They kept him busy.
Not in the way of drills and lectures, but in the small, surgical ways a life stitches itself back together: paperwork to sign, interviews to decline, sensors to stand before while technicians adjusted filters and recalibrated instruments.
Shinra moved through the motions like someone wearing someone else's clothes. The fabric fit well enough. He still felt the seams.
Yuna shadowed him without crowding. That was her way: close enough to step in when he stumbled, invisible when he didn't need protection.
Mizuki called it "rehab by logistics." Kaizen called it "keeping his hands out of trouble." Riku called it "entertainment if he decides to collapse spectacularly again."
He would have laughed if the sound hadn't felt foreign in his chest.
***
In the lab, the shard hummed in its box like a moth against glass.
Mizuki refused to leave it alone. She had staff rotating nights so the object never sat entirely unobserved. Data flowed from its containment like a quiet river—temperature anomalies, micro-vibrational outputs, weak sigils that slipped in and out of noise.
"Something's embedded in its matrix," she told him one morning, thumb tracing a waveform on her tablet. "Not tech by our standard. Not Breach-pattern either. More… old. Structural signatures that echo archaic constructs."
Shinra watched the live feed of the shard as if observing one of his own old scars through a new mirror.
"A relic," he said.
"A ledger fragment," she corrected. "A node that once belonged to a network. The root's fragments are repurposing what they find. This is a piece that's being tested for integration. Whoever seeded it here probably hoped the root would accept it."
"Or hoped it would fail," he said.
Mizuki's eyes sharpened. "Failure teaches faster. That's why you saw the change in the field. The root tried one approach in the Convergence. You erased its avatar. That erased its expectation. Now it's doing smaller, surgical tests. Anchors. Beacons."
She slid the tablet his way. A map bloomed—dots pulsing along the city like a nervous system lighting up.
"Hotspots cluster around the Convergence," she said. "And near places you visited before containment. Someone put the shard here deliberately."
"Someone," Shinra repeated. The memory overlay that came when she said it was a crowded chamber, a hand sliding something into a slot, a seal.
He shook it off.
Arios hummed, tired. They are cataloging patterns faster than they used to. Their methods are modular now.
"Are we sure we can't just blow the shard to dust?" Riku asked, less a question than a line of defense for his anxiety.
"Because then we'd remove an opportunity to learn," Mizuki answered. "Knowledge is a weapon too. We want to see what it does when it's allowed to behave."
"Knowledge that makes people like me paranoid," Riku muttered.
"You keep us human," Hana said, tossing a small smile at him. "We need that."
Shinra drew his fingers along the edge of the tablet. "If they're learning from me," he said slowly, "they'll start to adapt in ways we can't simulate. We'll always be reacting instead of being the architects."
Mizuki nodded. "Then we become the architects of their response. We track, then we preempt. Less blunt force, more trap-laying."
He liked the plan because it involved less swinging and more thought. He liked it because it kept people alive.
***
That afternoon they took a shorter patrol to a residential block where three anchors had appeared over the previous week.
Anchors were small, almost laughably so when you first saw them—a filament, a shard of compressed void, a whisper of wrong air. They fit into the world the way grit fits between teeth.
But they were dangerous in that quiet way that made an ocean rise.
The team moved through low buildings, sunlight slanting against rusted iron and glass. Children peered from doorways; an old woman watered a balcony plant and raised a small, superstitious hand. People were learning to live with the new scale of fear. They adjusted their habits. They changed their streets.
Shinra kept his hands in his pockets.
It felt safer.
They found the first anchor in a collapsed stoop, half-buried in dirt. It looked like nothing much: a dark sliver, pitted and warm to the touch, humming at a frequency only the lab could read.
"Hive node?" Kaizen guessed.
"No," Mizuki said. "But it's broadcasting identifiers now. Small packets of data, quanta-scale metadata. It's like a flag that says 'here'—and then the root pings back routes."
"And that's bad because—" Riku began.
"Because then the root can point avatars with purpose," Hana finished. "It stops being random and becomes surgical."
Shinra crouched and watched the anchor as if it were a living thing. He felt Arios tighten its focus inside him. Marker noted. Peripheral acknowledgment received.
A child crept closer, curiosity overriding caution. Shinra straightened slowly and stepped between the kid and the anchor, a small, careful motion.
"You can't touch that," he said quietly. "It'll hurt you."
The child's eyes widened. "Are you a wizard?" he whispered.
Shinra's smile was tired, but real. "No. Just a man who likes his hands."
The child beamed, the trouble in his face dimming for a breath.
Watching them, Shinra felt a pull beneath the pull—the echo of an older responsibility, a memory he had not earned in this life. It came as a faint ache at the base of his skull and then slipped away.
He understood why people had once placed names on him, why they had made altars and bindings.
Names made things accountable. Names made things hold.
He didn't want that for himself.
But he also understood that when others put his name into their mouths—fearful and grateful both—they were trying to hold something they did not understand.
***
They neutralized the anchor with a containment weave that Hana and Mizuki built like a delicate cage. It pulsed under the glass and then sat quiet.
Data streamed in: micro-transmissions, timestamps, a lattice of references that coalesced into a map of probable next-seed locations.
"That's the vector," Mizuki said. "We can predict probable propagation."
They fed the data to Authority as a courtesy, careful to redact anything that would endanger Sanctum's position.
Ryou called the transmission clean. His voice through the comm was brisk; he asked practical questions and made practical promises.
Kurogane's name echoed in the margins of the log, always present like a stern punctuation.
Mizuki's brow furrowed. "They'll want more custody," she said. "And the Envoy won't be subtle."
"We already know that," Kaizen replied.
"So we act before they can ask," Shinra said.
That possibility—preemptive action—felt like stepping off a cliff with a map in hand.
It was unsettling. Useful.
***
As they finished, the girl from the market watched them from the end of the lane.
She had a way of blending into the day, like something that belonged to the light there. Now she stood watching with shoulders square as if she'd rehearsed the stance all afternoon.
Shinra caught sight of her and felt, briefly, the old palace overlay—a corridor, a torch. He blinked it away and saw only a young woman, no older than twenty-five, hair cropped to chin length, jacket patched at the elbow. The pendant at her throat was a dull disc on a frayed cord.
She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, then pulled her hood up as if to hide the pendant.
Mizuki frowned. "She's been flagged by our peripheral sweeps," she said quietly.
"Observer?" Yuna asked.
"Low probability hostile," Mizuki replied. "But there's something else: a residual echo on her left scapula. Micro-signatures that match an era fragment we catalogued months ago. Not Breach tech, not current. Old."
Shinra's heart kicked—not loud, not a storm, but a nudge like a hand remembering a shape.
The girl turned as if sensing the attention. For the briefest second, their eyes locked.
She didn't move toward them. She didn't smile or call. She simply folded herself back into the crowd and drifted away.
Arios hummed, anxious now. She is a variable. We should observe.
Shinra watched the place where she had been until she disappeared entirely.
He had the odd, private feeling that someone had placed a fingertip on a book he'd once written and then closed the cover again.
***
That night, as they ate thin soup in the communal hall, each bite tasted of metal and caution.
They spoke in small fragments—plans, predictions, worklist items. No one let sentiment crack the surface too long.
Kaizen leaned in, lowering his voice. "If the root can anchor and route, we need to deny it nodes."
"How?" Yuna asked.
"Hard to remove what you can't find," he said. "But we can make candidates hostile to anchoring. We can set false positives. Let it waste its cycles."
Mizuki's eyes gleamed with circuits. "A feedback net. We feed it garbage. Make it learn wrong things."
"Then when it tries to aim," Riku said, "we hit the aimers instead."
The plan felt clever and dangerous in the same measure.
Shinra listened without interrupting. He hadn't decided whether he wanted to be the lure or the shield.
Later, when most had drifted off to rest, he walked the roof alone.
The city lay beneath like a scattered constellation. Lights winked, breath rose from vents, sirens were a faint, remembered rhythm.
He thought of the child in the alley, the woman with the pendant, the shard humming under glass.
A sound came from the edge of the roof—a soft footstep. He turned.
The girl was there.
She stood in the shadow, hood down, pendant visible in the dim light.
"You shouldn't be up here," Shinra said.
"You shouldn't either," she replied.
Her voice was low, steady, not afraid at all.
He studied her face. There was a map of weather there: careful lines, little storms.
"Who are you?" he asked.
She didn't answer at once. She tilted her head, considering.
"I watch," she said finally. "I keep things that remember from being loud."
"Why?" he asked.
She folded her hands inside her sleeves. "Because if you wake something, it's fair to know what it might want."
Arias, inside him, scrambled: She carries an echo. Not marked as hostile. Unknown origin. Probability of connection low but rising.
He asked, "Do you know that name?"
She glanced at him with something almost like recognition, then looked back out across the city.
"No," she said. "But there are stories. Old things in basements. Old songs. My grandmother hummed a tune she said meant 'hold on.' She had a pendant like that one."
He noticed her fingers touch the cord at her throat, a small, nervous gesture.
"Why watch?" he asked again.
"Because I don't want to be surprised," she said. "Because people who keep things—books, names, little relics—don't get told when the past comes knocking. They have to be ready."
"Ready for what?" Shinra asked.
"For when the past remembers them," she said. "And comes asking."
Her eyes were bright in the thin light.
He could have asked how she'd known to be on the roof. He could have told her to leave, to go home, to vanish into the market and forget she had seen him.
Instead, he simply said, "Thank you for watching."
She gave a small, almost imperceptible bow.
"You should sleep," she said. "You'll be more dangerous when you're tired."
He allowed himself a laugh that was half a groan.
"Good advice," he said.
She moved away into the darkness, steps careful and cat-quiet.
When she was gone, he sat a long time watching the city breathe.
Arias spoke, quieter than before. She's a thread. Watch the thread.
He nodded to no one.
The net had learned a new aim. New nodes glowed on Mizuki's map. The little shard under glass pulsed with patient heat.
They would not find the end of it tonight.
But they would not be surprised either.
The root had learned to aim.
They would learn to be unpredictable.