Leila lives between the city’s polished promises and its damp, rusted anatomy. She’s precise with tools and stingy with faith—hard-won habits from jobs that change names but keep the same cost. She thinks in materials: steel that relents, tape that seals secrets to skin, progress bars that crawl like patient snakes.
Chapter 02 fractures the “clean relay” myth. SimEx pods turn a routine plant into a choice about complicity. She finishes the job, not out of obedience, but to own the next move. The forgetting ends.