Etta Vance arrived at ten in the morning with a toolkit that smelled faintly of solder and burnt lemon peel. She liked that smell; it meant something had been fixed recently, or at least that she had been close enough to the job to catch the singe. The building on Carnelian Reach wasn't the newest on the strip—its exterior was a collage of patched panels and grafted-green terraces—but the residents called it a lattice for reasons that had nothing to do with architecture. The air in the stairwell always held the morning scent of municipal citrus mists, a state service that left the banisters sticky and the lobby smelling like a bakery that had been hired to be cheerful. Above the mail slot sat a chipped ceramic figure of a cat in a jaunty fez; Marta told Etta later it had been donated by a neighbor who believed small animals in hats brought good comms. Etta laughed at that and then adjusted a clamp.
The kit she carried fit snugly into the concavity by her hip: an affect node in its carrying case, wrapped in protective foam, with the vendor logo — a stylized hand and a pulse line — half-worn away. She tapped the case like an old friend and felt, absurdly, like a technician approaching a purring instrument. Her job was plain on paper and complicated in practice. She calibrated touch sensors, tuned feed dampers, ran baseline profiles. She made other people's proximities safe to exchange. She rarely did it for herself. Her phone pinged as she stepped through Marta's door: a cheerful message from Rafi about the paperwork that awaited at headquarters and an emoji that suggested he thought she was making something theatrical of the assignment. She sent back a single eye-roll emoji and a terse “Onsite.”
Marta's apartment smelled of slow-cooked citrus and rosemary; the living room had the cluttered warmth of a person who lived with sound. Scores lined the wall in mismatched frames, brown thumbs of a lifetime of practice, and a battered upright piano took up half the view by the window. Marta greeted her in a cardigan the color of old brass and with hands that reached for Etta like a conductor calling a new player to a familiar piece.
"I want it to be honest music," Marta said, settling Etta with tea and a pastry. "Not staged harmonies. Luca deserves more than a curated weather report of my feelings."
Etta closed the case and set the node on the coffee table with a practiced, index-finger flick that made the casing clink. She had met dozens of clients who wanted reconciliation on a schedule, or under a certain light, or with theatrical flourishes that would play well to distant watchers. Marta did not want a show. Marta wanted risk, which was paradoxically more difficult to design for than safety.