Meira's smile was a closed thing, like a shell. When the man stepped out from shadow — not the rooftop watcher, not the hooded figure — he carried himself with the grace of someone who had rehearsed the world's reactions. He wore a coat that smelled faintly of ozone and new paper; his eyes slid over me with the bored interest of a man at a gallery opening.
"You shouldn't have come to the harbor alone," he said, polite as a headmaster. "It's messy this time of night."
Meira didn't answer him. She kept a small, steady hand on my sleeve as if I might be a candle that could sputter out. The man smiled and it was the wrong kind of warmth — the way an advert smiles in the corner of a screen while it sells you something you don't need.
"You two know each other?" he asked, with a civility that didn't reach his voice.
Meira's jaw tightened. "We do now," she said. Her eyes flicked to the ruined phone in my hand and her pupils narrowed like someone reading a page with a knife pressed to it.
The man took a step closer, as if proximity could compel truth. He smelled like all the offices that have been built since the world decided neatness is a virtue. "Zoh," he said, and the name slipped out like a coin. "You look better in person than on paper."
"You know him?" I asked before Meira could.
The man tipped his head. "I know what he used to be." His smile thinned. "And I know what he is now."
Meira's hand tightened. "You should go," she told him. "We're leaving."
He laughed only slightly. "You don't get to tell me where to stand, Miss—"
"Meira," she supplied, as if she were correcting a used book's title.
The man's eyes flicked to hers for a heartbeat that lasted longer than it had any right to. Recognition sparked there — like two people remembering a secret handshake — then vanished. "Meira," he repeated, a word used like a measuring device. "That name brings me inconvenient memories."
Inconvenience is how polite systems describe things that threaten their order. I had discovered that definition slowly, over the last handful of hours.
The man's hand found something under his coat: a small device, silver and flat, the kind of ugly little gadget that does administrative cruelty. He pressed a button. For a second, nothing happened. Then the air wheezed, like a breath expelled after holding it too long. A metallic hum threaded across the quay and the pigeons scattered into nervous blurs.
Meira flinched as if the sound had unstitched something inside her. Then she moved — swiftly, a motion that betrayed training more than panic. She stepped between the man and me as if her body could form a shield. Her chin lifted. "Leave," she said. "You don't want to be here when that happens."
The man's smile hardened into an expression that was almost pity. "You know what they'll do if they find him, don't you?" he asked. "You know what they'll do to him when they decide 'it' is worth studying."
A fresh twinge of fear — sharp and clean — slid through me. Study is the polite word for dissection; labs call dominion a technique. The city's posters, the DO NOT REMEMBER stamp, the ECHO card — everything stitched to the same seam.
"Who are 'they'?" I asked, because questions are a kind of keystone. Whoever held the arch held the city together.
The man's eyes had the soft cruelty of someone who likes corners. "People with mandates," he said. "People who think they can order life back into neat drawers. People who have made mistakes with things like you."
Meira's laugh was a thin wire. "Not people," she said. "Names. They have names, and you wear one when you work for them."
The man's smile was a blade. "We all wear names." He stepped back and folded his hands like a polite executioner. "I have paperwork," he said. "And guidelines. Protocols."
Protocol is a word that smells like bleach.
The hum in the air found my ruined phone again — the device chirped, a little metallic cough, and an image loaded so slowly it was almost a dare. On the cracked screen appeared a photo of a lab room, bright and clinical. Inside it, a body lay on a table under a sheet. A hand sticks out from the sheets, fingers like the pale petals of a moonflower. There's a shadow of someone bending over it. Meira's name was scrawled in the corner of the image — not in her hand, but in a hurry. Beneath it, in blocky letters, a message: DELIVER IF RETURNS.
My stomach hollowed. The image hung in the air like a verdict. Meira's breath came out short. She looked like someone who had been given a sentence and remembered the crime.
"You asked me to do that," she said, softly. Her thumb rubbed the seam of my jacket as if to steady both of us. "If you ever woke — if you ever came back — you told me to tell you: Don't trust the living. "
I had the sudden, absurd urge to laugh because life was turning into a riddle that needed a prize behind it. "You knew me?" I asked. "You knew I'd wake?"
Meira's face changed in the way that lit a lamp: it softened, then sharpened as memory and pain realigned. "I knew the probability," she said. "You were… important. Important people make mistakes that echo." She said the last word like a curse.
Important people. The phrase landed like a stone and sank.
"Why me?" I asked. "What was I?"
Meira's eyes found the harbor water, dark and indifferent. "You were an experiment," she said. "A prototype for something they wanted to make permanent. They named projects like beliefs: tidy and impersonal." Her fingers trembled when she said it. "You were Project Echo's first success."
The name hit like a hand. Echo. The card in my pocket, the stamp, the lighter, the lab photo — all threads pulled taut.
"Then why am I… walking?" I asked. The question felt like a challenge. "Why am I not… gone?"
"Because something interrupted them." Meira's jaw set. "Something they didn't plan for. And when something interrupts a pattern, it leaves edges. Edges are where mistakes bleed through."
A sound — quick, like a dropped tray — woke something else nearby. Meira's head snapped up. Her hand found mine and in a movement too fast to name, she yanked me toward the stacked crates where a narrow gap led to service stairs. "Move," she hissed. "This way. Now."
We slipped behind the crates with the clumsy grace of people who have not perfected stealth. The man by the quay watched, hands folded, the silhouette of someone who'd called a rehearsal. "You can run," he called after us, voice polished, "but errors are what we come back for."
We pushed through the back-door labyrinth of the harbor, old boxes rubbing our shoulders like guilty friends. Meira's lungs were tight; her breathing spoke of a woman who'd rehearsed panic into protocol. She didn't let go of my sleeve.
"Who was that?" I panted. "Why would they want you—"
"No," she cut me off, meaning the question was useless. "He's from a department that handles reclamations. They find things that should not be free." She spat the last word like it had been coal. "If they think you belong to a file, they will pursue you until you are catalogued again."
The ladder at the end of the passage spat us onto a rooftop that smelled of old rain and weeds in concrete. Lights blinked in distant buildings like the slow breathing of a sleeping animal. In the far distance, the city hummed on, oblivious.
Meira sank to a low ledge and for a moment she looked very young, very tired. "You asked me to look out for you," she said. "You asked me to watch the list. You asked me to stop them if they ever— if you ever woke."
I wanted to ask her how she knew the list, why my mother's name had been circled, why the ECHO card felt like a brand on my memory, but the rooftop pressed urgent things into the air: the smell of rain, the distant keening of engines, and the tiny, unavoidable fact that somewhere below, someone in a suit had decided to come back for me.
A noise that was not the city — close, mechanical, patient — started again somewhere behind the warehouse. We both turned.
Footsteps, precise, like a metronome. The sound of boots on metal steps. A shadow reached the rooftop ladder and a shape began to climb.
Meira's hand tightened on my sleeve, fingernails whispering skin. Her face folded into a plan that did not have a happy end.
"Go," she said, the word like a command and a blessing all at once.
I wanted to obey and I wanted to stay. I wanted to tear every paper that bore my name and feed it to the harbor gulls. But the person climbing the ladder had a rhythm to their breath that spoke of certainty. They were not improvising.
As the top of the ladder scraped the roof, light caught on something cold and rounded: the rim of a gas mask, glass reflecting our small figures in warped, comic shapes. Behind that, a voice — distorted, bureaucratic, close — barked, "Subject Zoh — do not resist. Containment protocol: active."
Meira's mouth opened, and in the space of a heartbeat she did something I will not forget: she moved like a line being cut, sudden and decisive. She pushed me toward the far edge of the roof and then, without looking back, stepped forward to meet whoever came up the ladder.
The ladder clanged. A silhouette filled the opening.
Hands grabbed me, rough and sure. I stumbled and the city tilted in a way that made the world a poor painting. Meira shouted — something like my name and something like a curse — and a pair of gloved arms closed around her as well.
The rooftop spun into a bright, sudden chaos: shouts, the scrape of leather, the metallic clack of equipment. Someone pressed a small object to my temple — cold, clinical — and a light bloomed behind my eyes.
In that last clean slice of sense before everything dulled, I heard a voice from the ladder, tinny and oddly gentle through the mask: "Don't struggle, Zoh. It makes cataloguing difficult."
And then a hand covered my mouth, and the world went black.