Neon Veil

Asha Cole worked nights the way some people breathed: with a rhythm that belonged to the city instead of to her. The neon and the braided light-rails looked ornamental to most citizens, but she had learned to read them as surgeons read pulses. She was a maintenance technician for the municipal lighting network, a job that meant climbing behind facades, listening to transformers, and replacing capacitors with hands stained by grease. There was a private difference in her work that she did not place on applications; she could see memory when it lived in light. To others a sign was a sign; to her the glow sometimes held a thin film of moments, trapped and layered like residue on glass. Those moments were not useful in the register of commerce, but they were valuable in a quieter, more dangerous way. The city bought them and banked them, taking a stitch out of grief and dimming rage so people could sleep and traffic could flow. It was a compromise that had saved neighborhoods after the catastrophe the elders spoke of without naming, and it had become municipal policy as immovable as bridges.

On a night when the rain had left the streets brushed and bright, she climbed the metal ladder behind a diner to service a music club's sign. The sound of the district was close and warm: a kettle hissing, two men arguing about a game, a saxophone leaning notes into a doorway. Her gloved fingers moved with automatic care over screws and lenses, but presence in her chest sharpened when the thing she loved about the job showed itself. A slice of amber glowed inside the housing, thin as a sliver of skin and shaking like breath. She had been taught to extract such shards whole and reseal the fixture so the city would never know a memory had been freed. In practice the work required a steady hand and a calm mind; the temptation to pry into what belonged to strangers was the part you had to keep locked away. That evening the shard answered her touch like a live wire and slid free before she could make her choice.

Her father had once stood on a public platform and called parts of the grid an unkind engine, and officials had watched his face with the coldness of men cataloguing faults rather than people. He paid a small price in reputation and a greater one in loneliness; Asha carried what remained of his stubbornness folded into her sleeves. She kept the stories tucked tight against the practical job of keeping lights from blinking out on a cold morning. She aimed to be just a gadget and a glazier in a city that rewarded indistinction.

The shard that spilled was a child's laughter, a rain-slick ticket, and a hand that had been missed. It swirled across the alley like a flock of moths and unspooled into the air above the diner awning. A woman beneath stopped mid-step and looked up with a face that shifted like a photograph left in water. Tears came without preamble, forming at the corners of eyes that had been braced for bills and errands rather than memory. The city had built fences against this sudden exposure for a reason. The suddenness of the release made the hair on the back of Asha's neck stand up. Her first reflex was to clamp her glove over the housing and draw the shard back into shadow, because that was what you did. Her second reflex was something older and more dangerous: to watch and name the feeling of the woman below, to recognize that the shard had landed in a life already fragile and that she had made it tremble.