The Cost of Living
The neon never went quiet. It came through the floorboards as vibration rather than sound — a low, continuous hum that Umi had stopped consciously hearing months ago, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator until it turns off.
She sat at the kitchen table with the rent notice open on her screen. Fifteen percent. Again. She ran the numbers without needing the calculator app, because she had been running them in her head since the first notice arrived, and they came out the same way every time.
The protein supplements or the transit pass. Not both.
She closed the screen and stood up.
The apartment was small enough that standing up constituted most of a room change. Eighty-fourth floor of a residential spire that had been modern once, in a decade she couldn't quite pin down from the architecture. The walls were thin. Through the one on her left, her neighbor's cybernetic lung kept its rhythm — a sound she had come to use as a kind of clock, regular and indifferent.
She went to the window.
Three blocks east, a holographic koi moved through the smog between towers, translucent and enormous, advertising something she couldn't afford. Below it the street was the usual density of bodies and light. Above it the sky was the color it always was — the particular orange-grey of a city that had forgotten what unfiltered air looked like.
She reached for her shoulder without deciding to. The spot near her collarbone, where the phantom itch lived. No injury, no mark. Just a sensation that arrived when the apartment felt smaller than usual.
She needed to get to work.
The commute was three elevator transfers and a mag-rail. She had timed it to the minute — not because she was compulsive about it, but because the margin for error between making rent and not making rent was currently measured in overtime hours, and overtime hours required being on time.
On the train, a young man across from her sat with his eyes unfocused, hands twitching in his lap, somewhere else entirely. Umi watched him for a moment. Everyone was plugged into something. She sometimes tried to identify what it was she was plugged into, and couldn't find an answer, and moved on.
Her title was Data Sanitizer. The work was what the title suggested — nine hours in a cubicle, scrubbing personal information from old archives before they fed into the city's central AI. Careful, repetitive, invisible. The kind of work that required someone who was good at sitting still and paying close attention and not being noticed.
She was good at all three, though she couldn't have told you when she had learned them.
"Jing." Hana's voice, from the next cubicle, accompanied by the specific sound of someone leaning over a partition. "My station is glitching again."
"Did you cycle the cache?"
"Twice. It's the new security patch. Everything's been laggy. Like the system is searching for something." A pause. "Are you coming to the Night Market tonight? My brother's band is playing."
Umi produced the smile she kept for this. "I can't. Laundry."
"You're thirty, not eighty."
She turned back to her screen.
She couldn't explain to Hana why the Night Market felt like a door she wasn't allowed to open. She didn't have a reason — no specific memory of consequence, no event she was hiding from. Just the feeling, sitting at the base of her sternum, that her routine was the thing keeping the floor solid, and that stepping off it would reveal there was nothing underneath.
Around three in the afternoon the air changed.
Not the temperature, not the sound. Something else — a pressure differential, a quality she registered before she could name it. She looked up from her screen.
Office. Servers. Fluorescent flicker. Hana's gum.
She looked at the window.
Far off, against the smog, a drone held position. Not a standard police unit — the profile was wrong, too narrow, too still. It sat exactly where it was despite the wind that was moving the holographic koi three blocks over.
She looked at it. It didn't move.
The pain arrived without warning — a pressure behind her eyes, a flash of blue, and underneath it a voice she didn't recognize using a name she recognized even less:
Jing. Run.
She gripped the desk. The office continued around her, indifferent.
"You okay?" Hana asked.
"Too much caffeine," Umi said.
When she looked back at the window, the drone was gone. The space where it had been was just smog and the koi's tail moving slowly through it.
She turned back to her screen and kept working.
She left at the standard time and took her standard route. Head down, pace even, the same sequence of turns she had taken every evening for fourteen months.
She didn't notice the man in the grey coat. She didn't notice the cameras.
The apartment was dark when she got back. She didn't turn the lights on. She sat on the bed and watched the neon move across the ceiling — pink, then blue, then the amber of a different advertisement cycling through — and felt the familiar quality of waiting for something she couldn't name.
The feeling had always been there. She had stopped trying to locate its source.
Under the bed, behind a floorboard she had no memory of loosening, a small silver locket lay in the dark. The hinge had corroded. Inside, behind fogged glass, two girls stood close together, their faces softened by water damage and time.
One of them looked like her.
The other one was gone.
