Ava had come to prefer the city at the precise instant when its appetite for light shifted from borrowing to buying. Dawn was a negotiation: shutters creaked open in staggered fashion, reflecting panels across a district tilted like obedient sunflowers, and the municipal bells—tiny brass things that chimed the hour by catching a ribbon of morning heat in a polished cuvette—would give a soft, mechanical trill. Ava liked that sound; it was the only clock she trusted not to be waving a ledger at her. She hooked her harness, snapped the leash to the anchor ring and told the reflection bank on the penthouse façade to take a breath. Micro-actuators hummed; a thin arm of mirrored tiles rotated in a precise arc and the light that had been languid across the river became a purposeful blade, sweeping the terraced orchids on the luxury client's balcony.
The wealthy client, a man with an impressive collection of pocket squares and an even more impressive irritation with turbulence in his mornings, observed from behind polarized glass. He had paid extra to keep the light crisp, arranged, and compulsory at seven twenty-three sharp. "Could you make it less theatrical?" he asked, as if the sun were a bad accompanist.
Ava smirked and adjusted a torque limiter with a fingertip. "I can smooth the sweep. It will stop apologizing for being daylight."
He blinked. "I suppose that's acceptable."
She loved small moments like that: performing delicate motion with spanners and firmware while somebody negotiated the semantics of sunlight like it was a tablecloth. Out on the terrace, one of the orchids tilted as if inclined to applause. The world beyond the glass was waking in its usual marketable increments—bakeries puffed steam and the vendors selling sugared citrus curls stacked them like little suns. Those curls had nothing to do with Ava's route orders for the day, but they perfume the early hours regardless; the smell reminded her of rooftops in childhood summers and made her smile despite herself.
Halfway through a fine-tuning sweep she felt the ping on her wrist console: an unscannable maintenance call from a sector two blocks over, a dense row of communal tenements where sunlight was sold in rationed minutes. The message had the simple urgency of someone who could not tell which end of the sun to blame. Ava dropped the torque tool into its holster with a practiced twist and hooked the harness rail. She slid down the terrace ladder, the leather of her gloves singing against aluminum, and took the lift to street level where the air smelled faintly of citrus sugar and frying tuber cakes. The city had its own breakfast rituals; none of them included apologizing for the way light behaved.
She rode the service tram that ran along the interior gutters—a narrow thing, more a maintenance trolley than public conveyance—and watched the reflection arrays of neighborhood buildings shift like gear teeth. The tram conductor, a woman who embroidered tiny suns on her uniform collar, tipped her hat at Ava as she brushed past. "Trouble on Meridian Block?" the conductor asked; she always called everything by its older name as a private joke about municipal rebranding.
Ava shook her head. "Just a dark room and an annoyed radiator."
The conductor gave a knowing whistle. "Those are never mere radiators."
Her boots clacked on the service walkway; she moved into the tenement and was met by Lila Hart, who had a clipboard and the sharp, humane impatience of someone who spent her days persuading people to take care of themselves. Lila's clinic sat two flightcases down from where the light had failed. She had a way of folding concern into a smile that made it look like competence.
"Thanks for coming, Ava," Lila said without preamble. "We had a patient in Room 6 report total darkness at noon yesterday. The monitors logged a trip to backup in the pediatric ward. It spooked the staff."
Ava followed Lila through a narrow corridor that smelled faintly of soap and hot bread. The tenant's apartment was dim in a way that felt personal; lamps burned but the windows looked like obstructed eyes. Ava crouched before the living room reflector node, palm flat across its service hatch, and started the diagnostic sequence. Her fingers found an irregular dent near a hinge, a place where someone had pried and then smoothed their tool-marks over. The micro-gimbal bearings didn't complain, but the adapter clipped into the mirror's secondary mount had a finish that didn't match any manufacturer's catalog she carried in her head.
She roughed the adapter with a thumbnail. It was aftermarket, clearly; someone had soldered a bypass and clipped a tiny relay in-line. It wasn't the kind of hack intended to fail elegantly. It was careful, clandestine. On the edge of the adapter a small symbol sat stamped into the alloy—a stylized sprig encircled by a thin ring. For a second Ava thought of herb jars in the market and the way gardeners marked their pots. The mark tugged at some old knowledge. She slid the adapter into her palm, feeling its heat and the quiet hum under the plating.