Fragments of Axiom

The city woke like something trying to remember itself — neon eyelids blinking against a permanent drizzle, trains that breathed steam onto glass towers, and the low hum of routers humming like distant bees. Nora Riggs moved through that hum with the certainty of habit; the sound of her boots on wet concrete was a metronome for a life arranged around data points and deadlines. She lived in a narrow flat above a laundromat where the detergent soap left the air smelling faintly of lemon and rust. A single plant leaned toward the streetlight on her sill, and every morning she pressed her palm to its cool leaves as if that could steady the pulse she kept for herself.

She was twenty-nine, exact in the way she kept her passwords and the way she rolled her sleeves — the faint scar along her left knuckle from a soldering iron that had been there since a night she refused to leave a failing drive. Her hair curled at the nape of her neck, a nervous map of old decisions. People at the office called her precise and irritable; Mara, on the corner, called her by name and left a paper cup of coffee on the steps sometimes. She liked the small softness of those gestures because inside the server rooms her work was a series of cold truths: patterns, anomalies, timestamps that didn't belong.

The morning began with a message from Iris — half a sentence and a string of symbols that Nora's eye picked as an overlay, not just a text. Iris was a student, twenty-two, restless and wrapped in paint-splattered scarves, the kind of person who hoarded stray chords of songs and kept notebooks full of color. Her last message came with a timestamp that had been tampered with. Nora saw that before she saw the three empty dots: no reply, then nothing. The text had a single attached image: the corner of a studio wall with a red symbol painted in a momentary blur.

At her office, SecuraCorp's glass facade caught the rain like a finger dragged across a screen. Nora's badge card folded against her ribs with a familiar weight. She passed through biometric scanners and fluorescent corridors where people moved like variables in routines, and at her terminal the world reduced to hex and arrays. The anomaly pulsed on her screen: a packet trail that should have dissolved into noise but had instead left a trace — neat, almost architectural. Someone had carved a doorway into the city's data and set a lock on it.

She let her fingers rest on the keyboard and felt, absurdly, the way a diver might feel the pressure in her ears before descent. There was somebody at the other end who had made sure the doorway left a clue. The clue was not for her, not directly, but fingerprints could be broadened into leads. She saved the trace into a folder labeled TEMP and closed it behind a layer of redundancy. The folder's name was a poor comfort; by noon she would be drinking bitter, automatic coffee and telling herself not to tilt the balance too far. But Iris's name hadn't left her hands — it kept returning like an echo she could not silence.