If there’s one thing the Tower is exceptionally good at, it’s pretending nothing has changed while quietly rearranging your life around you, the way a careful host might move furniture an inch at a time until you start bumping your shins and blaming your own clumsiness.

  Three days after my adjustment, I was reassigned to Oversight Support, which sounds impressive until you realise it mostly involves watching other people do their jobs and not touching anything unless explicitly told to, preferably in writing, preferably twice. My console had been stripped down to the bare minimum, my permissions politely euthanised, and someone had very thoughtfully added a delay to my access time, just in case I felt like getting clever and pressing buttons before thinking about the consequences.

  They were not wrong to worry.

  Oversight Support sits at a strange angle on the floor, close enough to the Extractor to feel its hum but far enough away that you’re never mistaken for someone essential, and the first thing I noticed when I stepped back into the Tower was that the building hadn’t missed me at all. The lights came on at the same precise interval, the floor panels gleamed with the same obsessive care, and the air carried that familiar, filtered nothing-smell that makes you feel like your lungs are being politely tolerated rather than welcomed.

  Ressa spotted me before I’d even logged in.

  “They didn’t tell us where you went,” she said, pushing a cup into my hands without asking, which is how you know she was genuinely relieved. “That’s how you know it was bad.”

  “I was on a spa retreat,” I said, taking the cup. “Very exclusive. Lots of straps. Minimal dignity.”

  She snorted and looked me over in the blunt way of someone who has seen too many people come back wrong. “You look worse for it.”

  “I’ll put that on the brochure.”

  She leaned closer, lowering her voice. “You remember everything?”

  I opened my mouth, closed it again, and shrugged. “Define everything.”

  She grimaced. “That’s not a good sign.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But it’s a familiar one.”

  Across the floor, Elarina worked.

  I tried not to stare. Failed immediately. There was something about her that pulled the eye, not beauty exactly, not in the clean, ornamental way the upper Khali preferred, but presence, or density, as if she occupied her space fully while others slowly receded from theirs. Most Intakers wore the job in their bodies: the hollowed eyes, the greyed skin, the careful way they moved as though trying not to spill themselves.

  Elarina didn’t have that.

  She looked the same as she always had, which in that environment was unsettling in a way I didn’t have a word for yet.

  That should have comforted me.

  It didn’t.

  Oversight work is tedious by design. You watch the metrics scroll, you flag what the system tells you to flag, and you don’t ask why certain patterns never seem to register as anomalies no matter how often they repeat. I was halfway through pretending to review a harmless intake when the Extractor dipped.

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  Not enough to trigger alarms, not enough to draw official attention, but enough to make the hum hitch, like a machine clearing its throat before saying something it shouldn’t.

  I felt it in my teeth.

  Across the floor, Elarina stiffened.

  That was new.

  Later, when the shift smoothed itself out and the system pretended it had never faltered, I found her near the observation rail, standing with her hands folded in front of her in that way that suggested restraint rather than calm.

  “You felt that too,” I said, keeping my tone light because heavy things tend to fall faster when acknowledged.

  She didn’t look at me. “Yes.”

  “That’s not standard behaviour,” I said. “For you or the machine.”

  “So is pretending it didn’t happen,” she replied.

  I leaned on the rail, careful not to look like I was leaning on the rail, which is a skill you develop quickly when you’re trying not to draw attention. “They’ve been moving records,” I said. “Old ones. Quietly. The kind of quiet that usually means someone upstairs is nervous.”

  Her head turned then, just enough to acknowledge me.

  “I know,” she said.

  That was… strange.

  “What do you mean, you know?” I asked, because if there was one thing I hadn’t signed up for, it was Elarina being ahead of me.

  “I mean I have seen it,” she said, “and I mean I am not supposed to have.”

  I laughed, because that’s what I do when I’m standing near something that could swallow me whole and digest me politely. “You realise that’s the kind of sentence that gets people reassigned to recycling.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Which is why I haven’t said it out loud until now.”

  We stood there for a moment, the Extractor humming between us like an eavesdropper pretending to sleep.

  “They adjusted me,” I said eventually, because the words were pressing for air. “They took something. I can feel the shape of it, like a missing step on a staircase I still try to climb.”

  She nodded once. “They take what resists classification.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s reassuring. I’ve always been fond of resisting.”

  Her mouth twitched, almost a smile, which felt like a small victory under the circumstances.

  At the end of the day, Pilon didn’t leave.

  That in itself was unusual. Most people fled the floor the moment their shift ended, like the air outside might wash them clean by proximity alone, but Pilon lingered by her station, fingers worrying the edge of the console, eyes darting toward the Extractor as if expecting it to speak.

  “You shouldn’t stay late,” I said gently, because despite everything I wasn’t trying to scare her. “They don’t like that.”

  “They never did,” she muttered, and there was an edge to it I hadn’t heard before.

  Elarina joined us, her presence shifting the space without effort. “Pilon.”

  Pilon flinched, then exhaled shakily. “You saw it today,” she said, not quite meeting Elarina’s eyes.

  Elarina didn’t deny it.

  I looked between them, feeling like I’d wandered into the middle of a conversation that had started years before I arrived. “I’m missing something,” I said.

  “Yes,” Elarina replied. “So are we.”

  Pilon laughed then, sharp and brittle, the sound of someone whose humour has been sharpened into a blade because it was the only thing left to hold onto. “I used to think magic was something you added to the world,” she said. “Turns out it’s just very good accounting.”

  I didn’t like the way she said that, or the way Elarina didn’t contradict her.

  Walking home that night through the Khali district, the lights above too clean and too perfect to belong to anyone I knew, I found myself thinking about academies - about children standing barefoot in rooms they didn’t choose, learning to pull power from places they were told were empty, learning which questions were clever and which ones ended careers.

  I thought about machines that hummed a little louder when the right kind of memory passed through them, and about systems that didn’t so much hide their secrets as process them into something more manageable.

  I still don’t know what they took from me.

  But I’m starting to understand why they were afraid of what I might keep.

  And for the first time since I put on my badge, I realised something else too, something that sat cold in my chest without asking permission:

  The Tower isn’t hiding its secrets.

  It’s refining them.

  And somehow, impossibly, Elarina is not being refined at all.