The device felt heavier tonight.
Elias turned it slowly in his palm, thumb brushing over the thin seam that divided its surface. The metal was warm, holding heat the way skin did after a long fever. It had always done that near fractures, reacting before sensors confirmed anything. A faint line of light crawled across it, uneven in its rhythm, as if the device itself was listening for something to give way.
One override left.
That knowledge pressed harder than the weight ever could.
The bridge stretched out in front of him, broken clean through the center. Chunks of concrete lay scattered like discarded teeth. Ash clung to his boots, coating the hems of his coat. Below, the river glowed an unnatural blue, electrical currents snapping across its surface in erratic bursts. Every surge lit up the underside of the bridge, throwing harsh shadows that disappeared just as fast.
The city watched from a distance. Emergency lights flickered across rooftops and streets, late to respond and already overwhelmed. Sirens echoed, layered and indistinct, as if no one had decided which disaster deserved priority.
This situation would have been simple once.
Elias had corrected worse. Fires that erased entire neighborhoods. Collisions that should have left nothing recognizable behind. He had even intervened in a conflict that never made the news, a war reduced to a line item buried deep in a classified report. Enough interventions that the language around him had changed.
People stopped saying lucky.
They started saying necessary.
Some used other words, too. Words Elias refused to repeat.
He crouched near the fracture point and pressed his fingers against the asphalt. A low vibration ran through it, subtle but constant, like a held breath. The structure hadn't decided what it wanted to do yet. It was waiting.
Under the wind and alarms, he heard it.
Screaming.
Close. Human. Panicked in the way that came from knowing exactly what was happening.
Elias stood quickly.
"Any visual?" a voice asked through his earpiece.
Mara.
"I'm at the breach," he said. "It's bad."
Static crackled before she replied. "Worse than projections?"
He leaned forward and looked down.
The commuter bus rested at a dangerous angle against what remained of the support beams. The front half was gone, torn away during the collapse. Inside, figures shifted. Some were slumped and unmoving. Others clung to seats, windows, each other.
"It is," Elias said.
A pause followed. Not a technical delay. A human one.
"How many?" Mara asked.
He counted carefully. Once. Then again.
"Twenty-three," he said. "That's what I see."
"And the grid?"
His jaw tightened. "The river's feeding energy back into it. If the discharge spreads, it'll hit the lower district first. Hospitals, shelters, transit systems."
She didn't answer right away.
They both knew what those numbers meant. They had memorized outcomes years ago, back when overrides still felt like victories instead of trades.
"We reran the simulations," Mara said finally.
Elias exhaled. "I assumed you would."
"If you stabilize the bridge, the surge dissipates," she continued. "Power holds across the city."
"And the bus?" he asked.
Silence.
"That wasn't rhetorical," he said.
"Elias," she said quietly, "if the grid fails, we're looking at thousands before sunrise."
He closed his fist around the device. The heat pressed into his skin, almost sharp.
"And if I act?" he asked.
"The bus doesn't survive."
A scream cut through the air below them. Someone shouted a name, voice cracking with urgency that had nothing to do with probability.
Elias turned away from the edge.
"Who's onboard?" he asked.
Mara hesitated.
He closed his eyes. "Say it."
"There's a flagged passenger," she said. "Lena Hart."
The world narrowed around him.
Elias lowered himself onto a slab of concrete, the noise of the city dulling to a distant hum. Lena. Of course it was her. It always ended up like this, circling back to the same fault lines.
Lena Hart. Emergency physician. Volunteer. The woman who had once cornered him in a hospital corridor after he redirected an override away from her ward.
"You saved more people," she had told him then, dust streaking her face, hands shaking. "I understand that. But I still had to look them in the eye."
He hadn't answered.
He never did when she spoke like that.
"She's alive," Mara added. "Injured, but conscious. She's keeping people steady."
That sounded right. Even here.
Elias stood and stepped closer to the edge. The bus groaned as another support shifted. Gravity never rushed. It waited.
"What are my options?" he asked.
"One correction," Mara said. "Full scale."
He glanced at the device again.
Every override cost something. Sometimes the loss was obvious. Sometimes it took years to notice what had gone missing. The world adjusted quietly, trimming whatever no longer fit.
"What does it take this time?" he asked.
Mara didn't respond.
"Mara."
"The system's unstable," she said. "At this level, the loss won't be localized."
His chest tightened. "Meaning?"
"Meaning it won't remove a structure. Or a record." Her voice dropped. "It'll remove a constant."
He laughed once, short and hollow. "Me."
"Yes."
Wind tore across the broken bridge, snapping his coat around his legs.
"I'm not joking," she said sharply.
"I know," he replied. "I'm just exhausted."
Her tone softened despite herself. "So am I."
The bus shifted again.
"We're running out of time," Mara said.
Elias stepped back.
"Alert emergency teams," he said. "Prepare for impact."
Her voice sharpened. "For which scenario?"
"I'm going down there."
"What?" She didn't hide the disbelief. "That won't change the math."
"Maybe not," he said. "But I need to see it up close."
He cut the channel.
The climb down was slow. Deliberate. Every movement sent tremors through the structure. The bridge resisted him, worn thin and unwilling to bear another choice.
When he reached the bus, the smell hit first. Smoke. Blood. Burned insulation.
Lena saw him immediately.
Her eyes widened. "You."
"Hi," he said.
She limped toward him. "Tell me this isn't happening again."
He didn't answer.
Her gaze dropped to his hand. The device.
Understanding settled in.
"How many?" she asked.
"One."
She closed her eyes.
The bus creaked around them. Someone nearby cried softly.
Lena opened her eyes and met his gaze. "Don't."
He frowned. "Don't what?"
"Don't make this about me," she said. "You know where that road ends."
The device burned hotter.
Above them, the city waited.
And the bridge creaked, patient and unforgiving.
Elias didn't answer her right away.
Lena watched him closely, waiting for the familiar response. The explanation wrapped in numbers. The calm voice that treated loss like a problem already solved. She had seen that version of him before, standing too straight in places where no one should have been standing at all.
It didn't appear.
The bus shifted beneath their feet, metal grinding as the structure settled a fraction lower. Someone shouted when the floor tilted. Another person grabbed a seatback and started crying without trying to hide it.
"You don't get to choose who this falls on," Elias said at last.
Lena let out a breath that sounded tired more than amused. "Neither do you."
He looked past her, scanning the interior. A woman held a child so tightly the kid had stopped struggling. A man pressed his sleeve against a deep cut, eyes unfocused as he tried to stay upright. Several faces had turned toward him now, drawn by the device in his hand.
Hope noticed details fast.
"When I say move, you move," Elias said, voice carrying just enough. "When I say stop, you stop. Don't hesitate."
A few heads nodded. Someone whispered thanks before he finished speaking.
Lena stepped aside, giving him room. She stayed close, eyes tracking his every movement.
"How much of yourself did you shave away to keep doing this?" she asked quietly.
The question landed without warning.
"I didn't erase people," Elias said, the words coming easily from habit. "I altered outcomes."
She shook her head once. "That difference only matters to the person holding the device."
The light along its surface jittered. Heat bled into his palm, sharp enough to demand attention.
Above them, a sound cracked through the air. Distant. Heavy.
The grid stuttered.
For a brief moment, everything felt tense, like the city was bracing. Elias felt it in his jaw, in the way the air pressed inward. The warning came and went, leaving urgency behind.
He tapped his earpiece. "Mara."
Her voice answered instantly, tight. "Containment's slipping. You have seconds."
"I know."
She inhaled. "Elias, talk to me."
He hesitated.
"I should've trusted you more," he said quietly.
Silence stretched.
"What does that mean?" she asked.
"It means you carried more of this than I let you."
Her breath hitched. "Elias..."
He cut the channel.
Lena watched him. "You're already halfway gone."
He didn't argue.
The bus lurched hard.
People screamed.
That was the moment. The one he had learned to recognize before his mind tried to slow it down.
Elias raised the device.
Lena stepped forward on instinct. "Wait."
He met her eyes.
He wanted to explain everything. The missing streets. The days that felt thinner than they should have. The way silence had followed him home for years.
Instead, he said, "Take care of them."
Her expression froze. "What?"
"You always do," he said. "Even when it costs you."
The device burned white-hot.
There was no flash. No sound. No visible fracture tearing open the world.
Reality shifted with the quiet certainty of something correcting itself.
The bridge shuddered violently. Concrete screamed as fractures closed. Steel twisted back into alignment, snapping into place with brutal force. Below, the river calmed, blue arcs vanishing mid-surge. Across the city, lights surged back in uneven waves. Systems rebooted. Power stabilized.
The bus slammed level.
People fell against seats, against each other. Someone laughed, sharp and disbelieving. Someone else dropped to their knees and sobbed openly.
Lena stumbled back, breath knocked from her lungs. She sat hard against a seat, stunned, alive.
Elias felt it immediately.
Not pain. Not emptiness.
Distance.
The air resisted him differently. Sound dulled at the edges. His hands looked unchanged, yet nothing reacted to them.
"Elias?" Mara's voice crackled faintly. "Elias, I'm losing..."
He tried to answer.
Nothing happened.
The device was gone. His palm felt ordinary, cool, unremarkable.
Emergency crews poured in from both ends of the bridge, voices overlapping as they took control of a disaster that no longer existed. People were guided out. Blankets wrapped around shaking shoulders. Stretchers rolled into place.
Lena was back on her feet almost immediately, arguing with a paramedic who tried to stop her. She waved them off, already moving toward someone crying near the railing.
She paused.
Frowned.
Her eyes scanned the space near the bus, searching for something she couldn't name. The moment passed. She turned away.
Elias understood then what had been taken.
Not his body.
Not his life.
His place.
The bridge would be logged as a near failure. Reports would mention a delay, an anomaly, a brief loss of stability. Files would feel incomplete without pointing to what was missing.
Mara would wake the next morning with a sense of unfinished business she couldn't locate. She would double-check systems that no longer required it, waiting for confirmation that never came.
No one would ask where the safeguard went.
Elias walked toward the center of the bridge. People moved through him without reaction. A paramedic brushed his shoulder and shivered, annoyed at the sudden chill.
He leaned against the railing. The metal didn't respond.
Traffic crept back onto the bridge, cautious at first, then impatient. Sirens faded. The city closed over the wound with practiced efficiency.
Elias searched himself for panic.
There wasn't any.
What remained felt quieter than relief. Something like rest.
He thought of the brother whose face had blurred over time. Of rooms he remembered standing in that no longer existed. Of mornings that felt light for reasons he could never identify.
All of it had been payment.
The river flowed calmly beneath the bridge, carrying reflections that belonged to no one. Clouds drifted overhead, indifferent.
Elias took a step back.
Then another.
The bridge didn't react when he left it.
His outline softened. Sound thinned. Thoughts lost their edges before they could fully form.
The last image that stayed with him was Lena standing too soon, wincing, waving off help, already moving toward the next person who needed her.
Alive. Stubborn. Still unfinished.
That felt right.
The image faded.
The city carried on.