Her last morning at the old desk looks exactly like every other morning, which is somehow the part she wasn’t prepared for.

No one holds a small gathering. No one says goodbye in any way that acknowledges what’s actually happening. Petra brings coffee, sets it down, says “see you at lunch sometime, maybe,” in a voice that already knows how unlikely that is once she’s three floors away in a different division with a different badge scope. Her supervisor nods at her once across the room, a nod that could mean anything, and means, she understands now, exactly nothing — a formality completed, a workflow optimised, a person relocated the way a flagged item gets relocated: efficiently, without malice, without acknowledgment that malice was ever necessary in the first place.

She clears her desk in eleven minutes. There isn’t much to clear. She has never personalised this space, some instinct always warning her against investing anything here that couldn’t be carried out in a single small box, and she is grateful for that instinct now, walking out with almost nothing in her hands.

Regional Data Standards is on the ground floor, a different building entirely, windows facing an interior courtyard instead of the tram line. The work is exactly as described: standards, formats, the invisible plumbing that makes other divisions’ data consistent. It asks nothing of her except competence, which she has, and offers nothing back except the specific, comprehensive blankness of a job built to occupy someone rather than use them.

At the end of the first day she goes looking, out of habit, for the Sector 9 queue.

It isn’t there. Not restricted, not flagged — simply absent, as though the sector itself has been quietly subtracted from the version of the world visible to her now. She sits with that for a moment, the particular vertigo of losing access to something you’d stopped noticing you had, until it wasn’t there anymore.

She thinks: this is what erasure actually looks like. Not dramatic. Just a missing tab, a shorter list, a version of reality slightly smaller than the one you had yesterday.

She takes the tram home the old way anyway, past her stop, toward Sector 9, because nothing in the reorganisation notice said she couldn’t still go there as herself, and she intends to keep doing exactly that for as long as there’s a there to go to.