City Without Smiles

The room buzzed with low, tense energy as bodies clustered around battered tables. Jessi hunched over a cracked datasheet, carving angry patrol routes into it with a pen that barely worked. Victoria leaned beside her, rerouting maintenance access points with a secondhand scanner that beeped like a dying bird. Paul hovered just behind them, vibrating like a small, overcaffeinated chaos grenade.

Nobody noticed the walls or the floors.
Nobody cared.
Focus was survival.
Focus was movement.
Focus was rebellion.

Everything else blurred into noise.

Victoria tapped the map, voice sharp but quiet. "Drone sweeps double here. Every half-cycle."

Jessi slashed a brutal X across the street grid. "Dead route."

Paul, restless as ever, drifted toward a dusty pile of scavenged supplies near the back. Jessi barely registered it — too focused, too locked in — until he made a pleased little grunt.

She looked up—

—and froze.

Paul was sprawled backward in a battered chair, feet kicked lazily over one arm, flipping through a hardcover book like this was some vintage coffee shop and not the staging ground for their survival.

Jessi blinked.
Twice.

"What the absolute—" she started, then stalked toward him, finger jabbing like a missile. "Where did you get that?"

Paul looked up innocently, holding the book higher. "Book," he said, as if that explained everything.

"Where?" Jessi barked.

Paul pointed vaguely over his shoulder. "Bookstore."

The silence cracked like glass.

Victoria straightened slowly, confusion creasing her forehead. Jessi followed her gaze properly this time — and really saw it.

Neat shelves.
Real books.
Soft light overhead.
Citizens browsing quietly, like none of them could hear the world outside dying one broken heartbeat at a time.

Above the entryway, burned into old wood in gold-stitched kanji:

Atlas Books.

Jessi shoved both hands into her hair and made a sound that might've been a scream in another life.

"We're staging a rebellion inside a working bookstore," she hissed.

Victoria blinked hard, then let out a short, stunned laugh — almost like a hiccup — and clapped both hands over her mouth in horror.

Paul, utterly unbothered, flipped another page.
"They got a good sci-fi section too," he said brightly.

Behind the checkout counter, the owners exchanged glances:

The woman with the mechanical brace rolled her eyes heavenward. ("Hana," a stitched name patch said.)

The boy with burnt eyebrows snorted into a battered dataslate. ("Ren," his read.)

The older man with the long scar smiled faintly, like none of this surprised him anymore. ("Daichi," stitched in deep blue.)

Hana muttered dryly, "These are the ones, huh?"

Ren cackled. "Should we just write them a manual?"

Daichi only smiled wider and said, "Chaos cracks faster than strategy."

Jessi dropped into a nearby chair like someone had yanked the floor out from under her. She banged her forehead lightly against the table.

"We’re not soldiers," she muttered.
"We’re gremlins."

Paul leaned around his book. "Correction: Extremely charming trash pandas."

Victoria, still half in shock, sat down slowly against the wall. She stared around at the neat shelves with a strange, hungry look — like she wanted to touch everything but didn’t quite trust herself to.

"This is insane," Jessi muttered again. "We should be in a bunker. With guns. And terrifying inspirational posters. Not... not browsing ancient cookbooks while planning revolution."

Paul shrugged, still flipping pages. "Maybe EdenNet’s so busy chasing scary keywords they forget to scan for bookstores."

Victoria finally found her voice.
"It’s... statistically brilliant," she said, frowning thoughtfully.
"Bookstores operate on physical transfer only. No loyalty telemetry. No priority signals. Passive zones. EdenNet ignores them as irrelevant background noise."

She looked around again, marveling, voice softening into awe.

"They’re ghosts. Perfect."

Paul slammed his book shut loudly enough to make three tables jump.
"Which means we," he said proudly, "are officially the dumbest smart rebellion in history."

Jessi cracked one eye open. "You say that like it’s a compliment."

"It is," Paul said cheerfully. "Dumb things are harder to predict. Trust me. I’ve been an idiot professionally for years."

Victoria grinned — not polite, not cautious.
A real grin.
Small and fierce.

"We’re noise in the system," she said.
"And noise... breaks patterns."

Maybe that was why it would work.

Not because they were perfect.
Not because they were brilliant.

Because they were stubborn.

Because they refused to fold.

Because they were the wrong note in EdenNet’s perfect song — the note that cracked the mirror, that shattered the smile.

Inside Atlas Books, under broken lights and dusty pages, the rebellion grew.
Quiet. Messy.
Alive.

Exactly the way it had to be.