Rain clings to the city like an apology that never quite lands. The yard is damp and honest this morning; even Corin's cigarettes smell like weather. I fold the ledger into my jacket and feel the patch Hae‑In gave me against my ribs like a coin in a pocket—small, cold, reliable.
System: Morning check — Shade Rank 3 available for testing. Suggested task: Practice Shadow‑Map calibration. Reward: 400 XP.
The System's enthusiasm is a physical thing. It tells you about upgrades like a friend handing you a sharper knife and then watches to see if you cut something important. I tell it to wait. Rank upgrades are useful, but the taste they leave can be bitter.
We have a delivery to make to the vault: the fragment needs safer hands while Hae‑In and Min run deeper queries. The route is the one I drew in the ledger—safe alleys, staggered times, trusted faces. It should be simple. Simple is a generous word.
Jeong insists on coming. He says he wants to learn how to keep watch and not flinch when the city bites. He carries a satchel of tools like a small, hopeful army. Corin grunts but says nothing; he knows the kid needs practice and that practice scars like callus.
The market is waking. Vendors wheel out carts and the smell of frying oil does what nostalgia can't: it makes worry taste ordinary and manageable. I move in the shape of a man with purpose and hope nobody notices the way my hand tightens around the fragment under my coat.
Halfway through the route a child drops a toy and it reels into the gutter. Reflex buys me a second: I crouch to fish it out because people in this city hand you small trust tokens when they think you can be relied on. As I stand a shadow folds through the alley like a seam being pulled wrong. Echo Sight shows it as a thin black thread running along the wall toward the vault route. It's not large—no teeth bared—but precise, the kind of motion a trained hand would use to watch rather than attack.
Someone is trailing us.
I don't shout. I don't make a scene. I tuck the fragment deeper and change my gait, subtly shifting the ledger's weight so the route looks as if we're heading to a market stall we aren't. Corin notices because he always notices, and he nods once in the language of plans that don't need speech.
We cut through a service door and take streets that smell like laundry and lost letters. The tail stays a careful distance behind, mirroring our steps with a patient, polite rhythm. Mariel's signature patience, I think, but I don't say it aloud. The city has a dozen ways to dress interest; I prefer not to be a curiosity.
At the vault gate a woman with a face like an old photograph checks us in with a smile that doesn't pretend to be private. The vault keeper—Amira—scans the fragment with a device that looks like it eats light. She frowns and then relaxes. "You're getting careful," she says. "Good."
Inside, the vault smells of paper and salt. Min is there, looking at schematics like a man who has learned to pray in blue ink. Hae‑In is already mid‑sentence when we enter, talking to a small group: a retired ward engineer, a librarian who once cataloged civic rituals, and a woman named Sook who runs a shelter and has hands that don't flinch at wounds.
"We found a series of surfaceings," Hae‑In says without preamble. "Fragments near wards, near families, at markets. Someone's testing the water."
Min watches the lifeline schematics and then points at a map. "Patterns cluster along old distribution nodes," he says. "Not random. A soft needle, pricked in places that hurt. Whoever's doing this knows value."
"You think it's organized?" Sook asks. She folds her hands in the way someone prepares to knit a plan in public.
"Organized predators," Min answers. "And facilitators with pockets."
We talk in circles that mean the same thing. The group agrees to tighten routes, rotate couriers, and increase the number of decoys. Hae‑In looks at me for a long moment. "You're getting more than lucky hands, Sung," she says. "You're getting eyes that matter."
Her praise is strange and uncomfortable because eyes that matter make enemies who want to sell sight for profit. I keep the ledger open on a table and draw thicker lines between safehouses. The System pipes up with efficiency tasks about routing—but its neat checkboxes feel like a browser history of my life.
After the meeting we escort a cache of documents—old minutes from stabilizer trials—to Hae‑In's workshop. The documents are brittle and smell like other people's apologies. Min points out odd redactions and bureaucratic euphemisms; one line in particular stands out, marked with a smudge of ink and a short notation: PROJECT GARDEN — ARCHITECT PROTOCOL INITIALLY RESTRICTED.
The words make a small, embarrassed sound in my chest—like a cough you ignore and then feel for days. Architect. The ledger has hints, scraps of protocol names, obscure labels that match nothing sensible. The origin vaults I dreamed of peeling back now have a door stamped with a title that sounds like someone named a god with a blueprint.
Hae‑In watches my face and says nothing. She folds the documents gently and tucks a loose note into my hand: Look for the gardener's symbol. She looks at me as if naming a next step is a love we owe ourselves.
On the walk back, a shout behind us breaks the evening—someone calling for help. The shout is the city's way of sounding kindness; sometimes it's true. We run because it's what we do. Around the corner a group has formed: a man in a cheap suit arguing loudly with a vendor and a small cluster of onlookers. The suit is the broker from the yard, thinly disguised. He's pointing at the vendor with a card in his hand like a priest with a pamphlet.
"They swear the goods are theirs," the suit says. "But there's evidence the stall possessed a fragment. It was found nearby."
The vendor is shouting about lost customers. The broker's voice is smooth as oil and cruel as a blade. Corin moves forward and I keep my hand near the ledger, fingers flexing like a fist that's learned to hold a pen. The broker's partner from the alley stands at the edge of the crowd, hands folded like a man waiting for dinner.
Someone in the crowd hurls an accusation. The vendor hits back, and a scuffle spills into anger. In the middle of it a small girl is shoved—accidentally, but the market sees everything as a moral market and nothing stays neutral. The child tumbles and cries, and the broker more than flinches.
My Echo Sight maps the motion before it happens—the shove, the way the vendor's foot will slide, the broker's hand going for a card. I intercept the shove with a choice that's equal parts instinct and calculation. I don't hit anyone. I put myself between the broker and the vendor and shout for space. People step back because someone is shouting a truth and because market fights often stop when the price gets too public.
The broker sneers, but his voice cuts. "You're meddling in commerce, boy. This isn't your market."
"It's my city too," I say, too hot and honest. The words flit out like birds and land where they will.
The broker narrows his eyes and then folds his cards. He leaves with a promise in his step—promises that smell like suits and money. Behind him, Mariel lingers and looks at me with a measuring glance that is equal parts respect and warning.
After the scuffle the market slowly returns to its rhythm as if the city has been given a small, necessary bruise and the blood has already dried. The vendor thanks us in a tone that means more than it says. The girl holds my hand for a beat and then runs back to her mother with a triumph that feels like a small transgression in a good way.
That night I sit on the roof and write in the ledger. Architect. Garden. Gardener's symbol. The words feel like hooks and I try to imagine how they fit together. The city hums below me, a series of small, stubborn truths—people who keep parts of their lives private, people who sell pieces of themselves for coin, people like Corin who answer knocks without asking the price of kindness.
System: New capability ready — Shadow‑Map active. Side effect: temporary phantom pressure; recommend rest. Reward: 600 XP.
The System waits like a shopkeeper ready to ring me up. I test the Shadow‑Map cautiously in the yard: it overlays recent echoes onto a small mental grid, connecting threads across time and space the way a cartographer draws a river's tributaries. It's beautiful in the clinical way of instruments, neat and sharp and liable to make you think you can measure everything.
The Shadow‑Map highlights a faint recurrent arc—small gestures, a broker's pattern, a set of coordinates near an old greenhouse marked on the stabilizer schematics. The gardener's symbol—Min's note—matches a faded stamp on one of the archived documents. The greenhouse was on the edge of a public park that no one used anymore, a place suitable for experiments no one wanted to watch.
Hae‑In reads the Shadow‑Map with slow approval. "You were meant to see patterns," she says. "You were meant to stitch threads."
I do not like thinking of myself as someone meant for anything. I like thinking of myself as someone who keeps promises. But the map does something useful: it gives us a place to go.
We plan to check the greenhouse at dawn. It feels like the kind of thing that will either make us feel smaller or make us feel more responsible. Either is useful.
Before I sleep I tuck the ledger under my pillow and write a small line for Corin: Don't let me trade names for answers. He folds the note into his hand like a relic and then passes out with all the practical efficiency of someone who has been on call too long.
I close my eyes and the Shadow‑Map's faint lines overlay my dreams—gardens and glass and a person who once kept careful records in a clinic and had the courage to hide a photograph. A name rolls just out of reach. I sleep wanting to be the kind of person who does not let names go for coin.