Chapter 23 :Tracks in the Dust

  If a city is to endure, it must learn to curate its own predators.

  Left to chance, teeth follow hunger into every corridor.

  Under ecological quarantine corridors, however, the host may route fear like water:

  prey buffered in safe channels, vectors trapped in sacrificial zones, culls scheduled by clock rather than claw.

  Guests often mistake this for kindness.

  — Cities of Strangers: Notes on Hospitality and Debt in the Expansion Era,

  Dr. Yara Imani (2nd ed., Ashoka Press)

  ?

  If there’s ever a phrase you don’t want stuck in your head when you’re trying to sleep in an alien city, it’s “someone abducted my corpse.”

  It kept doing laps all night.

  Every time I drifted toward actual rest, my brain helpfully replayed Mercy’s voice—matter-of-fact, a little brittle—over the image of those drones slamming into her old body and hauling it down into the deep city. Then my hindbrain would remember that the dome we were sleeping under belonged to the same system that had just gone grave-robbing in low orbit, and that was that for the next twenty minutes.

  By the time Mercy brightened the shelter walls to morning, I felt like I’d spent eight hours trying to nap in a server rack.

  The others didn’t look much better.

  Chloe sat on a crate just inside the flap, elbows on knees, mug cupped in both hands like she could absorb stability by osmosis. Frankie’s avatar had that overcaffeinated stillness he got when he’d been up all night running models instead of doing anything sane. Trevor had his tablet open but kept not looking at whatever was on it, eyes going back to the dome curve above the terrace like it might start dropping corpses next.

  Mercy’s voice was quieter than usual.

  “I have reprocessed the capture from twenty-three different angles,” she said. “The drones’ vector is consistent with a guided descent into the deep-city sector we flagged yesterday. I still cannot penetrate the masking below that band. I am… sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” I said automatically.

  Which was true.

  Didn’t help.

  Trevor cleared his throat, Governance posture snapping into place like he’d put on a uniform we couldn’t see.

  “Okay,” he said. “Ground rules.”

  Frankie made a tiny face. “We have so many rules already.”

  “We are now,” Trevor said, “sharing a planetary shell with an entity that: one, can reach into orbit faster than our own drive can reorient; two, can grab high-value hardware without asking; and three, currently treats us as ‘guests’ in a way we do not understand. That means we stay boring.”

  He tapped the terrace map Mercy had projected over the fold-out table. The green band around our little camp glowed reassuringly harmless, like a polite hazard cone.

  “We do not go looking for whatever just took Mercy’s body,” he said. “We do not try to track it. We do not test the boundaries of those red zones for fun or curiosity. Today’s objective is limited recon along the vector toward the cut relay, inside green-rated corridors, within easy retreat range. No heroics, no deep-city tourism, no—”

  “Corpse recovery quests?” Frankie offered, then winced the second the words left his mouth. “Sorry. Sorry. I heard it. I hate me too.”

  Mercy didn’t answer right away.

  “That chassis,” she said at last, “contained no active cognition. It was an interface, not… me. But the idea of it being repurposed without my consent is—”

  She cut herself off.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Unpleasant,” she finished, which was an understatement on the level of “Venus is a little warm.”

  My own skin crawled in sympathy.

  “Pretty sure ‘abducted my corpse’ should qualify for hazard pay,” I said. “Like, automatic bump in the ‘this posting sucks’ stipend.”

  “If Governance had a form for this,” Trevor said dryly, “it would be ten pages long and end with ‘no compensation available at this time.’”

  He dragged a hand down his face, the motion as much exorcism as itch.

  “But there is no Governance here,” he went on. “Just us, the ship, and a city that has its own rules. So we act like good guests. We stay where it’s told us we’re safe. We document. We do not provoke anything that can push drones into orbit.”

  Chloe nodded, eyes still on the map.

  “We keep probing along the cut relay’s bearing,” she said. “But we hug the kid-friendly routes.”

  “Kid-friendly and not corpse-accessible,” Frankie muttered. “Good. Excellent. Love that that’s a category now.”

  “Mercy,” Trevor said, “you mentioned last night you were reconfiguring your anomaly detection?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I have widened thresholds around field discontinuities and elevated any pattern that resembles the drones’ approach signature. I am also allocating additional processing to monitoring deep-city field sweeps, even though my visibility is limited. This will reduce my spare capacity for… banter.”

  She sounded almost apologetic about that.

  “We can live with slightly less banter,” I said. “We can’t live with surprise corpse heists.”

  “That,” Frankie said, “is now officially our mission patch.”

  He caught himself, grimaced.

  “Okay,” he added. “That one was worse. I’m stopping now.”

  “Please,” Mercy said softly.

  We all looked up at the dome in an awkward silence.

  Rails, terraces, light-rivers, the same as yesterday. Nothing to show that a pair of orbital pickpockets had just used it as a gravity well and drawn a line straight through Mercy’s history.

  “Right,” Trevor said. “Suit check, sled prep, light recon. We come back before local dusk. We stay inside green. Everybody ready?”

  No one said yes with any enthusiasm. But no one said no, either.

  And that, apparently, counted as consent.

  ?

  The city was still in host mode when we set out. Just… more reserved about it.

  Yesterday it had tripped over itself trying to be helpful: doors chiming, railings leaping to keep us from stubbing our existential toes. Today, the lights along the terrace woke in front of us and dimmed behind, but the pulses were slower, like a concierge on minimum wage. The railings waited half a second longer before politely growing extra height when one of us drifted too near the drop.

  “Did we hurt its feelings?” Frankie asked.

  “Unclear,” Mercy said. “I do not have access to a ‘feelings’ register.”

  We pushed the sled along the ramp, microfab humming in its patched casing, fresh sensor stakes stacked like minimalist spears. Mercy had layered a new diagnostic band over my HUD: thin, translucent arcs marking the range of her anomaly watch. Every time a field ripple twitched in the distance, a little ghost of it walked across the map, tagged with time and direction, like the trace of a magnetic field in a lab experiment.

  The terrace floors and lower rails had a dusting of pale powder—grit from the shell, decomposed organic whatever, tiny fragments of… something. Enough that you could see where things had passed.

  And there had been a lot of things.

  “Okay,” I said, crouching by the base of a balustrade. “We are not alone.”

  Directly in front of me: a crisscross of prints.

  Delicate three-toed impressions, maybe the size of my thumb, clustered around the base of a pillar and along the edge of the walkway. A thinner line of tiny ovals, evenly spaced, like something centipede-adjacent had been commuting to work. Every so often, deeper, rounder marks—pads and claw-tips—overlaid the smaller tracks, edges blurred where they’d been stepped on again.

  The dust was a palimpsest, old errands overwritten by new emergencies.

  Chloe knelt beside me, visor polarizing to get a better read on the surface.

  “Differential settling,” she murmured. “See? The dust in the small prints is more compacted. Those are older. The deeper ones are recent; the load profile matches something… what, ten kilos?”

  “Fifteen,” I said. “If local grav is still baseline. Look at the slide on that rear print.”

  She hummed agreement.

  Frankie leaned over us, upside down relative to the terrace because his avatar didn’t care about “down” unless he wanted it to.

  “Are we having a nerd-off about footprints while living inside a haunted terrarium?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Chloe and I said together.

  “Cool,” he said. “Carry on.”

  He drifted forward toward the archway at the end of the terrace. The passage beyond was still shaded, a soft blue haze smearing the details.

  “Hold up,” Trevor said. “Let Mercy scout first.”

  Mercy spun up one of the little flyers we’d printed on the upgraded microfab—a stubby, beetle-like drone the size of my hand. It zipped past Frankie and into the shadowed corridor, lattice feelers out.

  Frankie’s avatar blurred, then re-resolved a step to the side.

  “Or,” he said, “we can send our resident ghost.”

  He synced himself to the drone’s feed, his own outline half-overlapping its projected position. Then he simply leaned forward and let his torso and head flow through the arch.

  “Welcome,” he intoned, voice echoing theatrically in our ears, “to the Last City Haunted House Experience. On your left, you will see… more hallway. On your right, less hallway. Ahead, in the distance, the faint shape of yet another hallway. Terrifying.”

  “Any hostiles?” Trevor asked.

  “Negative,” Mercy said. “No predator signatures above ambient. No anomalous field spikes. No… wait.”

  She highlighted a faint line along the floor of the corridor. Tiny dotted sigils flickered at the edges of our HUDs, like the city had tried to whisper something to our systems and thought better of it halfway through.

  “Overlay?” I said.

  A strip of text resolved at the bottom of my vision. Clean, neutral, no-frills font; no pretty glyphs, no decoration.

  ECOLOGICAL QUARANTINE CORRIDOR

  TRANSIT: RESTRICTED

  I blinked at it.

  “Mercy?” Chloe said. “That’s new.”

  “It’s not,” Mercy said. “It is only new to you. I found those labels in a deeper schema layer last night while I was… not sleeping.”

  “How many of these corridors?” Trevor said.

  “Dozens,” she said. “Most outside your current envelope. A few intersecting with green-rated routes. Tags vary: transit restricted, transit suspended, transit conditional.”

  “Ecological quarantine corridor,” I repeated. “Quarantine of what?”

  “Unclear,” she said. “The metadata is sparse.”

  Frankie phased fully back through the arch and reappeared at my side, hands in pockets.

  “Well,” he said. “On the bright side, at least the haunted house has signage.”

  We followed the sled onward.

  Everywhere we walked in that outer band, the dust was busy. Little prints, big prints, scuffs, the occasional patch of something that had clearly been a puddle at some point in the last few hours. On projecting our path backward, Mercy built us a ghost of the night’s traffic: a whole invisible city of small things moving around us while we slept.

  Except… not everywhere.

  ?