The Department of Unnatural Modifications pulsed like a migraine in brass. It rose above the smogline, a tiered ziggurat of paperwork and pneumatic tubes, stained from decades of sunless rain and sanctioned despair. Madlenna Zinth adjusted the pressure valve in her prosthetic wrist and stepped into the intake vestibule, hoping to be mistaken for something ordinary.

  The lobby sighed.

  “Intention, please,” said the floor. Its voice had the dry crackle of old carbon copy.

  Madlenna tilted her head so the brass hemisphere of her left eye caught the perimeter glyphs. Three surveillance sigils blinked erratically near the ceiling. One had stopped blinking. That might help.

  “I’m here for Form 227-K,” she said, low. “Retroactive component exemption.”

  The floor said nothing. Something behind the receptionist's desk began stamping itself rhythmically. A man in a gray doublet coughed up a ticket number and quietly died into the carpet.

  Madlenna crossed to the Number Dispensary—a tangle of pneumatic brass vines coiled through a marble kiosk. She did not pull a number.

  Instead, she lifted the flap marked Expired Appointments and jammed a wire into the exposed socket behind her left wrist. The kiosk twitched. Somewhere in the walls, a memory of being useful whirred to life.

  “Authorization override,” she whispered.

  The machine grumbled. A stale ribbon of cardstock curled from the dispenser with the number 879-Z. The ticket smelled faintly of mildew and regret. She took it.

  Then the room tilted.

  Not visibly. Not geometrically. But conceptually. The lobby’s mood recalibrated. The line reshaped itself—not lengthwise but historically. Applicants flickered in and out of simultaneity: a witch in powdered cerulean vanished mid-argument; a tired boy in a perpetual yawn loop stepped backward and forward through his own paperwork. The queue did not lead forward. It led in.

  And at its center, wrapped in carbon twine and stacked with addenda sheets thick as hymnals, stood a form labeled Eno.

  Madlenna had seen many things rendered animate by the State: Self-Justifying Tax Codes, weaponized historical footnotes, even a clerk who turned into an anecdote mid-sentence. But never had she seen a man built entirely from deferrals.

  His outline flickered with ink bleed. Marginalia feathered his shoulders. A “Note to Reviewer” pulsed faintly across his spine. He turned toward her slowly, like someone afraid of breaking sentence structure.

  “Is that… is that my number?” he asked.

  His voice was toneless—too bureaucratic to be tender, too deliberate not to be.

  Madlenna didn’t answer. She held the ticket up like a lantern.

  Eno blinked. The numbers on his cheek restructured themselves to match.

  “You’re early,” he said, quietly.

  “No,” she said. “You’re overdue.”

  The queue behind her rustled, paper-thin and carnivorous.

  Eno moved like bureaucracy incarnate—measured, apologetic, slightly damp. As he stepped from the queue’s coil, a chorus of groans issued from the line behind him. The queue re-formed instantly, closing its gap with predatory etiquette. A woman made of footnotes burst into tears. A bell rang in a department no one could name.

  “You’re not supposed to have that number,” he said, eyes flicking to the ticket still clutched in Madlenna’s metal hand. “It’s in rotation. Under Review. Marked Existence Conditional.”

  Madlenna tilted her brass eye to fix on him. “Then it’s overdue for interference.”

  Eno frowned in a way that reshuffled the margins on his face. “Interference voids processing. Interference makes the intention unreadable.”

  “Intention was forged,” she said. “Like anything worth having.”

  She didn’t mean to say that aloud.

  He took it anyway, filing it somewhere behind his collarbone. “That’s a violation.”

  “I’m aware.”

  They stared at each other. Behind them, the queue hummed in bureaucratic displeasure, adjusting its metaphor. It now resembled a set of nested filing cabinets, each cabinet breathing softly.

  “I shouldn’t be speaking with you,” Eno said. “Form relations outside authorized counters are discouraged.”

  “I’m not a form.”

  “I know,” he said quietly.

  That word again—knowing. She hated how he said it. As if he’d read her footnotes before she wrote them.

  “Fine,” she muttered. “Let’s skip the preamble. I need a bypass. Your designation grants access to Sublevel Three. Human adjacency. Mechanical revision. Vaulted protocols.”

  Eno flinched. “Sublevel Three is sealed.”

  “Not to you.”

  “I’ve never used it.”

  “Then we’ll test its integrity together.”

  He stepped back. Several loose clauses fluttered from his sleeves and dispersed into the air like startled birds. “You can’t want that. I’m unfinished. Outdated. Still under deliberation.”

  “You think you’re the only one?” Madlenna lifted her sleeve. The soldered seam along her elbow hissed, revealing a tangle of exposed filament and raw alloy. “I rebuilt half of me with parts labeled Inadmissible for Civic Use. You think I waited for permission?”

  Eno said nothing. A corner of his spine peeled slightly at the edge, revealing redacted text. It spelled the beginning of something that looked like desire.

  “I can take you to the door,” he said finally. “But I can’t guarantee it will open. Or stay open. Or mean what it says.”

  “Good,” she said. “We understand each other.”

  The queue behind them shifted, folding inward to erase their footprints. Somewhere, a signature revoked itself.

  Madlenna looked once more at the ticket. Its ink was beginning to smudge, as if embarrassed to still be present.

  “You’re wrong about intention,” Eno murmured.

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. It’s not forged. It’s filed. But not always where we think.”

  He turned toward the corridor marked FORMS AWAITING METAPHYSICAL CLARIFICATION. Its signage flickered between fonts.

  She followed him into it. The air thickened like unresolved grammar.

  The corridor sloped downward, not in distance but in certainty. The floor beneath Madlenna’s boots softened from tile to vellum, then to something like the absence of permission. Eno walked ahead, his frame taut with marginalia, his outline growing fainter where the light forgot to reach.

  “This level doesn’t technically exist,” he said. “It was requisitioned by an obsolete emotion. The Department reclassified it as ‘archival guilt’ and never cleared it for deletion.”

  Madlenna exhaled through her teeth. “So we’re trespassing in someone’s unprocessed regret.”

  “Several, actually.”

  The walls began to breathe—slow, tired, rhythmless. Cramped side-doors lined the passage, each stamped with rejection symbols: embossed denials, dripping quill strikes, bureaucratic bruises. Behind one, something wept in perfect meter.

  “Don’t touch the doors,” Eno murmured.

  “Do they touch back?”

  “They remember being opened.”

  A soft chime ahead—sublevel proximity alert. Eno paused, one foot half-faded into the boundary zone. “You should go back. There’s no alchemical record on file for you. The Vault reacts badly to… improvisation.”

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  Madlenna stepped beside him. “What do you think I’ve built my life out of?”

  Eno’s gaze flicked to her brass eye, to the microdial constantly correcting for focus drift. “That’s not regulation material.”

  “No. It works.”

  She reached for the brass lever inset in the floor. It was labeled REMAINS OF PURPOSE, INCOMPLETE. The mechanism resisted her touch—not mechanically, but philosophically.

  Eno placed a paper-slim hand over hers. His texture crinkled like memory improperly stored. “The Vault opens by contradiction,” he said. “You can’t pull it with certainty.”

  She stilled. “Then how do you—”

  “I’m a deferral. My entire self is pending.”

  He pulled.

  The floor split. Not open—apart. Like a seal that had always been waiting for him. They descended into a space that had once aspired to be a conclusion. The Vault.

  It was not a room. It was a typology.

  Shelves, floating in disordered conviction. Stacks of selves. Drafted identities, unfinished requests. One shelf bore a folder labeled “Reasonable Hope, Misplaced.” Another breathed softly and whispered rejection letters in dead dialects.

  Eno stopped before a locked cabinet. “This is where my human form was last considered. They said I was structurally unsustainable. Too many conditional clauses.”

  Madlenna crouched. The cabinet didn’t have a keyhole. It had a question.

  Etched in brass: What would you do if they said yes?

  She said nothing.

  Eno touched the cabinet. The surface rippled with recursion. “I filed to be human because I wanted the right to be wrong. To want poorly. To ache. The form requires a projected purpose. I gave them the only one I had.”

  “What was it?”

  He looked at her, and for a moment she saw the shadow of a face beneath the page.

  “To be seen. And still left unfiled.”

  Madlenna’s brass hand clenched. “Then let’s make something unarchivable.”

  Behind them, a new form fluttered into being.

  The form fluttered between them like an anxious moth. Pale cardstock, crisp corners, the unmistakable scent of recent intention. No department stamp yet. No routing. A future still unsorted.

  Eno reached for it.

  It recoiled.

  “I didn’t write this,” he said.

  “No,” Madlenna murmured. “I did.”

  His gaze turned sharp, too legible. “That’s not how it works.”

  “It is,” she said. “When the materials are unstable. When you infuse something with contradiction.”

  She had etched it with her own blood-slick oil—mechanism meeting metaphor. It was a prototype she'd sworn not to build. An alchemical accelerant: not to transform, but to disqualify. A deliberate nullification of process.

  “What did you name it?” Eno asked, voice paper-thin.

  “Amendment. Type D. ‘For Use When Meaning Must Be Preserved Without Approval.’”

  The Vault sighed around them. Folders creaked open of their own accord. A clause on shelf three wept softly and disintegrated.

  “If you use that on me,” Eno said, “I become something unrecognizable. Not man, not form. I lose my status. I can’t be processed.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “I thought you wanted me out.”

  “I did.” She met his eyes—one brass, one flawed. “Until I understood that exit equals erasure. They’ll grant you a name, Eno. Then replace everything that made you wait.”

  Eno turned to the cabinet again. The question etched on it had begun to fade.

  “What would you do if they said yes?”

  His answer felt obsolete now. Permission, once given, demanded compliance.

  “Madlenna,” he said slowly, “I don’t know who I am without waiting. If you cut me loose from that—what remains?”

  She handed him the form. Her touch left a stain. “Whatever you choose. But I’m not letting the Department edit you into someone forgettable.”

  His fingers curled around the paper.

  And the forgetting began.

  It was not violent. Not sudden. Just... omission. A subtle curl at the edge of presence. He lost the name of the room. Then the day of the week. Then the shape of his hesitation.

  Madlenna stepped closer, but he didn’t notice. Not entirely.

  “What’s your designation?” she asked, watching carefully.

  He blinked. “Eight… seven… I—”

  The number fluttered in his mouth. Then vanished.

  He looked down at the paper, confused. “Did I request something?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “To not be processed.”

  “Oh,” he said, like a man waking in a room that used to be his. “That seems… inefficient.”

  Madlenna looked away. “It was.”

  The form pulsed gently in his hands. Not as paper now, but something less tangible. A possibility. An undoing.

  He didn’t remember waiting. But he hadn’t yet left.

  “Do you know me?” she asked.

  He tilted his head. “No. But I feel like I should.”

  She smiled without grace. “Then we have time.”

  Behind them, the Vault closed.

  It did not lock. But it no longer needed to.

  They emerged from the Vault not where they entered, but somewhere liminal—between classifications, beneath clerical radar. A corridor hung like a dropped stitch in the Ministry’s weave. Fluorescent glyphs flickered above sealed doors labeled DISCARDED FUTURES and REINSTATED CAUSES, PENDING CONTEXT. Footsteps echoed in triplicate, even though they walked only once.

  Eno moved differently now. His edges had softened, blurred where bureaucracy once dictated precision. The paper grain of his skin had warmed; his joints no longer creaked with procedural memory. He walked like someone not expecting to be filed.

  Madlenna slowed. “You feel it too?”

  He nodded, not quite understanding. “Something in me is… unwriting. The waiting kept me legible. Now I don’t know what parts of me are still required.”

  A bell rang overhead. Unauthorized presence detected. Reclassification imminent.

  Madlenna pulled him into a service alcove between departments. A pneumatic tube buzzed past her head, leaking heat and old arguments.

  Eno leaned against the wall. “Do I know you?”

  “No,” she said. “But you’re asking.”

  “That feels important.”

  “It is.”

  A rustle of static crackled through the air as a door opened without unlocking. A form emerged—half-golem, half-ruling—draped in regulatory seals. It was faceless, expression outsourced to embossed legalese. One arm was a quill. The other, a stamp.

  “Entity 879-Z,” it intoned. “Your processing has resumed by default. Emotional interference is a known trigger for spontaneous adjudication.”

  “No,” Madlenna said. “He’s been amended.”

  “He’s been corrupted,” the form corrected.

  It turned to Eno. “Prepare to be completed.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Do you remember the number?” it asked.

  “I remember the line,” Eno said. “I remember how it folded when I spoke. How the others flinched when my name was called and not heard. I remember being a question nobody processed because I wasn’t useful yet.”

  The form hesitated. Paper quivered along its spine.

  “Do you remember your request?” it asked.

  Eno looked at Madlenna.

  “I don’t want to be made human by a system that forgot why it asked me to wait. I want to stay unreadable.”

  “That is not a valid submission.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  Madlenna stepped forward. “He’s already been unfiled. Anything you stamp now is graffiti.”

  The form lifted its seal.

  Madlenna reached into her coat.

  The vial was small, labeled Substance: Sentiment, Condensed. Her most illegal work—emotion-infused steam, calibrated to disrupt mechanized consensus. She shattered it against the floor.

  A hiss, like redacted breath. The form staggered, lines unraveling across its limbs. Regulations slipped from its chest like falling petals. Its ink ran.

  Then it was gone.

  Eno stared at the fading stain on the ground. “You did that for me.”

  “No,” Madlenna said. “I did it because you weren’t meant to survive their version of you.”

  He looked at her, uncertain. “What version do I belong to, then?”

  She didn’t answer.

  But she offered him her hand.

  And this time, he took it without waiting.

  They surfaced in a corridor without signage. No queue. No echoes. Just ceiling fans ticking in bureaucratic stasis and a stale smell like someone had tried to sanitize hope.

  Eno looked at his hands—flesh-like now, though uneven in texture. As if reality hadn’t decided whether he was metaphor or man. The page-quality of him was gone. No footnotes curled at his wrist. His margins had receded.

  Madlenna studied him in profile. “Do you feel different?”

  “I feel,” he said. Then added, quieter: “I think that’s the difference.”

  A pneumatic register hissed to life somewhere behind them, searching for data that no longer fit its formats. Madlenna reached into her coat again. No vials remained. Just a wrench made of contraband alloys and a slip of brass etched with her name—pre-amnesty.

  Eno saw it. “You know they’ll reissue your identity as a cautionary footnote. ‘Unauthorized edits to civic forms may result in narrative instability.’”

  She tucked the nameplate away. “Then let them. The system only respects coherence. We made contradiction hold.”

  He glanced down the hall. A door blinked into place, then blinked out again. The logic of this level was still catching up.

  “We’re not fugitives,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  “No.” She paused. “We’re anomalies.”

  He nodded, almost solemn. Then a smile cracked through—slight, unsure, but entirely his.

  “I like anomalies.”

  Silence opened between them. Not tension—absence. Space cleared for something else.

  She reached for his sleeve, lightly. The fabric didn’t crinkle like paper. It creased. He let her.

  “I should go,” she said. “There’s work to hide. Systems to rewire.”

  Eno didn’t let go. “And I should stay lost, I think. Just long enough to matter.”

  They stood in that unclassified corridor, neither assigned, neither erased. The bureaucracy would eventually correct. But not yet.

  Madlenna leaned in, forehead nearly touching his. “When they find you—what will you tell them?”

  He tilted his head. “That I was mistaken for something beautiful. That I waited, and the line never resumed.”

  She touched his cheek, one hand metal, the other warm. “Say nothing,” she said. “Make them question what’s missing.”

  Eno didn’t kiss her. But the space between them stopped being administrative. For one moment, it was voluntary.

  Then she walked—out of frame, out of system.

  And Eno turned back into the hall of almost-doors and unfiled lives, alone but not filed.

  Behind him, the air folded around the memory of their form.

  It did not require a stamp.

  It was already valid.