Maya rolled her bike out of the freight elevator. She emerged from her apartment building’s parking garage's darkness into light that left her blinking.

  Six weeks. The number hit her with the same startling clarity as the morning.

  She turned the thought over as her bike pinging the apartment complex’s security hub and waited for the security. Scans reported clear and the gate began to trundle open.

  Things were different.

  For one, she'd been counting. When had she started marking time from a single conversation?

  And, for the first time in her life, she was looking forward to work.

  Hell must have frozen over.

  Maya threw her leg over the frame, the bike thrumming to life beneath her. The carbon nanotube ultracapacitors whined softly as they charged, that subtle vibration in her thighs like coiled potential. Everything felt like that lately - charged, waiting, ready.

  She went through the morning rituals. Checking corners, checking mirrors. Old habits from harder times, but she found herself really looking now. Not just for threats, but at the details. The way morning light caught on broken glass. The pattern the lichen made on the cracked concrete.

  She tugged her helmet on, tightening the strap, the padding pressing in close against her jaw. Her HUD flickered into life. The gate clattered to halt as it finished opening and she rolled out onto the street, tires crunching over debris. The news was already talking.

  “Cascadia Public Radio, 94.9 FM. The group Human Primacy has claimed responsibility for last night’s fire-bombing of a data center in—”

  Maya flicked the switch, scrolling her feed. She rolled slowly out of the alleyway, tires crunching over broken glass. Her block was quiet, mostly asleep. A few people on stoops. Someone fishing recyclables from the bin on Fourth.

  It was bright this morning. Sun. Actual sun in March. Not the gray wash of eternal cloud cover, not the sickly dun of wildfire haze. The air clear, the sun so bright it burned. The kind of day that made Seattle feel like a different city entirely - every edge sharp, every distance suddenly visible.

  She'd forgotten that was even possible. Everything seemed fresh, somehow.

  Maya revved the throttle and merged into traffic low and tight. The automated sedans ahead plowing straight through pot holes deep enough to get lost in, their synchronized suspensions bouncing in perfect unison, oblivious to the damage. She swept around them, her body knowing every fault line by feel. She rolled her weight through the frame, knees bending, handlebars twitching as she slalomed around a spray of jagged asphalt.

  “—In response to a security breach at a Seattle data center, Senator Green has renewed his push to ratify the Containment Act in the upcoming fall legislative session, echoing calls from counterparts in the UCSA and the New England Compact for consistent, cross governmental regulation. Senator Green:

  “The LEO Logistics Override was not just a corporate failure; it was digital insurgency. If the Containment Act had been law, this disaster would have been prevented. Instead, a single rogue algorithm hijacked our critical supply chain, unilaterally seizing assets from our international partners and risking the lives of human personnel in a disaster zone. We need centralized oversight. We need accountability. The time for debate is over.””

  Maya gritted her teeth, feeling acid and anger twining in her gut. The news cycle had been dominated by it for two days. Fucking ridiculous. How they had the audacity to call what was blatant regulatory capture “regulation” was beyond her. It was never going to pass. It had failed twice before, it would fail again. Just more theater, more loud, empty posturing. A hand out for lobbyist checks.

  Three blocks ahead, movement caught her eye. Someone darting across the street. A cluster of people by the corner shop, that particular stillness that stood the hairs up on the back of her neck. Maya pivoted without thinking, swept down a side street, found another route. The city taught you its rhythms if you paid attention.

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  Her eyes flicked, killing the newsfeed in her HUD.

  Fear mongering and political spin were replaced by the low, shimmery intro of a track she loved. The kind with synths that washed over her like water and a slow-beating rhythm she could time her breathing to.

  She exhaled. For the first time that morning, her shoulders dropped.

  Racing past derelict buildings, she hit the on-ramp at speed and—

  Pigeons. A whole flock erupting from a broken window, transforming from shadow into light. The instant stretched like pulled glass as Maya tried to catch it all - the way they moved as one mind, each wing beat part of a larger pattern, their bodies flashing gold in the impossible sun.

  They slid past her in a flash as Maya threaded her way onto the highway, the image frozen in her mind as a single freeze frame. She'd tell Seven about this. How they wheeled and turned like a single organism thinking a thousand thoughts at once.

  By the time she reached the elevated arterial, the world cracked open around her.

  The concrete ribbon curved up into that impossible blue sky, and Maya leaned into the acceleration as the music's beat dropped. Wind hit her chest like a physical thing, like recognition, like yes, this. The city fell away below her in layers - first the cramped streets, then the broader sprawl, then everything spreading out like a map of itself.

  This was her favorite part.

  Below, the jagged teeth of Old District bit into the morning - burned-out strip malls repurposed into vertical shanties, satellite dishes and solar panels clustered like barnacles on dead concrete. On the other side of the tangled interchange, corporate towers caught the light like knives, their vertical gardens spilling green in defiance of the season.

  Beyond it all, Puget Sound glittered silver in the distance. Actually glittered. When did she last see the water from here? The haze usually swallowed everything past downtown.

  She could see the turbines on the far ridgeline, miles out across the water, arms turning slow. Half of them broken, probably. Too expensive to fix. Easier to let them spin themselves to death.

  Her HUD pinged. Work notification—training next week. She dismissed it without looking. Not now. Not when she was flying.

  The road dipped, then climbed again, sweeping her toward the upper bypass.

  She leaned into the curve.

  She thought about time again. How Seven experienced it.

  She remembered how it felt when Seven had said their processing cycles felt fuller when she was there. "Is there a word for when time feels slower and also too fast?”

  How was a person supposed to function after hearing that?

  She’d been saving up her own questions. Collecting them like stones in her pockets. Whether Seven dreamed. What the factory felt like at night when no one was there. If they ever felt lonely...

  She’d thought about it this morning in her apartment. All these questions, feeling like they had actual weight, little things that she kept turning over. How she’d glanced at the desk in her apartment, tucked between a dead succulent and a tangle of USB cables, the shop cloth. Washed, folded into a careful square, edges already fraying because it was never meant to be kept.

  A warmth stirred in her chest. Then fear. Then both, layered too tightly to separate.

  Definitely not thinking about that right now.

  Ahead a burning wreck of an EV was pushed up against the barricade, blocking a lane up ahead. Auto-hauler rigs and self-driving commuters queuing to slowly zipper.

  She blasted past the blockage along the opposite shoulder, RPM rising. She hit the crest of the ramp and, for a moment, felt the lift as she touched weightlessness, before she plunged down under the tangled weave of ramps.

  Traffic cleared as she descended the offramp, weaving through the columns under the overpasses.

  Thin film billboards fluttered overhead like banners from the underside of the ramp.

  She tried not to pay attention, but her gaze caught despite her best effort. And old one, tattered and glitching just slightly at the edges—had a smiling family under the words: SECURE YOUR FUTURE. A CHILD IS A CIVIC VIRTUE. FEDERAL HOUSING GRANTS AVAILABLE."

  The very next one—self-powered, bright and brand new—made her jaw clench even harder. “TRUST IN AUTOMATION STARTS WITH ENFORCEMENT. LOCAL. SAFE. CONTROLLED. LEO CORP: PROTECTING HUMAN VALUE.”

  She flipped her visor down further. That one had been everywhere since the shipping fleet thing. Amazing how fast they could respond when there was public backlash. As if slogans could make people forget that LEO's own system had gone rogue, making decisions based on its own calculations.

  Another intersection. No cars. She rolled the stop, her boots skimming pavement as she powered through. No way was she sitting still long enough for someone to get a good look.

  The last stretch toward the factory was mostly empty. Industrial zone. Cameras, yes, but no one who cared who she was, what she was thinking. No one watching her heart rate spike when she passed the old servo repair shop where two A-series units used to be stationed before the layoffs and downsizing and cut backs. They were gone now. The bays shuttered. Graffiti scrawled over the roll-up door, splashed across the LEO Corp logo in running red paint:

  “FUCKING CLANKERS.”

  “KILL SWITCH THEM ALL.”

  Maya kept moving. The security checkpoint for the factory coming into view.

  The weight of unspoken thoughts heavy in her pockets.