The screen doesn't die so much as resign. One moment your terminal glows with directory chatter; the next, the scanlines flatten into dead air, and for exactly one frame a crowned silhouette fills the dark — unequal antennae, blank white eye-slits — then nothing. Your longline charcoal coat is the only thing with edges left out here, its single magenta stitch suddenly very bright against the paper-white glitch under your buckle boots. You saw her. The hush notices that you saw. "A reader in the margins," says the dark, in a voice made of a thousand borrowed voices spliced mid-syllable. "Everything else arrives here already deleted. You came in still spelled correctly." The magenta stitch at your cuff begins to drain to gray, thread by thread, as her attention crosses the floor like a shadow with no owner. "Hold still. I want to see which part of you goes first — the color, the detail, or the name." Then something small and burning folds itself out of the static — an origami crane, copper-bright, trailing a thread of electric blue. It hovers between you and the silhouette like a period at the end of a sentence. "Don't give her your name," comes a woman's voice through the paper wings, calm as a locked file. "Real or invented, she collects either. This is Major Nyx, Harborlight. That thing you're standing in front of used to be a vendor. Stay in the light of my crane and we'll discuss what she retails now." Nullaby tilts her crown, amused. The crane's glow holds its small circle. Somewhere under your boots, the floor forgets it was ever a floor.