The notification template appears in her queue at 08:03, filed under a reference code she has to look up.

RESIDENT COMMUNICATION — SECTOR-WIDE — INFRASTRUCTURE REVIEW STATUS. It is not addressed to her. It is not hers to close. But it has been copied to Verification for informational purposes, which means someone in Division 4 has decided that people like her should know a version of what is happening, in a form they cannot act on.

She reads it twice.

Residents of the affected corridor will be notified of any changes to allocation status as they occur. No immediate action is required at this time.

No immediate action is required at this time. She has written variations of that sentence herself, dozens of times, about zones that were not Sector 9, about people she would never meet. She has always understood it as accurate. Today it reads like something else — a sentence built to be true and useless at the same time.

She checks the distribution list. Sector 9, full corridor. Everyone.

Elias will have heard about this by now, one way or another. She thinks about calling — she has no way to call. She thinks about going after work — she went two days ago, she cannot make it a pattern without someone at Meridian Street eventually asking why her tram card shows the same route four times in ten days.

She processes the morning’s queue instead. Forty-four items. She closes them methodically, the way she always has, and notices for the first time how much of the methodical part is armour.

At 11:20 Petra stops at her desk with a mug in each hand, sets one down without asking.

“You’ve been quiet,” Petra says.

“Busy queue.”

“Everyone’s queue is busy.” Petra doesn’t sit. “There’s a review notice out for the western corridor. Division 4 stuff. You used to talk about Sector 9 a lot, a few weeks back.”

“Did I.”

“You did.” Petra looks at her for a second longer than the sentence requires, then picks her mug back up. “None of my business. Just — be careful what you’re curious about. Curiosity shows up in your metrics same as anything else.”

She goes back to her desk.

Mara holds the mug without drinking from it. The coffee goes lukewarm while she watches the light shift across the ceiling panels, seventeen minutes at a time, rising and falling, never actually changing.

She thinks: they know I’ve been curious.

She thinks: of course they do. That was never a secret. That was the whole shape of it.

She opens the next item in her queue. Sensor drift, Sector 4. Close.

She keeps working.