Ev Park smelled the city before she saw it: a cold, late-summer tang of metal and jasmine that pooled between the towers like a polite rumor. She adjusted the strap of her kit bag, the weight of tools settling against the hollow of her shoulder the way old guilt used to settle against bone. The high-rise lobby hummed with a squat, bureaucratic cheer—potted palms with LED soil tags, a concierge who offered bottled tea with a barcode smile, a poster for the Night of Nearness festival fluttering beside the mailboxes. Above her, the building's presence nodes pinged soft, accomplished beeps as if they wanted credit for keeping strangers less lonely.
She didn't want credit. She wanted to finish the job and go home early enough to make a real dinner for once—no rehydrated pouches, no tasteless delivery boxes—something that did not pretend connection. The building manager met her at the elevator with urgent eyebrows and a hand that left a damp smudge on the clipboard.
"Someone nearly leaned too far over the balcony," he said. "Late shift. Felt… a pulse, like a push." His voice had the lightness of someone who regrets small things immediately.
Ev tightened the canvas strap and let the elevator take her up. She moved through the unit like a practiced surgeon. Rented furniture, a wall of indoor vines that required an app to mind their watering schedule, a glass door that misted when the afternoon humidity reached the building's comfort threshold. A man in a thrifted band shirt sat on his balcony railing and rubbed his temple. He'd been unhurt but shaky, which mattered. Presence nodes could push, when someone abused them with artful amplifiers, and that pushing was new enough to acquire adjectives.
Ev opened the node's panel with the flat blade of her multitool and surveyed the nest of coax and ribbon cables. She pried a connector free, smelled the faint ozone of an overdriven amplifier and felt the tiny hairs along her forearm tighten. The board's traces gleamed under the lens. Someone had soldered on a nonstandard jumper—clean work, careful—but the pattern of modulation was unfamiliar in the way a foreign accent is unfamiliar: the cadence was wrong but it had a laughably recognizable inflection.
She pulled up the node's log on her tablet. Timestamps scrolled like a small argument. At a glance she recognized something that made her throat go dry: a handshake signature she had built once, months ago, in a corner of a life she tried always not to map on her workday. Her fingers hovered over the screen.