Chapter 32 – Patterns in the Water

The shift ended at 5:14 p.m.

Shen Wei sealed Furnace 3’s daily report and wished Manager Zhao a good evening that Manager Zhao acknowledged with the distracted nod. The lab floor was emptying in its usual drift: techs filing toward the elevators, a single Stage 2 apprentice pretending to finish a report for the overtime pay that Clearsky had stopped approving two quarters ago.

Lin Yue’s station was empty.

That was unusual. Lin Yue left at 5:15, not 5:14, and only after complaining about at least one thing: the compliance forms, the furnace schedules, the rumored Middle District curfew extension. Leaving early without a goodbye was a data point he noticed and filed under Lin Yue: behavioral anomaly, recent.

He headed for the elevator.

“Stairs.” Her voice, from the corridor that branched toward the east stairwell.

He turned.

She was standing in the doorway of the stairwell, one hand holding the door open, her expression the kind of composed that wasn’t composed at all — the composure of someone who had rehearsed this and was about to discover whether the rehearsal had been adequate.

“My legs are tired,” he said.

“Humor me.”

She did not wait for an answer. She let the door swing open and stepped through, and after a beat Shen Wei followed.

The east stairwell was the one everyone used to avoid. Three floors down there was a ventilation glitch that made the air smell faintly of burnt plastic, and the cameras on the landings had been offline for at least eleven months. Clearsky’s facilities team had a standing joke about how the east stairwell was where you went when you didn’t want to be recorded receiving bad news. Lin Yue had once used it to cry about her mother’s phone call.

The door hissed shut behind them. The stairwell’s ambient hum swallowed the floor noise. Lin Yue walked down half a flight and stopped on the landing between Floors 6 and 5, arms folded, back against the wall.

He followed her down. Stopped two steps above her. Waited.

“Stage 6,” she said.

The words did what words sometimes did in small enclosed spaces. They hung.

He let his face do nothing. That was the first and most important instinct. Lin Yue would read a performance the way she read his handwriting.

“What makes you say that.”

“Don’t.” She said it softly. “Don’t make me earn it. I’ve already earned it. You know I’ve earned it.”

He came down the last two steps. Leaned against the opposite wall. The stairwell was narrow enough that they were only about four feet apart, and not for the first time in months, maybe since the day he had pocketed the pendant, he could not read the room well enough to know which way it was going to tilt.

“Tell me what you think you have,” he said. Carefully.

She almost smiled. It wasn’t a happy expression. “Fine. We’ll do it your way.”

She counted on her fingers.

“You don’t do the thing anymore,” she said, and touched her thumb. “The wrist thing. Second hour of every shift, always the left one, always two rotations clockwise. You used to do it during the certification review, you did it the whole first month of furnace 7’s calibration issue, you’ve done it for as long as I’ve known you. You stopped. About six weeks ago. I noticed at the time. I assumed you got a cream for it.”

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She touched her index finger.

“Your knee clicks. It did yesterday going up the stairs to the east observation deck — slightly, twice, right knee. Today you came down from the same stairs and it didn’t click. Either you got a cream for that too or your meridian flow is reinforcing your joints in ways that don’t happen at Stage 5.”