The bell doesn't ring.
It's a small thing—so small most wouldn't notice. But Eira hears the absence. That quiet hole where the second morning chime should have echoed down the east corridor, signaling the start of Movement Period 2. Instead, the silence stretches, unnatural and wrong.
For a heartbeat, no one moves.
Then, like nothing ever happened, the city exhales. Synchronized footsteps resume. Eyes forward. Backs straight. Another flawless rotation. But Eira feels it crawling up her spine—a wrongness, subtle but sharp. Like something watching. Or remembering.
She walks alone through a corridor so obsessively symmetrical even the shadows fall in regulation. Light levels remain steady, adjusted precisely to emotional neutrality. Every pane of glass, every vent, every tile was designed to remind her she was never meant to stand out.
She lowers her eyes. Too quickly. A reflex.
Mistake.
She corrects—lifts her gaze, blinks twice in regulation, adjusts her posture. Perfect again. But the wall beside her glows faintly, its sensor waking. A pale green pulse runs across the surface, scanning her breath, her stance, her hesitation.
Behavioral Drift: Level 1.
She doesn't speak. Doesn't whisper an apology. Even that would be considered uncalibrated.
She passes her parents in the Hall of Adherence. They move in flawless formation with the other adults, their faces smooth and impassive. Perfect. Clean. Dead—not in body, of course. Aurelis does not allow unscheduled death. But their gestures are empty. Their eyes hold nothing. Their humanity has been edited out.
Her mother brushes against her as they pass—barely a touch. A mistake? Or something more?
Eira dares to look back. Just for a second. Her mother's eyes twitch. Not a blink. A flicker. A memory trying to resurface, maybe. But it fades as quickly as it came. She continues walking, undisturbed. Controlled.
Eira doesn't know whether to feel hope or dread.
At school, the silence sharpens.
Her assigned seat—the desk she's occupied for 6.3 years—is already filled. A girl identical in height, weight, even bone structure sits there, not even glancing up. Eira stands frozen for a moment, her mind blank.
The instructor looks at her without expression.
"Displacement?" he asks. Not truly a question—more of a warning.
"I... I don't—" Her voice cracks.
A nearby student inhales. Not shock. Not pity. Just a data point.
Eira forces her hands to still beneath her sleeves. Her knuckles ache with pressure.
The instructor's eyes narrow.
"Class. Turn."
Thirty necks pivot in unison. Faces blank. Eyes trained.
Except one.
A boy. Slightly slouched. Right hand trembling beneath his desk. His eyes don't move. He refuses—or forgets—to look at her.
The system registers the deviation. The instructor taps his interface.
Behavioral Drift: Level 2. For both of them.
Two levels from erasure.
When class ends, Eira leaves in silence. That's expected. No one will speak to her. Contact is discouraged until a subject's behavior stabilizes.
But then—something foreign brushes her hand. Something light. Folded.
Paper.
She doesn't react. Doesn't blink. Just slips it up her sleeve like it's always been there. Later, in the corner of a blind spot, she unfolds it.
I didn't turn. - 17D. Hallway after lights.
Real handwriting. Slightly uneven. Imperfect. Alive.
Her chest tightens—not from fear, exactly. From something she doesn't have a word for anymore. But it makes her pulse stutter. That's enough to make it dangerous.
The lights dim at Cycle 2100. Soft blue, soothing, like the city is tucking in its children. Another manufactured calm.
Eira lies still on her sleep surface, replicating the regulated rhythm of someone entering rest-state. Shallow breath. Stillness. No irregular eye movement. She's had years of practice.
But she doesn't sleep. She never does.
Twelve measured minutes later, she slips out of bed and into the hallway, barefoot. The floor is cold. It makes her flinch. Not enough to matter.
Her sleeves hang too long over her hands. A sizing flaw. She could have reported it. She didn't.
Hall 27, Subsection Delta. She's only been here once during a sanitation reassignment. The corridor is dark—left unused for 2.4 years due to "resource optimization."
Kael is already there, knees pulled to his chest, fingers pressed to his temple. He doesn't look up as she enters.
"I wasn't sure you'd come," he murmurs.
"I wasn't sure I should," she replies, lowering herself to sit beside him.
They don't speak for a long time. Not out of fear. Because the silence feels full. Shared. Breathing. Not manufactured.
His name is Kael. He doesn't offer it, and she doesn't ask. She just knows. Somehow.
He tells her his parents gave him the name before Final Calibration, before the system deleted their empathy. He remembers how his mother's lips shaped the syllables. He traces the sound of it in the air sometimes, silently.
Eira watches him drag his finger over the floor in a looping pattern.
"I think I used to have one too," she whispers. "A real name."
They talk. Not about rebellion. Not about escape. Just about what used to be.
Rain, she says. She thinks she remembers rain—falling without a filter. Hitting skin. Making puddles.
Kael says he used to cry when he stepped on a bug.
They wonder if those emotions are still inside them—or if they're just memory echoes.
The system would say it's malfunction. But here, it might just be survival.
"Do you ever think about what comes after this?" Kael asks.
"After what?" she replies.
"This life. This city. Us."
"I thought there wasn't supposed to be an after."
Kael meets her eyes. "That's what scares me. That we still ask."
Suddenly, a flicker pulses at the far end of the corridor. Red. Not overhead. Beneath the wall panels. Inside the circuitry.
Kael's hand closes around her wrist, steady.
"Someone saw us."
Eira goes cold. Not just with fear—but recognition.
This isn't rebellion. This is exposure. Two people, too human, too visible.
The red flicker grows. It pulses again—quicker this time.
They run.
Not like rebels. Like children who don't know where safety is.
They duck into a side chamber—an old filtration room left half-operational. The door seals behind them with a click.
Kael's hand hovers over the manual override. His breath is shaky.
"They'll send a Vigil."
Eira doesn't answer. She presses her ear to the wall grate, staring through the slits.
The corridor outside isn't dark. It's void. As if the light itself was consumed.
Then it appears.
Not a drone. Not a mech.
A person-shaped thing.
Too smooth. Too polished. Clothing seamless. No folds. No movement.
Its face is wrong—there's a smile, but it doesn't shift. Doesn't rest.
It has only one eye. A circular lens in the center of its face. Black. Empty.
The Vigil.
It walks with calm precision, tilting its head now and then. Not listening. Sensing. For residue. Thought trails. Memory static.
Kael holds his breath.
Eira tries.
She fails.
The Vigil's eye flashes white.
And she sees something.
Not the Vigil. The consequence.
Her mother—shaking. Crying. Her father begging. And something approaching—off-frame. Silent. Exact. Then: gone.
The next day, her mother served toast and didn't say her name. Her father hummed for three seconds and never again. Their smiles were wrong.
They had forgotten her.
Not on purpose.
The system had taken the memory.
Back in the chamber, Eira's body shudders. Kael rests his forehead against the cold wall, fingers still on her wrist.
"We're going to need a way to hide what we remember," he says.
Eira doesn't answer. Her eyes drift to the corner, where a faint outline of a handprint is scorched into the metal. Faint. Missed. A flaw the system forgot to erase.
She traces it gently.
A mistake that stayed.
A memory that survived.
They wait in silence until the Vigil fades.
But something inside her doesn't.