Two Routes Through Port Meridian

Nora learned early that Port Meridian looked different depending on where you stood.

From the upper transit platforms, the city behaved itself. Light slid through the smog-control arrays in clean bands. The morning schedule pulsed through the spine of the station. Trains threaded in and out with a rhythm that felt deliberate, almost kind. The ads were muted at this hour, color tempered for commuters who still wanted to believe they were moving toward something of their own choosing.

She moved with them, badge warm against her collarbone, jacket cut to look like she belonged anywhere with glass walls and quiet security. No visible weapons. No visible intent. That was the first lesson. If you wanted to move through the city’s curated layers, you learned how to look like an extension of the system that ran them.

The briefing suite sat above the transit spine, a row of rooms designed to feel temporary despite the money sunk into them. Glass walls, privacy film that turned opaque at a gesture, a view of the tracks that made everything feel purposeful. The liaison was already there, hands folded, eyes on a screen that reduced the city to shifting probability cones.

“Witness containment,” he said, as if the words were neutral. “Non-hostile. Data breach involving municipal infrastructure. We need the situation stabilized.”

Nora took the seat across from him. She did not mirror his posture. Mirroring made people think you were asking for alignment. She preferred parallel lines.

“Location?” she asked.

The screen resolved into a flicker of movement, a soft halo of projected routes bleeding into one another. A person rendered as a dot. The dot did not have a name yet. Names complicated things. Names created friction with models.

“Unstable,” the liaison said. “The asset moved through low-priority zones after the copy. We have retrieval teams standing by, but the optics favor a protective extraction. Quiet. Clean.”

“Witness safety is still the priority,” Nora said. It came out flat. She made no effort to warm it.

“Within reasonable parameters.”

There it was. The phrase that meant the parameters would be decided later, somewhere she would not be invited to sit. Nora nodded once, not in agreement so much as acknowledgment. The liaison mistook it for the former. They often did.

She took the data slate, thumbed through the fragments they were willing to show her. In the transit logs, a maintenance runner was flagged for unauthorized duplication. The city’s nervous system was, briefly, out of alignment. It was the kind of breach that made legal teams twitch. Not because it was catastrophic, but because it suggested intent where there was supposed to be only optimization.

The armory on Level Nine smelled faintly of coolant and disinfectant. The racks were modular, labeled with reassuring clarity. Every piece of equipment had a lineage, a maintenance schedule, and a liability profile. Nora assembled her kit without hurry, choosing light armor, some nonlethal options, and a compact sidearm she hoped she would not have to draw. She loaded the extraction protocols into her HUD and trimmed the default contingencies. The system preferred redundancies. She preferred quiet exits.

“Response window is five minutes if anything trips,” the tech said, glancing up from his console. He was young enough to still believe in windows.

“Five minutes is a long time,” Nora replied.

He gave a thin smile, as if that were a joke. She did not correct him.

On the transit platform, the city slipped back into view. The curated corridors thinned into something more porous. Glass gave way to composite. The hum of the spine became a vibration you felt through the soles of your boots. She watched the districts change in reflection, the neat geometry of corporate zones giving way to the patchwork of transitional wards. This was where the algorithms hesitated, where responsibility changed hands often enough that it began to look like it had none.

She reviewed the safehouse nodes suggested by the system. None of them were truly safe. They never were. They were pockets of delayed attention, places the city did not look at very hard because looking cost time and money and clarity. She marked one in Tidemark Ward, an old exchange building that still carried legacy credentials in its bones. The kind of place that confused new surveillance into thinking it had already been accounted for.

The dot moved again. The last-known location was already stale.

Nora closed the slate and let the train carry her into the seam between zones. The city here did not pretend to be gentle. It did not apologize for the way its systems thinned. She felt the familiar pressure behind her ribs, the memory of a guarantee that had once looked airtight on a screen very much like the one she had just left. She did not follow the thought to its end. She rarely did. Endings made you hesitate.

When the doors slid open, the air smelled different. Salt from the port, metallic and damp. The light was harsher here, unfiltered. Nora adjusted her jacket, checked the route once more, and stepped into the noise.

The city kept moving, and she moved with it.

***

Switch learned early that Port Meridian felt different when you stopped expecting it to behave.

Down in the low-priority zones, the city didn’t pretend to be seamless. Power dipped. Transit stalled. Maintenance drones hovered like they’d forgotten what they were meant to be fixing. The port cranes moved with the patience of things that knew no one was watching them closely. Everything here worked just well enough to keep people from calling it a crisis.

Switch threaded through it with the ease of habit. Hood down, hair catching damp neon. She didn’t carry a badge. She carried recognition. Faces she’d seen before nodded at her from doorways and clinic windows. Not because they trusted her. Because they knew her shape in their day.

The runner caught her near a shuttered noodle stall that still smelled faintly of broth when the wind shifted. He passed her a burner chip with the casualness of someone who didn’t want to be seen doing anything that mattered.

“Kid tripped something he shouldn’t have,” the runner said. “Copied logs out of a transit node. Corporate dogs are already sniffing.”

Switch slotted the chip and let the data ghost across her retinal overlay. Routes bloomed and collapsed. Priority flags flickered in colors that meant nothing to anyone who didn’t know how to read the city’s moods. A maintenance runner, barely old enough to have learned which corridors stayed lit after midnight. She felt the familiar tug of irritation. Not at the kid, but at the way the city liked to turn small noticing into liability.

“Who’s carrying the story?” she asked.

“Street journalist. Wants the kid breathing long enough to make it inconvenient for anyone to tidy this up.”

Switch snorted, a sound that held more affection than humor. “Stories don’t protect people. They make people visible. Visibility gets you erased faster.”

“Will you take it?”

She was already moving, scanning the foot traffic, clocking a pair of municipal drones that were pretending to be bored. “Already did,” she said. It wasn’t bravado. It was logistics. If she hesitated, the city would make the decision for her.

She cut through an alley that used to lead to a clinic before the clinic lost its license and its funding in the same week. The walls were layered with old access tags and fresher gang marks, a palimpsest of people trying to tell the city they’d been here. Switch ducked into a side door and pulled gear from a cache that had been rekeyed so many times it barely remembered its original owner. Nothing matched. Everything had been made to fit.

She checked her sidearm, adjusted the sling of a compact shield rig, and ran her fingers along the worn edge of a blade she carried more out of habit than intent. Corporate retrieval teams preferred distance. She preferred options.

“You sure you want to touch this one?” the cache runner asked from the doorway. He was young, but his eyes had already learned how to flinch when names came up.

“Corporate retrieval doesn’t play nice,” Switch said.

“They don’t play at all.”

She glanced back at him. “Neither do I.”

The city shifted as she moved toward Tidemark Ward. The infrastructure thinned into older bones, legacy systems layered under corporate retrofits that didn’t quite agree with each other. The hum underfoot changed pitch. She could feel the transit lines nearby, a low vibration that threaded through the soles of her boots and into her teeth. This was where jurisdiction went to blur. Where responsibility learned to pass itself around until it became a rumor.

Her handle lit up on a private channel. SWITCH. The name carried its own gravity now, a street myth built out of one lucky moment and too many retellings. She let it ring once before acknowledging. The city liked to pretend names were switches you could flip on and off. She knew better. Names stuck. They accrued expectations. They got people killed when they started to believe in them.

The last ping put the kid near an old exchange building. Unit 417. A place the city thought it had already processed. Switch grimaced. Those were the worst places. The ones everyone assumed were accounted for.

She took the stairs two at a time, breath steady, humor gone quiet in her chest. The city did not care about maintenance runners. It cared about throughput. It cared about minimizing noise. Anyone who made noise without permission became a problem to be solved.

Switch stepped into the seam between corridors and wards, into the place where the city’s attention thinned just enough to make room for people who knew how to move. She checked her route one last time, then slipped into the current of Port Meridian, carrying the weight lightly because carrying it heavy had never made it easier to bear.