cracked monitor, a pale ghost in blue light. She looked older. Or maybe he had simply run out of patience and the sight of her made him see age where there was none. Her eyes were the same — precise and tired and dangerous like a memory that had learned to hurt.
"Stop," he said. It was not a command. He barely knew if anyone heard it.
Someone behind him moved. A hand on his shoulder. Protocol. Betrayal. Routine. He turned. The hand belonged to one of the guardians who had been cut earlier. He had been patched together with tape and shame.
"You work with them?" the patched man said.
"No," Kael said.
He did not explain. He did not say that a ledger could be wrong or that humans keep pockets of stubbornness that numbers can't tax. He didn't say Lyra had been an engineer and engineers make mistakes into maps. He didn't say he had remembered the way she laughed when she soldered circuits back into life.
"Time to go," the scarred woman said. She stepped forward with the child's small body behind her like an anchor.
He looked at the child. There was something unaccounted-for in that face. A ledger couldn't place it. A ledger couldn't name the way a child's breath fogged in a room and made the air smaller and more intimate. It wasn't a number. It was not for sale.
"Tell me where you found the link," Kael said.
"We only keep nodes," she said. "We don't trace. We don't send."
Her answer was stubborn like the way people clung to beliefs when they had nothing else. He felt the ledger gnawing at his ribs. He felt something else too, small and metallic, like a key he had dropped and been walking over for years.
The holo in the market blinked and Lyra's face flared and then hid. The list updated, shifted. The ledger rearranged itself, soothing the noise. Somewhere above, an auditor would read the event as neat bytes that didn't smell like guilt.
He left the node with nothing extracted. That fact should have been a failure. Instead it was a violation he could not measure. He had Level Alpha. He had a ledger's blessing. He had done nothing.
Walking back into the wet light, he kept his hands empty and his blade quiet. He had not decided anything yet. He had, however, made a new kind of ledger entry inside himself. It was not numbers. It was a thin, dangerous line: a name that would not be crossed out.
He told himself he would sleep and make sense in the morning. He told himself he still belonged to Kronos. He told himself he could be the man his sister needed and the machine the corporation demanded.
The street closed around him like an eyelid. The city kept counting. The ledger had its winners. The ledger had its exceptions.
Lyra existed now in the cracks between those claims. She was a wound and a map and a thing no one at Kronos could easily classify.
He kept walking. The blade at his side made a small, steady sound against his thigh. Every now and then he thought he could hear a clock beat inside his chest and sometimes he thought the clock was Lyra's voice counting him out, again and again, until he learned how to listen properly.