He pushed away from the frame and paid for it at once. Pain ran from his side into his shoulder, sharp enough to make his breath catch. He waited it out without comment, then started along the terrace path. Lina saw the pause, saw the way he guarded his side, and followed without asking if he wanted company. She moved stiffly for the first dozen steps and kept her bruised arm close, but she followed. That had become her way with him. She did not leave anymore. She simply decided where near him she would be.

The upper gardens were already awake in the same blank, graceful way they always were. People drifted between fruit walls and water steps. A tone sounded somewhere overhead, low and pleasant, and several groups altered course at once without looking up. Elias watched that with the same hard focus he gave dead instruments and failed code. The city kept steering its people with signals so soft they barely felt like commands. Once, he had measured his life by a machine he meant to run tomorrow; now that tomorrow belonged to another world, and whatever remained of it was beyond his reach.

He led them toward the elevated transit spine that cut across the district in a pale arc. From below it had seemed decorative, another clean line in a city built to soothe the eye. Up close it carried weather, age, and older use. Wind had scoured the sides. Salt had bitten into seams. Along the outer wall, beneath the smooth rails, a series of long public murals ran panel after panel above the open drop to the flooded lower streets.