The Songbird Circuit

Ash fell in a slow, deliberate drift, the flakes too light to be snow, too gritty to be dust. They clung to the seams of Rae’s jacket and turned her hair the color of cold concrete. People shuffled in the ration line with their heads down and wrists forward, waiting for the scanner to bless them with rice paste and algae bricks. The loudspeaker cracked and hummed like an old throat clearing a lie. “Order keeps you. Order names you.”

Rae rubbed warmth into her fingers and watched the screen above the kiosk roll through birthdays, numbers, assignments. Names rarely appeared. The Registry preferred codes that didn’t carry stories.

At the front of the line, Petar from the salvage yard glanced over his shoulder. He raised two fingers, a greeting too small for cameras to notice. “Quarter shift, Rae?”

She nodded. “Some server racks came in from the north stacks. Good copper.”

“Good scrape for your brother,” he said, rolling his wrist to tempt the scanner into hurrying. “How old now?”

“Seventeen.” She said it softly, as if the word might bruise. Jun still collected the stamps school required, still sat beneath the civic murals staring at the painted wheat and endless horizon beyond the city’s ruin. He had asked again last night about the river boats, how many bridges needed to lift for one to pass. She had answered without numbers, because numbers were never enough.

A drone skimmed the line, its lens a dispassionate pupil. People straightened. Rae kept her face neutral and imagined the inside of the machine, the batteries, the fine coils that hummed like a trapped bee. Every day, she thought of what could be repurposed, what could be softened into a tool.

The scanner beeped green. Rae collected the paste, tucked the bricks under her arm, and moved toward the salvage yard. The yard sighed with rust. Rows of old terminals stood like headstones, each with a screen face etched by sun and acid rain. She slid her way between chassis and cabling, lifted lids, counted screws into a tin. Each click a prayer to pay their rent and keep Jun in the classroom one more month.

Petar hauled a rack onto a workbench that had survived three managers. “You hear about the sweep last night?” he asked.

Rae leaned her weight into a stripped screw. “Up in Strata Five? They always come when the ash is thick.”

“This was closer. Strata Eleven east side.” He gestured toward her district without looking at her. “Someone put a name on a wall. A whole name.”

Rae swallowed. “That’s not a crime.”

“It is when the wall is the Registry’s.” Petar jerked his chin toward the city. “They think names make people think they’re real.”