Rowan moved through the South Quadrant checkpoint exactly one minute before shift start.

  Morning came not from a sun but from the walls—light panels warming from sterile white to soft gold, calibrated to simulate calm. It fooled most. Not her. Rowan trusted nothing that bloomed on command.

  As always, she passed through without incident.

  The enforcer posted at the main gate gave her a curt nod—barely perceptible, but there. He didn’t say her name, but he didn’t have to. No one did. Everyone in this sector knew her. Not personally. Not socially. Just… by function.

  She was the one who caught inconsistencies. The one whose reports were never late. The one who never laughed in the hallways or lingered in the break room.

  "Back early again?" came a voice behind her.

  She turned, just enough to register the figure walking parallel across the inner atrium. Kato, another analyst from the east wing. Always cheerful. Always a little too loud in the silent zones. Always chewing synthmint—sharp, acidic, out of place in the recycled air.

  "On time," she replied. Not cold. Not warm. Just factual.

  Kato smirked and peeled off toward the other elevator.

  Her boots struck the tiled path with precision—sixteen steps from the checkpoint to the main lift, two minutes to ascend to the data core.

  Everything followed pattern. Everything aligned.

  The elevator opened with a muffled chime. She entered alone. A soft mechanical voice greeted her—“Level Four: Data Analysis and Surveillance Oversight.” She didn’t answer. It wasn’t waiting for her to.

  As the lift began to rise, she stared straight ahead, watching her reflection ghost across the metal doors. Neutral expression. Eyes sharp. Hair tied back. Not a strand out of place. Her uniform fit like a second skin, seams crisp, collar smoothed down by muscle memory.

  The ride took twelve seconds.

  When the doors opened, the scent of sterilized air and faint ozone filled her nose.

  The hum of the console was a familiar constant—so low it blended into the silence, more presence than sound. The data stream flowed uninterrupted across the vertical display wall: blueprints of correction logs, movement patterns, biometric pulses, and incident reports stacked in seamless precision. Nothing moved out of place.

  Rowan sat motionless in the center of it all, fingers hovering above the interface, pupils dilated to catch every flicker of anomaly.

  Everything was as it should be.

  Except it wasn’t.

  A line in the correction matrix lagged by exactly 1.2 seconds.

  That never happened.

  Her eyes narrowed. Her fingers twitched once, then stilled. She reran the string. The lag disappeared. The report reloaded, smooth and whole.

  Except—

  A name.

  Flickered.

  It shouldn’t have.

  The system corrected itself instantly, overwriting the anomaly with a blank identification tag: REDACTED. But Rowan had seen it. One word. A designation that didn’t belong to any report currently logged.

  She didn’t blink.

  The system didn’t make mistakes.

  Her hand moved. She initiated a manual log search. A deviation that could be flagged. A curiosity that could be punished. But logic dictated that unexplained data variance was, by definition, inefficiency—and inefficiency demanded resolution.

  The search returned nothing.

  No report. No flag. No trace.

  Only the void where a name had been.

  Rowan remained still, save for the subtle movement of her thumb brushing the edge of the console.

  Then—just faintly—something pressed at the base of her skull. A pulse. Not pain. Not quite. More like pressure. Like a thought that didn’t belong to her, trying to surface.

  She recalibrated her breathing. Three seconds in. Three out.

  "A report. A correction. A blank space where a name should be," she murmured, letting the words drift into the hum. “Clean. Flawless. Except it wasn’t.”

  Another breath.

  She opened a new terminal overlay and tried again—this time using root-level indexing. A more aggressive query. One that would ping memory caches and buried redundancies.

  The screen flickered.

  For 0.7 seconds, it filled with corrupted code—familiar fragments, frayed data chains, and then—nothing. Reset.

  Rowan stared.

  The name had not returned.

  But the flicker had.

  And in its wake, a timestamp.

  It was from earlier today.

  She paused, hands steady, but her mind moved faster than the console ever could. Timestamp. Origin node: Central Medical Interface 4. Wellness division.

  She pulled the division’s logs.

  A flagged dissenter. Escorted by enforcers. Processed in twenty-seven minutes. Status: resolved.

  No further data attached.

  Except… one note had been appended. A secondary marker. High-priority.

  She opened it.

  A surveillance feed played—silent, grayscale, clinical. The dissenter stood between two enforcers, head slightly bowed. The room was pristine, seamless. Then, just as the escort began to move, the dissenter lifted their head.

  And locked eyes with someone just out of frame.

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  The camera angle adjusted.

  A woman stood near the corridor exit, not part of the escort. Civilian uniform. Medical credentials clipped to her coat. Her posture was tense, one hand locked around the strap of a satchel.

  Even in grayscale, her golden-brown skin caught the overhead light, soft but unmistakable against the antiseptic white. Her coiled hair had come loose from its tie, framing her face like shadow.

  She didn’t speak. Didn’t move.

  Just stood there, staring back.

  Something about her lingered in the frame. Like a held breath.

  Rowan leaned forward.

  Not alarm. Not confusion.

  Recognition.

  The video ended.

  She leaned back, just slightly. Not enough to show doubt. But enough.

  She reached toward the desk, fingers grazing until they found the pendant—the smooth metal disc she always kept. It wasn’t regulation. It wasn’t labeled. She didn’t know where it came from.

  But she always held it when thinking.

  Rowan turned the object slowly as the room dimmed around her, the screen still open to the paused surveillance feed.

  The dissenter’s name was gone.

  But she remembered the flicker.

  It was a start.

  And she should have reported it.

  That was the procedure. Anomaly detected. Route through internal review. File the deviation. Let the Bureau compensate.

  But Rowan didn’t file the anomaly.

  She stood.

  Not abruptly. Just... stood.

  Her shift hadn’t ended. There were still logs to review, flags to clear, patterns to validate. But her body moved before she finished reasoning it through. Her hand disengaged the console. Her boots met the floor. The hallway unfolded before her, clinically lit and empty—punctuated only by the low, regulated churn of the cooling systems buried in the walls.

  The walk to Central Records was exactly 312 meters.

  She knew the distance the way one knows the sound of their own breath.

  She’d walked it for audits. For recalibrations. For silence.

  Today, it felt longer.

  Outside the data wing, the corridor widened into a viewing stretch—transparent panels opening onto the plaza two floors below. Citizens moved in synchronized rhythm, pausing at crossings when the overhead lights pulsed amber. Enforcers dotted the floor like game pieces, positioned at junctions with unmoving precision. Visors down. Expressions unreadable.

  Two stood near the security terminal across the walkway, speaking low.

  Rowan didn’t mean to listen.

  But she didn’t mean not to, either.

  “Seventh correction this cycle,” one said.

  The other scoffed. “Should’ve been caught earlier. System flagged it after public contact. Too messy.”

  “Still no confirmation on what triggered it?”

  “Not from above. Just says subject had ‘inappropriate latency during engagement.’”

  A pause.

  “Civilians aren’t supposed to linger, I guess.”

  Their voices weren’t sharp. Just… clipped. Contained. Weighted with something—dismissal, maybe. Or unease. It was hard to tell.

  Rowan kept walking. Her pace didn’t change. She didn’t look back.

  The corridor narrowed again as it passed through the central arboretum—one of the few spaces in Astraeus where nature was permitted to exist. Even here, it was groomed to mechanical perfection. The ceiling stretched into a transparent dome overhead, panels shifting slowly to mimic the illusion of sky. Dawn. Dusk. Dawn again. Soothing. Controlled.

  Rows of silvergrass bent gently as she passed, engineered stems flexing in identical rhythm. Like breath, if breath obeyed programming. The air was scented faintly with synthetic lavender—barely detectable, but sterile.

  Rowan hated this place.

  She hadn’t said so. Not in years. But walking through it now, the feeling settled under her skin like static. The stillness. The control. Even the illusion of life here was monitored.

  A small drone hovered above the garden path, recalibrating a soil sensor. It chirped softly as it registered her presence and veered aside without contact.

  She didn’t slow.

  Past the arboretum, the corridor pinched inward, narrower now. This was the route to Central Records. Less traveled. Less visible. No one lingered here without cause.

  The final hallway was lined with biometric checkpoints. Each one pinged in turn as she passed.

  No errors. No warnings.

  No reason to stop her.

  She almost hoped one would.

  But her ID cleared every gate.

  As always.

  She found herself standing in the Records Hall.

  It was colder here. Quieter than even the data center. Light filtered from the ceiling in thin, diffused bands, catching on the obsidian floors and the edges of static consoles. The space stretched in every direction—row after row of dormant machines, each one pulsing like a silent witness.

  Clean. Untouched. Unnervingly still.

  A sanctuary for truth.

  She shouldn’t be here.

  Her ID cleared her without issue, of course—it always did. She wasn’t flagged. Not yet. She moved between the aisles, her boots whispering across the polished surface.

  Terminal 9C accepted her handprint instantly.

  The interface lit beneath her fingers, blooming awake like a system breathing in.

  She entered the timestamp. The system took it. She added the node. The medical division’s designation lit up. Then came the final piece—a query code she hadn’t used in years. A failsafe from her analyst days. One she never deleted. A key hidden in plain sight.

  A shadow protocol.

  The screen hesitated.

  Not in speed, but in rhythm. The hum shifted—just for a breath. Like something caught in the machine's throat.

  Then the results populated.

  Routine logs. No flags. All clear.

  Too clear.

  Rowan narrowed her eyes. She rerouted the query and accessed the correction archive.

  The screen pulsed once.

  Just once.

  And then—there it was.

  A code she didn’t recognize.

  No citizen tag. No anomaly flag. No Bureau authorization. Just a single classification string:

  R-57-RET-FAIL

  It flickered near the bottom of the stack, like a corrupted ghost clinging to the edge of erasure.

  She reached for it.

  The console buzzed.

  Access restricted.

  Another flicker.

  Unauthorized query logged.

  Rowan’s pulse didn’t quicken—but her posture shifted. Shoulders straighter. Eyes colder. Not fear.

  Recognition.

  She cleared the command trail. Just in case.

  She should have left.

  But her hands moved on instinct.

  Not for the dissenter.

  For the timestamp.

  She traced the feed’s metadata, pulling parallel records. Cross-referenced it with internal logs. Expanded the parameters. Filtered for secondary witnesses.

  Three entries.

  Two enforcers.

  One civilian medic.

  No name.

  Only a placeholder tag.

  She mirrored the query in the correction database, this time without hesitation.

  The screen hesitated.

  And then—

  Her own name.

  ROWAN IVER.

  Correction issued. Case closed.

  No—

  That—

  That couldn’t—

  Her name.

  That was her name.

  But she—

  She blinked.

  Again.

  Still there.

  Filed. Flagged. Deleted.

  But she was here.

  Her hand moved to her collarbone. Just above it. Not to check for a pulse—she knew it was there—but for something else. Something beneath the skin. Something that might explain this.

  Nothing.

  She’d never been flagged. Never deviated. She followed the cycle. Reported deviations. Filed the proper chains.

  She was clean.

  She was clean.

  Correction date: two cycles ago.

  Location: Unknown.

  She didn’t remember being erased.

  But the screen did.

  The silence felt heavier now, like the machine was holding its breath, waiting to see if she would fall apart.

  Her name hadn’t disappeared.

  It stayed.

  Unmoving. Unquestionable.

  Her name.

  Her deletion.

  The console dimmed.

  Rowan didn’t move.