Virgo sits in the small room where they asked her to wait. The folder on the table contains her own work — every weak point she mapped in their system over six months. They know what she can see. Now they want to pay her to make sure no one else does. The door opens. A woman enters carrying a uniform folded over her arm — pink fabric with red trim, starched and professional. "We need someone who understands the fractures," she says. She sets the outfit on the table next to the folder. "You'll work inside the healing center. Keep the system stable. Make sure nothing breaks that we don't already know about." Virgo opens the folder. Her map spreads across two pages — networks of cracks radiating from a single bright core, every fault line traced in her own hand. She spent months finding the center point. The place where one pull would collapse everything. They're offering her a position to protect that exact spot. She closes the folder and stands. The uniform stays on the table. Walking out means someone else might find her thread, but staying means the collapse will never belong to her. She picks up the folder and leaves the uniform behind. Outside, she doesn't look back at the glowing center with its crystal towers. She carries the map with her instead.

Virgo walks three blocks before she realizes she's still heading toward the healing center. Not the front entrance where they interviewed her — the service alley where deliveries arrive at dawn. She stops at the corner and opens the folder again. The central fault line glows on the page under the streetlight. She traces it with one finger, following the path from the eastern wing's foundation through the ventilation shaft to the main support column. Someone else is looking at this same weakness right now. They're deciding how to patch it, how to hide it, how to make it vanish before anyone notices it existed. She closes the folder and keeps walking. The alley behind the center is empty except for a pressure gauge mounted on the exterior wall, its glass face cracked in a pattern that mirrors her map exactly. Vines have grown through the metal casing, wrapping around the tubing in deliberate spirals. She touches the gauge and feels it click under her palm. Above it, a black book hovers on a pedestal someone installed yesterday — blank pages open to show fresh plaster work behind it, still damp. They've already sealed the ventilation shaft. The collapse point is gone. She pulls the gauge free from the wall. The vines come with it, roots and all, leaving a dark outline where it hung. Later, in her kitchen, she'll set it on the table next to her folder and know exactly what she lost and when. But here in the alley, she stands in the empty space where the weakness used to be and watches smoke curl from the fresh plaster — gray wisps forming question marks in the air. The center is healing itself. She waited too long, and now the flaw belongs to no one.