The city had always been quiet.
But now its quietness had texture.
Ira noticed it while sitting on one of the lower steps, watching water gather slowly along the edge of the basin before slipping back into stillness. The air carried a faint mineral coolness that settled on her skin. When she shifted, the stone beneath her palms felt warmer than it should have.
She flexed her fingers, then pressed them flat again, grounding herself in the simple reality of touch.
Since the corridor, rest had become difficult. Not because she couldn't sleep, but because waking left her with the persistent sense that something had already begun without her. A movement continuing in her absence.
Footsteps approached, soft but unhesitating.
Devansh stopped a few paces away. She heard the faint sound of his clothing as he adjusted his stance, the subtle scrape of sole against stone.
"You should eat," he said.
She glanced up. In his hand was a shallow metal bowl she hadn't seen before. Inside it lay pieces of pale fruit, their surfaces faintly damp.
"I didn't know the city had fruit," she said.
"It doesn't," he replied. "It remembers how to grow structures. Rehaan remembers how to make things edible."
She smiled faintly and accepted the bowl. The fruit was cool, slightly rough against her fingertips. When she bit into it, the taste surprised her—clean, faintly sharp, almost citrus.
Her stomach responded before her thoughts did.
She ate slowly.
Devansh sat beside her, leaving enough space that neither of them had to negotiate it.
"I don't think I lost strength," she said after a while. "But I lost… margin."
He turned his head slightly. "Explain."
"Before, when something shifted, I could feel it and step back. Now it feels like I'm standing inside it while it moves."
She gestured with the edge of the bowl. "Everything feels closer. Louder. Not in sound. In… demand."
Devansh watched the faint disturbance of water as a droplet slid from the stone.
"That is the nature of systems once they include choice," he said. "They no longer resolve around a single center."
She looked at him. "You're saying the city's learning to improvise."
"Yes."
"And it's doing it around us."
"Yes."
She exhaled slowly. "That's what scares me."
He turned more fully toward her.
"Why?"
She hesitated, then spoke. "Because improvisation doesn't preserve anything. It trades."
Devansh studied her face.
"And what do you think it will take from you?"
She didn't answer immediately.
She thought of how her awareness no longer retreated cleanly. How emotion lingered in her body after contact. How Meera's fear had left warmth in her palms instead of passing through.
"My distance," she said finally.
He did not respond.
She took another bite of fruit, then set the bowl aside.
"I used to disappear into other people," she said. "Now I don't know where I end."
The words surprised her.
They had been forming for days.
Devansh's voice was quiet. "Neither do I."
She looked at him.
He did not elaborate.
But she saw it in the way his gaze no longer moved through the city without pause.