Syra (Krenyi)

Syra read the incident report twice before she said anything, which was, for her, already a concession to how much the numbers deserved a first pass in silence. They were clean. They were also unpleasant, and cleanliness had never once made a number kinder.

"This is the same system as corridor transit," she said, tapping the harmonic trace projected above the table. "Smaller distance. Same law. You do not get to call it a different kind of thing because it happened inside one station instead of between two."

Thorne, across the table, had the specific exhaustion of a man who had made exactly one correct decision under time pressure that morning and had not yet decided whether he trusted himself to make a second one calmly. "Then we write the rule," he said, "so nobody downstream of us gets to misunderstand it the way I nearly did."

"Write this," Syra said, already reaching for the stylus before he had finished agreeing with himself. "No visual endpoint, no jump. No power margin, no jump. No post-jump medical clearance, no repeat jump."

"All three, every time?" Thorne said. "Even when the margin's thin and the alternative is watching someone die on the wrong side of a door for six minutes?"

"Especially then," Syra said. "That is exactly the condition under which someone convinces themselves the rule was written for easier days than the one they're standing in."