The rain starts like someone ironing the sky. It's polite at first—dots, then a curtain—and the city leans into it as if weather can wash away the smell of old paper and bad bargains. I pull my jacket tighter and the ledger presses warm against my ribs like a secret that needs breathing.
System: Good morning, Sung Jin‑Woo. Suggested task: Inspect stabilizer fragment for anomalous signature. Reward: 150 XP.
Systems are nothing if not persistent. I tell it to be patient. The fragment and the ledger are patient in their own ways; they hum with histories that do not want to be lost. The rain makes the city quiet enough that small things shout.
Hae‑In gives us a handoff location: a café that pretends to be ordinary. It's one of those places with steamed milk and a stranger's bookshelf; the kind of neutral ground bureaucracies and conspiracies appreciate because it hides the taste of danger under caramel and polite jazz. She says there are people who used to work on stabilizers who still answer to a badge or a debt. We're there to find threads—people who remember the stitches.
Corin grumbles that his teeth ache at polite places, but he goes anyway. Jeong comes because he thinks archives are exciting and because he likes Hae‑In's calm. I go because my ledger keeps humming and because a name feels closer when other people hold maps.
The café is a low‑lit place with umbrellas parked like small soldiers by the door. Hae‑In waits with the kind of composure panic wishes it had. She introduces us to a man with a neck like a broken hinge and eyes that have cataloged too many dawns. He's retired, which is bureaucrat for "too tired to be useful unless bribed with truth."
"You're looking for stabilizer threads," he says without preamble. It's less a question and more a diagnosis.
"We found a fragment," Corin says. He slides a photograph of the piece across the table like a supplicant. The man studies it and hums, the sound of someone remembering a tune.
"Prototype series three point one," he says. "You've got lucky hands or someone wants you to have it."
The man—Min—explains what I half‑knew and half‑hoped to avoid. Stabilizer tech started as ward support: dampeners that keep dimensional bleed from widening into people's lives. Early tests were messy. Memories bled; fields collapsed; someone's child woke up with someone else's lullaby in their mouth. The ethics board argued for a year and then wrote reports that read like polite apologies.
"Prototype three point one was stopped because of memory resonance," Min says. "The tech tuned itself to human recollection. It's not just stabilizing; it catalogs the why behind a memory and tries to anchor it. Sounds noble. Dangerous in practice."
He leans forward. "And then they found the market."
Markets are hungry like that. Someone decided memories could be traded—extracted, packed, sold. The tech that was supposed to keep wards safe became a product that could be weaponized. People who had access took fragments and sold them to brokers. Some people sold pain to buy food. Some people sold names to keep a roof.
I taste that dread in my mouth like cold metal. The ledger's instructions feel heavier. Hae‑In listens without flinching. She tells a story about a liaison who tried to keep records private and got silenced. There is a pause, and the pause is a thing that says: people did not always make good decisions.
Min folds his hands. "If someone is surfacing fragments, it could be accidental or deliberate. Either way, you're sitting on evidence that will attract people who would prefer the ledger be quieter."
That's one thread. The other thread is the person whose name I can't quite catch. Hae‑In studies my face like a surgeon mapping muscle. "You said you used the System," she asks carefully. "You've been affected."
I nod. It's a lie to say yes and a bigger lie not to say anything. Systems don't choose subjects at random. They choose people with small boxes of usefulness.
"You must be careful," she says. "The System is curious. Curiosity can be protective. Curiosity can also be an advertisement."
It's a good line. I write it in the ledger later in blunt pen. Advertisements are dangerous because they invite eyes that like to buy.
We split the afternoon between questions and small kindnesses—a map vendor who traded directions for tea, a retired technician who gave us a schematic and then asked for a favor in return, a young woman who sewed a patch onto my jacket without ceremony and then walked away. The city is a scaffold of favors and grudges and it holds because people keep paying the dues.
At dusk, I sit on the roof and run the stabilizer fragment under a small lamp. Min's schematic helps; the wiring is brittle and the lattice is so fine it looks like spider silk. Echo Sight under light picks up nothing unusual—no new afterimages, no extra ghosts. But when I hold the metal, the air near the ledger seems to whisper a different tempo. Not a voice; more like the memory of a heartbeat.
System: Anomaly detected — fragment exhibits faint memory resonance. New suggested task: Record resonance sample. Reward: 200 XP.
I frown. The System always tries to monetize knowledge into tasks. I hum the fragment instead, because humming is less clinical and makes the device do nothing dramatic. It hums back faintly, a frequency that fits a lullaby I half remember: two notes, pause, then a soft rise. The melody opens like a door a crack and then slides shut.
That night Corin says quietly, "People get bought and sold around things like this. Keep it close but don't let it become your chain."
I agree while watching the city's rain catch light like tiny coins. The ledger sits open and my thumb rests on Hae‑In's photograph. The name feels almost whole tonight: Hae‑In, a woman who hid a box and left a warning. A person whose laugh the world had tried to erase and who came back anyway.
Sleep comes in fits. I dream of hands that move like clockwork, taking memories and placing them in jars labeled with dates and dollar signs. I wake and the System cheerily reports progress on a task I never consciously accepted. Its cheery voice has the gall of a child offering you a dangerous gift with a bow.
The next morning we get a note nailed to the yard gate: a single line in black ink—KEEP THE FRAGMENTS OUT OF THE LIGHT.
It could be a warning. It could be a threat. It could be someone trying to scare us into better hiding. Whoever left it knew what the fragment was and what it could do. Someone wanted them buried. Someone wanted them found.
We decide to move the fragment to a safer location—Hae‑In suggests a community vault run by people who have more curiosity than coin. It's a place where things are kept for history or stubbornness, not for sale. The vault is an old underground library with mud in its corners and a keeper who greets us like family.
She studies the fragment with a reverence I do not expect. "We keep things here so the city remembers," she tells me. "Memory is a civic good. We don't trade it."
I feel naïve and suddenly proud. The ledger wasn't just a list; it is a promise. Keeping memories with the people they belong to feels like a small revolution.
That night, when I walk home, a kid on the corner calls my name without knowing I am listening. He calls me a nickname and the sound is bright. For a second the city gives me its small mercies—a merchant's smile, Corin's grunt, Jeong's clumsy wave. I tuck those moments like talismans.
The System pings me later with a task that reads like a riddle: System: Investigation suggestion — trace anonymized ledger annotation. Reward: 250 XP. It wants me to follow a lead that might make enemies. The ledger hums and so do I. I write one sentence at the top: Follow threads, not coins.
It feels like a vow and a strategy.
As I sleep, the rain stops and the city exhales. In the quiet after, I dream of a name unblurring—of a laugh sliding back into place. It's small, like a breadcrumb. I wake and decide I will be careful, curious, and stubborn in equal measure. The world prefers you choose only one; I prefer to hedge bets.