There are two kinds of curiosity in the Tower, the kind with charts and committees and someone from Oversight nodding like they’re not about to soil their trousers, and the quieter kind that makes you slip into corridors with no windows and a sudden interest in ventilation reports; I prefer the latter because it feels honest and has better jokes.

  This round of professional risk began with irritation, which is my usual opening move for disasters, and Selvar had been hanging around Intake more than usual with the face he reserves for machinery that could hiss and spit if you leaned on it the wrong way. Elarina came back from her summons with the same quiet she always carries, which told me everything and nothing, and Ressa had that particular grin that says she’s already done something she ought not to have and is waiting to see whether the building will explode or applaud; the Extractor hummed and the regulators drifted in little ways you only notice if you listen like you’ve been paid to eavesdrop on the air itself. I listen too closely.

  The first time the pattern showed up I blamed myself for misreading a variable because that’s the most polite thing to do when you find something odd, but the numbers kept insisting. I was looking over intake spikes for the quarter mostly to distract myself from imagining Elarina in rooms with circular walls and clinical lighting, and when I stacked those spikes against the usual distribution curves there was a small, repeatable uptick in upper-tier allocation after certain high-yield dissolutions. It was small enough to dismiss with a shrug, but dismissing things never sat well with me, so I fed the problem the one thing that always gets me into trouble: cross-referencing. I pulled Academy ritual schedules—which are tucked away if you’re tidy about your illicit queries—and then I rifled through upper-tier grid reports, archived under the useful-sounding name of infrastructure transparency and therefore mildly taboo.

  I combined intake events, Academy dates, and grid shifts into one model, and they matched with a precision that made my teeth ache. The Academy’s big shows, the ones that make the elders look benevolent and give the streets something to applaud, lined up with increased output from the Tower by intervals so regular you could set a clock by them. I fiddled with lag times, transmission delay, environmental loss, and even threw in noise variables to prove myself wrong, but the pattern refused to be embarrassed. I removed the obvious outliers just to torture the dataset, and it still stood up, neat and intentional. What I had under my cursor was no accident. Someone had optimized grief into schedule-friendly energy.

  That made me want to know where the energy went. Distribution logs aren’t in my clearance tier, but clearance is easy enough paperwork if you know where the seams are, and I’d written parts of the redundancy script three years back so I know the seams well enough to be dangerous. I routed through archival maintenance protocols, labeled myself as predictive calibration, and slid into the macro-flow ledger. The interface looked like it wanted to be boring on purpose, so I let it and it paid me back by revealing a conduit the public plans don’t show: a secondary channel that branches off the main conversion stream deep under the Tower and climbs a shaft straight into the Khali reserve grid. Its name was sterile—Auxiliary Stabilization Channel—but the channel does no stabilizing that matters; it climbs and deposits into Academy reserves before the big rituals. I magnified the map until the pixels mushed together and traced the path with my fingertip. Intake conversion feeds the main grid, yes, but a steady slice siphons upward through that auxiliary path and lands in the reserves timed for ceremony.

  You could call it civic engineering if you like euphemisms. I called it powering ritual magic with Ghariq extraction, and truthfully, felt both insulted and unsurprised. Structured memory gives a cleaner, steadier converted output, and the more ordered the attachment, the better the energy behaves. That fact is the kind of ugly efficiency the Khali have never put on a pamphlet.

  I checked the conduit flows against ritual amplification logs and the curves matched like bad poetry: spike, surge, swell, flare. If this were incompetence it would be chaotic and someone would have tripped over it; instead it was tidy and deliberate and therefore worse, because tidy means deliberate intent. My stomach tightened the way it does when theory becomes real, and I filtered yields down to D-level structured entries because those are the ones that lodge like splinters: objects kept, rituals rehearsed, family patterns signed and sealed. There it was, a family unit in the ledger, D-level source, elevated fixation, cedar logged in neat administrative handwriting and then quietly upgraded post-processing, which is a bureaucrat’s way of saying someone decided this one was valuable. I remembered asking a question at the time, the silence that fell like a lid, and then the reassignment that they waved off as clerical but which had teeth.

  So I did the thing you’re not supposed to do unless you enjoy being watched: I tried to download restricted logs. You can’t pull everything without attracting attention, so you take enough to try and figure out the essence of the thing. I selected partial logs for three ritual cycles, auxiliary conduit flows, intake classifications, and allocation percentages after conversion, compressed them into a narrow archive, slid it behind a bland predictive model file, and began the transfer to a personal buffer that does not exist in the tidy books. Halfway through the interface hiccupped like it was thinking about calling security. I throttled the transfer to mimic background sync and injected a tiny error in a maintenance log to make the system sigh and go back to sleep, and the archive completed. I might have set off a silent alert, which is the Tower’s favorite way to watch you: no alarms, no blunt accusations, only patience and observation.

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  A patient watch is a worse messenger than an angry one because it sits and learns your habits. I pretended to verify intake metrics for thirty seconds, then closed the ledger, scrubbed my trail as clean as the system allowed, and went back to my main console. The Extractor hummed under the floor and though nothing changed on the gauges, everything felt different - like a room you’ve walked into and realized someone rearranged the furniture. I watched people move, watched Elarina’s figure at her station, and saw the compression in her field signature during the dissolutions that matter. They hadn’t erased me outright when they moved me; they’d made me peripheral enough to be ignored and nearby enough to notice. I had found a family D-level source tied to structured yield and that meant the output had value beyond civic maintenance.

  Being right in the Tower doesn’t warm you up or prove you clever; it puts you closer to the blade. I checked the archive again and the siphon wasn’t huge, but it was steady, timed to ritual windows, with slight dips in mid-tier allocation beforehand - small transfers, enough to make ceremony brighter without crashing anyone’s lights. The people whose memories fed those surges would never wake to see their loss turned into a sky show; they’d feel the city stay even and assume that was normal. Maybe stability is fine for most. I don’t want a city that grows and gorges itself on the sleeplessness of some.

  My thoughts turned to Elarina. Selvar told her she altered conversion metrics; I had seen the compression in her signature. If structured memory is premium fuel, then someone who resists total dissolution is both a problem to be fixed and a resource to be catalogued. The Tower won’t study her to protect her. They’ll study her to see what they can make of her. Understanding beats erasure because it means testing and repeating and, eventually, replication. That conclusion sat like a pebble in my mouth.

  I stood up, which made Ressa look over and raise a single eyebrow that asks a full sentence without needing words, and I shook my head a fraction to say “not yet” and “watch this,” which is the kind of gesture we use when we’re about to be foolish. I grabbed a slate with the archive tucked behind layers of harmless output, and walked toward Elarina like someone who might ask about lunch schedules. Halfway across, the lighting shifted a fraction and a lower chime slid through the corridor; a small panel announced that Oversight lockdown had been initiated, and doors closed with that smooth, indifferent efficiency the Tower prefers. People paused, as they do, because Tower changes make everyone look up.

  I kept moving toward the most ordinary path I could find, the secondary passage near admin rooms, because the least dramatic route is the least suspicious, and that door sealed a beat later. Ressa met my eye and her face hardened; she was all business now. The timing felt pointed even if cause felt murky. I checked the slate discreetly; the archive was intact and no purge had hit my buffer, but silence doesn’t mean ignorance, only that someone is taking notes.

  Security moved along the upper walkway with casual presence that changes the room without shouting. Conversations resumed on their ordinary track. The Extractor hummed on, unconcerned, and I tried a hundred little options in my head - send the archive out and risk loud detection, hide it and hope no one opens that maintenance alcove, or wait and let them come to me. Waiting felt like a confession.

  So I walked up to Elarina’s station and acted like the most boring man in the building, which is the best cover I have. When I got close I saw the compression again, the same small resistance running through the lattice, and she noticed because she always does; people who hold other people’s pain feel shifts like the rest of us feel a draft.

  “Busy?” I asked, keeping the tone casual.

  “Always,” she said without looking straight at me, hands on the console after the intake finished.

  “I have a modeling question,” I said, like a man about to discuss insurance, “about structured-yield variance and post-conversion smoothing.”

  Her eyes found mine. “You like dangerous phrasing,” she said.

  “Occupational hazard,” I replied.

  A guard paused near the central column and scanned the floor with that slow look that means someone has been told to be present. I kept my voice low. “I think the Tower optimizes beyond civic stability, specifically how that auxiliary channel is managed.”

  Her focus tightened by a hair. “Don’t,” she said.

  “I already have,” I answered, angling the slate so she could tell I had something without seeing it. That small signal felt reassuring for both of us. The nearest security door opened and two Oversight officers stepped onto the floor; they looked at her first and the room shifted in that particular way it does when authority arrives without an apology. I felt my stomach drop because this was climbing out of curiosity and into something that required answers I couldn’t safely give.

  One of them said her name, clear and deliberate. The Extractor hummed on and the auxiliary conduit kept doing its quiet job under our feet. Proof existed and someone had decided to watch more closely. As usual, I had picked the worst possible time to be right.