A municipal notice crawled its practiced face across public boards:
REGISTER LEGACY NODES.
UNREGISTERED CODE WILL BE PURGED UNDER SECTION 14B: NETWORK INTEGRITY AND CIVIL SAFETY.
COMPLIANCE CENTERS OPEN AT DAWN. SCHEDULED LULLABY AT NOON.
Bureaucracy is a lullaby with different notes. It soothes by threat. Same rhythm. Different words.
Mara woke with someone else's hands pressing a damp cloth to her brow. They smelled of salt and thyme and the faint ash of an old stove. For one unsteady moment the room filled with things that did not belong to her memory: small backpacks lined like teeth along a wall, a varnished plaque catching light, a woman repeating a verse until her voice fit the city's required tempo.
"Mara… please forgive me…" the woman said. The words reached her without context.
Mara gasped at the absence that followed. She woke up, like she did most days, in a cold sweat — her "dreams."
She pressed her palm over the scar on her forearm, just to be sure she was still in her body. Morning light pulsed through a dead holosign in the corridor outside.
The scar lived on the inside of her forearm, a pale crescent that flared when weather or memory pressed too hard. She touched it each morning the way other people checked the time: a quick, private gesture to confirm continuity. The habit mattered more than any pass or ration slip. It reminded her of the day she learned how to move without being noticed — not because she was clever, but because the city taught her to be small.
The hub woke in stages. Light leaked through the broken sign. A tram rumbled three streets away. Somewhere below, a kettle seller banged lids together in a steady rhythm. The transit market was a place of second chances and abandoned things.
Once, it had been a proper market. Later, a shelter for objects people could not bring themselves to throw away.
Raincoats missing sleeves. Toys with cracked faces. A stack of paper tickets fused together by fire. Every object carried the outline of a regret.
Mara moved through them like a shadow because shadows did not count as intent. She could lift a coin from a distracted merchant and be gone before his hand closed. She could trade a favor for a boiled egg, help a vendor fix broken articles or do a half-hour's watch over a vending column. Her economy was small trades and quiet exits.
She slept in a small room with her roommate Sene and a plant everyone forgot to water.
No matter how far the world had advanced technologically, the daily struggle for a living persisted. If they sold well, they ate better. If they didn't, they both felt hunger differently.
Mara kept her possessions in a tin beneath the mattress, folded with a care that bordered on ritual.
People in the market spoke in patterns. They hummed grocery lists. They folded grief into barganing.
"Did the board stutter last night?" someone asked nearby. "Which one?"
"The west feed."
"Boards always stutter." "Yeah, but not like that."
"Don't worry. If it mattered, they'd tell us."
A child two stalls away clutched a patched doll and let a half-line slip from her mouth.
"—sleep now, sleep—" she sang.
The doll answered with a note that did not fit the key. The child blinked, startled. "That's wrong," she said.
"It's fine," her guardian replied without looking. "Eat."
"But it skipped," the child insisted.
"Everything skips," the woman said, already counting coins.
Mara watched carefully. Who would notice? Who would smile? Who would turn a wrong note into gossip?
She stopped at the booth that sold kettle spouts and old interface straps. The seller — Feron
— had a scar over his left eye and a grin that never reached it.
"Well, look who showed up," Feron said. "Up for business today, brat?"
"Only if you're paying," Mara said.
Feron snorted. "I always pay. Just not in ways people like."
"That's not paying."
"That's economics," he said, tapping the counter. "Watch the backs today. Light fingers out."
Mara traded a spool of wire for a favor: keep watch for a man who liked to take pockets from backs. Small debts. Reliable returns. A woman brushed past and touched Mara's forearm — blessing or test. Mara touched the scar in response and both of them moved on satisfied.
On the far side of the market, something tugged at her sleeve. A frayed blanket protruded from a burned household unit. Curiosity was a dangerous currency, but Mara had a little to spend. She crouched, palms raw from last night's work, and reached beneath the cloth.
A crescent-shaped keepsong slept there, small and warm, as if it had been wrapped against sorrow. The metal was hand-worn; the blanket had been folded around it like an offering. When Mara lifted it the warmth spilled into her palm — bright and clean, like lemon peel rubbed across skin — so private she felt it settle under her ribs.
On the underside of the casing, a line had been scrawled in hasty ink — three words, small enough to be private and large enough to matter. Mara did not read them aloud.
She could sell it. Men would trade a week's rations for a humming relic. She could hand it to compliance and tell the simple truth: found in a corner. She could burn it and sleep without uncertainty.
She did none of those things. Instead, without understanding why, Mara slid the keepsong into the pocket beneath her coat and pressed it to her chest for a second as if checking for a pulse. It felt less like theft and more like sheltering something fragile — her hands deciding before her mind had finished weighing the arithmetic.
As she walked the market, voices braided around her like a blanket.
"Anyone hearing the new feed?" "Quiet. They said maintenance."
"Maintenance for what?"
"Everything."
A public board cycled notices in calm language meant to smooth panic into order:
REGISTER LEGACY NODES. UNREGISTERED CODE WILL BE PURGED UNDER SECTION 14B. COMPLIANCE CENTERS OPEN AT DAWN.
A crackle threaded the feed.
Mara did not look up. She wrapped the blanket's corner in her fist and took the old stairwell toward the sleeping rooms.
Later, in the stairwell's half-light, a vending column hummed on outdated firmware. It sold kettles and scrap metal and sometimes did things it wasn't meant to do.
It hiccupped.
"Don't kick it," someone muttered from the stairs.
"I didn't even touch it," Mara said.
"Ah They do that sometimes," the man answered. "Old ones remember things."
Suddenly, A sound slipped into her ear — not a full broadcast, just a shard of machine timbre that most people would mistake for static.
—listen—
The syllable brushed the edge of meaning and retreated. The keepsong pulsed at her fingertips then — deeper this time — sending a vibration through her teeth, a pressure behind the eyes. Not music. Not words. An instruction that felt like a fingertip on the back of the hand.
Mara pressed it closer to her ribs, as if it were a second heart. It did not resolve into a song. It was a fragment. A breath without notes.
She ignored it and walked on.
When she reached the room they called home — two bunks and a plant that nearly died twice a week — Sene still slept, a thin shape beneath a rumpled blanket.
Mara placed the keepsong inside the tin with her other possessions. Next to a spool of wire. Next to a folded photograph she never showed anyone. The photograph was the closest thing she had to an explanation of her being.
Outside, the public board flickered again. Someone laughed. Someone else grunted. The building eased itself toward sleep with old, necessary music.