A Minor Code

Ada Mercer kept one foot against the window frame and let the rain decide how the morning sounded. The city exhaled water and diesel beyond the glass: a low, persistent hiss that filled the intervals between the archive's humming machines. Inside the room, spools turned with the slow dignity of old clocks. Light slanted through the high windows and dust made faint halos in the air. Ada's hands moved like a pianist's — careful, patient, never hurried — as she threaded a strip of brittle tape onto a restoration head. The machine's arms lowered with the mechanical politeness of a machine that had spent a life handling voices.

At twenty-eight she had learned to hear what others ignored. In the tiny soundproof booth attached to the city's Audio Archive, she could pull a conversation out of static, recover a laugh from a flood of hiss, solve the last syllable of a name swallowed by age. It was precise work: a mixture of craft, stubbornness, and a little intuition that manifested as a prickle at the base of her neck. She rubbed the tape between gloved fingers and smelled ionic dust and lemon solvent, and the smell urged memories up like bubbles — the watchmaker's shop where she'd worked summers as a teen, the distant bar where she learned to keep quiet under a man who talked too long.

"You should go to bed sometime," Tomás said, in the voice of a man who had learned advice didn't need to be believed.

He watched from his stool at the counter. Tomás had been the archive's senior engineer since before Ada was born: small, pigeon-chested, with a beard like a broken bristle brush and a steady blink. Even when she missed anchor points in a file, he'd know which transformer hummed false. He smelled of cold coffee and lamp oil. "You sound pinched. The tape will forgive you, but your fingers won't."

Ada smiled without showing her teeth. "It won't forgive itself if I don't fix Mr. Voss's spool."

Tomás's eyes went soft. "Eliot Voss. Old city councilor? Missing voice?"

She adjusted the azimuth and listened, letting the restoration head run. The engineers' room was small enough that the slightest change in frequency felt like a door opening. The reel played: a mayoral speech, velvet and brittle, then a moment of ambient noise — a scrape and then a sequence of faint metallic clicks under the speech, so low it might have been a heartbeat. Ada leaned forward. The clicks repeated with a rhythm she couldn't place. They were not tape damage. They had a clarity that suggested someone had placed them there, like watermarks on paper.