The reorganisation notice appears in her division’s general channel on Monday morning, addressed to everyone and, she understands within the first paragraph, really addressed to her.

Verification is undergoing a structural review to improve workflow efficiency across divisions. Some roles may be reassigned to align staffing with regional demand. Affected employees will be notified individually within the coming weeks.

Petra catches her eye across the office, and doesn’t need to say anything for Mara to understand that Petra has read it the same way she has.

She goes back to her queue and works through it with a steadiness she doesn’t entirely feel, closing item after item — sensor drift, census lag, a maintenance flag from a sector she’s never been to and never will go to — and thinks, not for the first time, about how thoroughly this building has trained her to keep functioning through exactly this kind of quiet, formatted threat.

At lunch she doesn’t go to the stairwell. She sits at her desk instead, eating slowly, watching the ceiling panels do their patient imitation of daylight, and does the arithmetic she’s been avoiding since the notice on her file arrived in May.

A formal notice. A pattern of access outside her scope, however careful she’s been since. A supervisor who has, twice now, warned her without escalating — which means the escalation, when it comes, will not be a surprise to anyone but her, in the specific way that inevitable things always manage to still feel sudden when they finally arrive.

She thinks: they’re not firing me. That would require admitting there’s something to fire me for.

She thinks: they’re going to reassign me somewhere quiet, somewhere with no view of Sector 9 at all, and call it efficiency, and there will be nothing to appeal because nothing will technically have been taken from me — just moved, the way everything in this system gets moved instead of denied.

She doesn’t tell Elias that evening. She has decided, watching him carry his own diagnosis with a discipline she’s only now starting to understand the cost of, that she owes him the same courtesy he’s tried, however imperfectly, to give her — the right to carry a thing alone for a while before handing it over.

She writes it in her notebook instead, one line, underlined twice: My turn is coming. I don’t know when. I’m trying to be ready.