The Dormitory wing smelled of warm detergent and the faint metallic tang that always clung to instruments. For Mira Kael the scent was as familiar as the rhythm of her own pulse — a steady, practiced beat she kept a careful distance from. She had learned early in the Academy that comfort and caution were cousins and that a good calibrator kept both in tidy chairs by the door. Today was scheduled for routine rounds, the kind of day that meant smooth data, small smiles from caretakers, and the slow, obedient hum of the city’s maintenance grid. It was the kind of day that let you believe stability was unremarkable.
She moved through the dormitory with the calm of someone whose training had turned vigilance into a kind of quiet choreography. Children sat on low cots under muted lightbands, their faces soft and unmarked by the sudden spikes that had once shattered neighborhoods. Caretakers welcomed her with that automatic politeness citizens had learned to practice — neutral inflection, measured eye contact, a tilt of the head that conveyed gratitude without enthusiasm. Mira touched the Harmony-Reader to each child’s temple, watched the graphs trace the expected damped waveforms, and logged each entry with the precise thumbprint of a woman who trusted her instruments more than rumor.
Calibration was a language of curves and margins. Emotions were not eradicated in this city; they were negotiated, given boundaries and slower arcs so communities could function without tipping into collective frenzy. The system’s code rendered feeling into telemetry: rises, falls, decay constants. Mira knew the names of thresholds the way others knew recipes. She adjusted, nudged, verified. The children responded with the pliant calm of those who had never known the alternative, and she told herself that protection was a skill like any other — something to be practiced until the motions were smooth.
Still, there were habits her training could not remove. She listened for the difference between a waveform that filled its bounds and one that tried to keep going. She watched for spectrums that carried extra harmonics, little I-dots of frequency that implied a mind reaching past its leash. She had been praised for noticing the small things; praise was a soft current in a career that otherwise moved on protocol. That morning a caretaker mentioned a “spike” in the east wing and used the adjective the way people use weather terms — incidental, something to note in passing. Mira smiled, authorized a minor sweep, and kept moving.
The Harmony-Reader was compact and unassuming, a curved bar of pale alloy kissed by a series of lenses. When she rested it against the skull to scan, it projected a lattice of light across skin, the visible part of an algorithm that preferred to stay hidden. The device received and translated, fingers of light folding raw physiology into coherent graphs. She watched the naked output and trusted it the way a navigator trusts a map. Most days the map did not surprise her. Most days the lines behaved according to the rules she had helped enforce.
At the far end of the wing, in a quiet cluster of bunks where the youngest slept, a waveform refused the usual schedule. It rose, ragged and incandescent, and then did not diminish on the expected decay. The screen showed a living thing — a signature that hummed with an impatience that would not be coaxed into compliance. Mira blinked and recalibrated her reader, suspicion like a short, bright ache behind the teeth. She ran the sequence again. The graph responded the same way, a stubborn presence threaded through the metrics. She told herself it could be an artifact — a faulty lens, a transient bio-noise. She repeated the test with clinical steadiness and felt the small tremor of unease settle into the shape of a question.
Other patterns interdicted the ordinary: slight phase offsets, a harmonic that flirted with forbidden bands, a persistence beyond the nominal half-life. Her hands recorded the anomaly, fingers moving with the loyalty of habit. The system’s interface required certain steps when anomalies were found: flag, annotate, recommend review. She flagged the record and, as the protocol instructed, marked it for deeper inspection. Her cursor hovered a moment over the “closed” tab. The Dormitory supervisor, a woman who had been a gentle fixture here for years, met her with eyes that asked nothing but compliance. Mira logged the incident as routine. She used the terms the way the system wanted them used — noncommittal, technical, neutral. Still, the waveform lingered behind her palms like an afterimage.