Chapter 5: The Second Accident

Petra Wynn's building was the kind that had been optimistic once.

I could see it in the architectural bones — the wide lobby atrium, the planting wells now filled with recycled-fiber aggregate instead of soil, the elevator bank that still had brushed-copper faceplates even though two of the three cars hadn't run in four years. Arcology-adjacent construction from the mid-twenties, built when the city planners still believed the outer ring would gentrify outward from the district center rather than hollow from within. The kind of building where the fixtures outlasted the ambitions.

The responding unit had sealed the third floor at 0710. I got there at 0831, having spent the interval between Drift's ladder and Wynn's lobby driving in deliberate silence with the in-vehicle network receiver switched off, which meant no routing assistance and one wrong turn that cost me eleven minutes I did not have. I took them anyway. I needed to think without SEREN's interface materializing on my wrist terminal every time I paused too long.