So, so breathe, Mirakei, breathe.

  I was now in what they called a review hold. Fancy name for detention, I guess. The kind of wording that makes you think there might be a complimentary sandwich involved, when really what you get is a locked room and time to reconsider all your life choices.

  Sneaky, or smart of them, to have the word hold mean a locked room with one LOUD clock, no window, and a chair bolted to the floor. Ridiculous, really - why of all things would I steal a chair? I may only be Middle Khali, but I have some pride. That clock, though, that clock looks like an antique. If I were going to commit a crime, I’d at least make it a classy one.

  They brought me down three levels below Administration. Not the intake halls. Not the maintenance corridors. Lower. The kind of lower that makes your ears pop and your stomach do that small, traitorous flip. The air changed too - cleaner, filtered too many times, like someone had decided that oxygen itself was a security risk. It smelled like nothing, which was worse than smelling like metal, because at least metal admitted it was there.

  A woman in a grey jacket took my badge. She did not give me a receipt, which felt rude, considering how much paperwork this place usually loved.

  “This is standard,” she said.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “For anomalies,” she said, and opened the door like that explained everything and I was just behind on my reading.

  The room was small. White. A table. Two chairs. A wall panel with a soft blue light that stayed on whether anyone touched it or not, which I decided was probably there to make people feel calmer and instead just made me wonder what it was watching.

  “Sit,” she said.

  I sat, because I’m very cooperative when furniture is bolted to the floor and people are using official voices.

  They left me alone for a while. Long enough for my legs to cramp and my thoughts to run ahead of me in stupid circles. The kind that start with this will be fine and end with you are definitely being quietly erased from existence. I rehearsed explanations I would never be asked to give and apologies for things I hadn’t actually done, which is apparently a hobby of mine under stress.

  I kept seeing the console.

  DO NOT ASSIGN - FAMILY D-LEVEL SOURCE.

  It had a nice rhythm to it, for something that had just possibly wrecked my career.

  And I kept seeing Elarina’s face when it came up. Not shock. Not fear. Control. The kind of control you get from people who have learned to keep the work a private thing, the way some people learn to keep secrets and others learn to keep plants alive. I am in the second group. She is very clearly in the first.

  I told myself it was a mistake. A system glitch. A bad tag. But systems at the Tower did not make that kind of mistake. People did. And people like me did not get to decide what was a mistake and what was a problem. We got to decide how to look calm while being informed.

  My father always says: You don’t argue with the floor you’re standing on. You just try not to fall through it. He says this like floors are known for taking suggestions.

  We were Khali, yes. But not the kind that lived in the high towers with private lifts and soundproof rooms. My parents had a good apartment. Clean. Two bedrooms. A view of the east bridges if you leaned out far enough and didn’t mind the sense that you might fall to your death, which really adds to the charm.

  Middle Khali. The kind that worked hard to look like they belonged higher, which mostly meant pretending you weren’t counting how many times you’d been passed over for something.

  The higher Khali had other advantages. They trained in academies: sealed schools, tutors, the kinds of instructors who taught you to move things with thought, to dye a garment with a gesture, to make machines answer your voice. They emerged with gifts and the confidence those gifts bought, which, as far as I could tell, was the real magic. They designed the laws we followed and the machines we tended.

  Middle Khali learned not to ask why. We learned to nod, to file, to wait, and to be very grateful about it.

  When I got accepted to the Extraction Tower, my mother cried.

  Not quietly.

  Open-mouthed, hands-to-face crying, right there in the kitchen while the kettle boiled dry. Very dramatic. If anyone had been watching, they’d have thought I’d been elected to something important.

  “You’ve made it,” she kept saying. “You’ve made it.”

  What she meant was: You’ve gone somewhere we couldn’t.

  What she also meant was: Don’t you dare mess this up.

  Jalia was different. She was sixteen and already certain of the world, which I found deeply suspicious. She wanted this work the way other girls wanted marriage or a family trade. She watched me put on my badge like it was something holy. She drew the Tower on scrap paper and wrote my name at the base. She called the intake floor beauty and reverence and said she would stand where I stood.

  I told her not to be stupid. She looked at me steadily and told me not to be afraid. That sort of sturdiness is annoying and admirable in equal measure when it comes from someone who routinely leaves sticky notes out for you.

  The door opened.

  A man came in. Older. Dark jacket. No insignia, which somehow made it worse.

  He did not sit right away. He leaned against the wall and looked at me like he was measuring how much trouble I was, possibly in units I did not want to know.

  “Mirakei,” he said. Not a question.

  “Yes.”

  “You initiated an override during an unscheduled intake.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were instructed not to.”

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  I swallowed. My mouth felt dry. Then I tried to make my answer sound like something from a training manual instead of what it actually was.

  “I thought it was a system error.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I thought I could correct it.”

  “Why?”

  Why? Why?

  Take your pick, friend: because I was new and didn’t want to look useless. Because my parents had told all our neighbors I worked here, and one of their daughters, Pilon, had auburn hair, a lisp that was rather fetching, and made a mean sandwich (don't look at me like that. I didn't break into their flat to steal sandwiches. I broke in one time to see if they had a coaxial cable. The sandwich was on the counter.) Because Jalia had drawn the Tower with my name. Because the badge meant something. Because I wanted, very badly, to be the sort of person who fixed things instead of reporting them.

  “I didn’t want to slow down intake,” I said.

  He watched me for a long moment, the kind of silence that feels like it’s filling out a form about you.

  “That is not your decision to make.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  He finally sat down.

  “What you saw on that console was restricted.”

  “I didn’t mean to see it.”

  “That is irrelevant.”

  He tapped something on a tablet I hadn’t noticed before.

  “Do you know what Family D-level means?”

  “No.”

  “That is correct. You do not.”

  My hands were sweating. I rubbed them on my trousers and immediately regretted it, because now my trousers were also involved.

  “There will be a procedural correction,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we will make sure this incident does not affect your work.”

  I didn’t like how he said your work.

  “Does that mean I’m fired?”

  “No.”

  Relief came too fast. It made me dizzy.

  “It means you will be adjusted,” he said.

  The word sat between us, doing absolutely nothing helpful.

  “Adjusted how?” I asked.

  “You will forget what you saw.”

  I laughed once, by accident. A small sound. Not my best work.

  “That’s not possible,” I said.

  “It is,” he said. “You work in a building that removes things people can’t carry. Don’t insult us by pretending you don’t understand how.”

  I thought of Elarina again. How she stood and watched the Extractor. How steady she was. I’d seen Intakers before; enough to know the signs. The hollowed eyes. The pallid faces. The way their shoulders curved inward, as if making less space for themselves. The way their hands sometimes trembled even when they were still.

  Elarina didn’t have that.

  She looked… intact.

  Not untouched. Not soft. But solid in a way the others weren’t. Her face held its shape. Her posture didn’t fold. She looked like someone who slept, which in that building felt like a minor miracle.

  When the error hit, I panicked. I didn’t want my first major action on the floor to be a report. I wanted to fix it. To show I could handle responsibility.

  Middle Khali thinking. Earnest. Loud. Almost charming, if it didn’t get you into trouble.

  Elarina told me not to override.

  Her voice wasn’t sharp. It was worse than that. It was certain.

  I overrode anyway.

  The memory wasn’t mine.

  I knew that immediately. The smell. Cedar. The weight of the pen. The feeling of someone else’s hands, someone else’s grief. It slid past me like cold air.

  But it went into her.

  I saw it happen.

  Her breath caught. Her eyes unfocused for half a second, then locked back into place.

  I’ve replayed that moment more times than I care to admit.

  Not because of the memory itself.

  Because of what she did with it. She didn’t stagger or gasp. She didn’t show the strain I’ve seen in others when something sticks.

  She simply exhaled and absorbed it, like it was a vitamin prescribed by a doctor who’d never been wrong in their life.

  “I didn’t take anything,” I said. “I just saw a line of text.”

  “That is enough,” he said.

  They moved me to another room.

  This one had a different chair. Softer. Straps on the arms, not tight yet, but waiting in a way that felt personal.

  A woman with a flat voice explained the process.

  “It’s not removal,” she said. “It’s smoothing. Redirection. You won’t feel pain. You may feel tired.”

  I almost laughed again. That was what we told clients.

  “Will I remember today?” I asked.

  “You’ll remember being reviewed,” she said. “You won’t remember why.”

  “What if I try to remember?”

  She looked at me then. Really looked.

  “People always try,” she said. “It doesn’t help.”

  They strapped my arms.

  Not tight. Just enough to make it clear I wasn’t leaving.

  I thought of Jalia. Her drawings. Her questions. Her certainty that the Tower was where she belonged.

  The machine they used was smaller than the Extractor. Quieter. It didn’t hum. It made a soft, rhythmic sound, like someone sleeping nearby, which did absolutely nothing to make me feel better.

  “Just relax,” the woman said.

  I considered laughing, decided against it, and tried to think of my mother’s kitchen. The kettle. The chipped mug my father used. Jalia on the couch with her legs over the armrest, pretending not to listen to adult conversations while soaking up every word.

  Then something pressed against my thoughts.

  Not pain.

  Pressure.

  Like hands rearranging a drawer in my head.

  I saw the console line again, for a second.

  DO NOT ASSIGN — FAMILY D—

  It cut off.

  The rest slid away.

  The smell of cedar tried to surface. I don’t know why. It wasn’t mine. But it came anyway, faint and wrong.

  Then that went too.

  The pressure eased.

  “How do you feel?” the woman asked.

  “Tired,” I said.

  “That’s normal.”

  They unstrapped me.

  When I stood, my legs shook, which felt unfair, since they had not been consulted about any of this.

  The man in the dark jacket met me in the hallway.

  “You’ll return to work in three days,” he said. “Different floor.”

  “Am I in trouble?” I asked.

  He considered that.

  “You’re still employed,” he said. “That’s the answer you need.”

  As they walked me out, I tried to think of what I had seen.

  There was a blank place where something should have been.

  I could feel the shape of it.

  Like a word on the tip of my tongue, which is possibly the most irritating sensation a person can have without anyone else noticing.

  “Don’t talk about today,” he said. “Not to coworkers. Not to family.”

  “My sister—”

  “Especially not to family,” he said.

  I nodded.

  I told myself that was fine.

  I told myself that forgetting was safer.

  But as I left the lower levels and rode the lift up, which was far too clean and far too quiet, I had the sense that something important had been moved out of my reach.

  Not taken; just placed somewhere I'd never be able to find it.

  And for the first time since I got my badge, I was afraid not of failing, but of doing well.

  My mother will be so proud.