They had taught the children to treat dawn like currency. In the public schools they learned to bow their heads while the allotments were counted out, to line up wrists beneath cold, grey dispensers and watch the little numbers blink down when the teacher tapped the LuminPasses against the reader. Outside, the city rose in tiers of pale rectangles—apartments bleached to the same washed tone, alleys where the algae that once clung to stone were long gone, storefronts that opened only when the municipal schedule granted them seconds of usable light. Even the birds had thinned in number; what remained nested in the narrow shadows between towers where the metered glow did not intrude.
Asha Leto moved through that measured morning like a woman who could take apart and reassemble a filter in the time it took a neighbor to lock a door. Her hands still smelled faintly of silicone and metal from last night’s calibrations; she wiped them on the inside seam of her sleeve as she passed the municipal kiosk and watched the scanner blink green for the passage of the communal allotment. Tobin would be at home waiting for the allotted morning—two small windows and a soft lamp—so she allowed herself, for a breath, a private inventory of what was necessary: food, a ration of warmth, a story for the day. These lists steadied her in the same way her childhood prayers had once steadied someone else's mother.
The Department of Luminance occupied a slab of building in the middle ring of the city, its façade made of neutral composites engineered to reflect only what the central towers permitted. Inside, the hum of filtration units and the soft, clinical light calibrated to institutional settings created a feeling of false generosity. Technicians moved with practiced economy: a nod, the stretch of a glove, the exchange of data chips that carried the day's quotas. Asha signed in with a thumbprint that registered her name against a ledger she did not own; the terminal spat out the day's roster, and she made her way to Bay Seven where the domestic lines required the most precise regulation.
She had been a technician long enough to know the difference between a real fault and a phantom reading produced by jittering sensors. The system made its own liturgy: sensors whispered, the central master processed, regulations converted into beams. People accepted the litany because no one remembered what it felt like to receive light without accounting. The story of the rationing had authority: it began with a heatwave, an emergency that burned and blighted, they said, and the controls had been put in place to prevent another catastrophe. Asha had not been there then. If you asked her about the reasons for the measures, she would rehearse the official language, a litany that carried neither the grief of the past nor the sharpness of the present. She said it because saying it was practical; practicality kept Tobin alive.
That morning the diagnostics were routine. She inspected hardware, swapped a failing lens for a fresh polymer, logged the replacement against the day's maintenance schedule. A colleague joked about someone else's child, a small and brittle sound that passed without consequence. When she reached the end of her list the console pinged a line item that shouldn't have been in any technician’s daily script: an aperture with no allocation, a designation in a color reserved for classified channels. Asha's eyes narrowed as she scrolled. The entry carried a seal she did not recognize and a reference to a file marked only as an archive. The station's interface proposed no further detail. There was no error message, only the sudden and strange feeling that she was standing in a room that had tilted slightly from vertical.
She closed the panel and reopened it with a steadier hand. The file stub remained. The aperture number was logged, but there was no record of who had ordered it, no LuminPass that explained its existence. In a system built to account for every photon, an unaccounted gap was an aberration the engineers did not allow themselves to keep. Asha felt the familiar offset in her chest: curiosity braided with the old, efficient fear that it was safer to look away. She had a child to bring home. She could file a ticket, route the anomaly through the prescribed chain and watch the matter dissolve under a dozen responses. Instead she pocketed the stub in the soft fold of her mind and went on to the next calibration as if she had not seen it.