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.

Virgo carries the cracked pressure gauge in her coat pocket for two days before the plaza pulls her in. She hears about the new statue from a woman at the bread counter. A jackal-headed god with gold scales, carved overnight, no permit, no crew. Virgo goes because a thing that appears without permission is a thing worth reading. The statue stands in the center of the plaza. Anubis, taller than her, black stone under gold paint, scales balanced in one hand. At his feet is a low wooden table carved to hold a wrapped mummy. The table's side is covered in hieroglyphs and equations. A green topiary of a maiden stands near the fountain, her hair full of purple flowers. Virgo doesn't look at it long. She kneels at the table. She knows these equations. Everyone in the district knows them. They're the balance formulas Librae Equinox pinned to their study door last spring, the ones the scales artifact has been pointing to for weeks. The whole street has decided the equations belong to Librae. Virgo runs her thumb along the carved line. The error is in the third bracket. She saw it the first time Librae posted the work, and said nothing, because saying nothing is what she does. The correction here is clean. Someone rewrote the middle term and rebalanced the constants. It isn't Librae's hand. Librae would have kept the elegant symmetry. This solver chose accuracy over shape. She follows the carving to the signature block. The glyphs at the base spell a name in mathematical notation — subscripts, a prime symbol, a small closed loop. She reads it twice to be sure. It is her own name. Virgo sits back on her heels. Someone has been watching her margins. Someone copied the corrections she wrote in private, in the folder now sitting on her kitchen table, and carved them into public stone under a god of judgment. The thread she was saving for herself has been pulled by another hand and hung in the plaza for anyone to see. She waits for the anger. It comes, but thin. Under it is something worse. Whoever did this knows she saw the flaw in Librae's work and kept it. They know she is the kind of person who watches and waits. They put her name on a table meant for a corpse. She stands. The plaza is quiet. The topiary maiden faces the statue with her eyes closed, hands open at her sides. Virgo touches the carved edge of the table one last time and feels the grooves catch on her fingertip. The flaw at the healing center is gone. The correction to Librae's work is public. Two threads pulled by other hands in one week. She takes the pressure gauge out of her pocket and sets it on the table beside the mummy's wrapped feet. An offering, or a receipt. She walks out of the plaza knowing she has been named, and knowing she still has not moved.