Gray morning light cut through the blinds of Luke’s bedroom, catching the edge of the nightstand.
I woke on my stomach, tangled in a heavy top sheet and a dark blanket that had migrated sideways during the night. The room was quiet, smelling of night air from the cracked window. Beside me, Luke was dead to the world, face down against his pillow, one arm thrown out over the edge of the mattress.
My work slacks and button-down were draped over the back of the bedroom chair where I’d left them.
I rolled onto my back and checked my phone on the floor.
6:18 AM.
Asteron’s badge readers didn't care about spontaneous domestic decisions, and I was not walking onto the Systems floor on a Tuesday in yesterday’s clothes like an engineer whose server room had flooded.
I shoved Luke’s shoulder with a palm. "Hayes."
A muffled grunt into the pillow. "Five minutes."
"Five minutes means the bypass traffic backs up to the interchange," I said, swinging my legs out of bed. "And I don't have clothes here."
Luke rolled over, dragging a hand across his face, blinking up at the ceiling. His hair was sticking up at the crown.
"Right," he rasped, his voice rough with sleep. "Detour."
We took my hatchback to save the logistics puzzle.
The morning air outside was crisp, the neighborhood quiet. Luke rode in the passenger seat with his coffee mug wedged into the cupholder, watching the road roll by with the quiet neutrality of a man who didn't feel obligated to narrate early transit.
At my building, I hit the garage gate and pulled into my stall.
"Stay here if you want," I said, unbuckling. "I need six minutes."
"I'm coming up," he said, popping his door. "I'm not sitting in a concrete basement while you debate trouser options."
Upstairs, the deadbolt clicked open with its usual smooth mechanical release.
The entry lights triggered at a subdued thirty percent.
"Welcome home, Claire," NELL announced from the ceiling grille. "Your return is earlier than expected. A seven-minute variance in departure will compromise your baseline commute."
Luke stopped in the hallway, looking up at the speaker with a crooked grin.
"Mind your business, NELL," I said, dropping my work bag on the bench and heading straight for the closet.
"Would you like the kettle engaged?" NELL asked, completely unfazed.
"No," I called from the bedroom, unbuttoning yesterday’s shirt and tossing it into the laundry bin.
I grabbed fresh dark slacks, a clean gray knit top, and my spare blazer from the hanger. In the bathroom, it was cold water to the face, hair clipped back, teeth brushed.
When I came back into the kitchen, Luke was leaning against the island, his empty mug sitting neatly on a coaster beside the sink. He took in the fresh clothes with a brief, approving tip of his head.
"Six minutes," he said. "Impressive."
"I have systems, Hayes. Let's move."
We split naturally at Asteron.
He parked near the hardware bays; I took the pedestrian path toward the central tower. At the elevators, he caught a car down to Prototype, tossing a brief, casual nod over his shoulder as the doors slid shut.
Up on the Systems floor, the air smelled of stale industrial filters and damp umbrella nylon from an overnight rain.
I dropped my bag at my desk at 7:54 AM, woke the primary monitors, and pulled up the overnight error queues.
Priya appeared over the divider five minutes later, clutching a cardboard cup of green tea.
"You're in early," she said.
"Traffic cooperated."
"Must be nice." Priya collapsed into her task chair, spinning once before pulling up her screen. "I have a vendor batch file that is currently trying to murder our intake pipeline. It’s supposed to be standard component metadata, but the third-party database is spitting out serial numbers that our import refuses to recognize."
I pivoted my secondary display toward her. "How bad?"
"Four thousand rows rejected in the five-o'clock run," Priya sighed. "Every time it hits one of their new tags, the whole batch gets dumped into manual review."
"Show me the file."
Priya pushed the sample across the shared drive.
I opened the document in an editor. Long columns of text rolled past: batch IDs, component weights, Asteron part numbers, and then the vendor's suffix tags.
"It's not an invalid serial," I said after thirty seconds of scrolling. "Look at the punctuation. They’re using em-dashes instead of standard hyphens on every third batch because someone's export software is auto-formatting the text."
Priya leaned forward, squinting through her glasses at the lines. "You're kidding me. A typographic substitution?"
"Someone upgraded an office suite over the weekend," I said. "We can clean the characters before the file hits the parser."
We fell into a steady rhythm. Priya worked on the database constraints while I wrote a quick filter to strip the rogue dashes from the input stream. It was unglamorous, repetitive systems maintenance—the kind of quiet, necessary plumbing that kept Asteron from tripping over its own feet.
By eleven-thirty, we’d pushed a test run, processing the first eight hundred records without a crash.
"Batch two is running," Priya muttered, fingers clacking against her mechanical keyboard.
My phone vibrated against the desk mat.
[Luke Hayes]:
"Hardware cafeteria. They have the pulled pork. Ten minutes?"
I glanced at the progress bar crawling along at forty percent.
[Claire]:
"Make it fifteen. Testing a script."
[Luke Hayes]:
"Grab a table near the glass."
I pushed back from the desk, stretching my arms over the back of the chair. "Priya, let batch two finish before you push anything."
"Leaving?" Priya teased, not looking up from her screen.
"Lunch," I said. "Fifteen minutes."
"Bring me back an oatmeal cookie if they have the frosted ones."
"No promises."
The hardware cafeteria on the lower level was loud with the noon shift. Aluminum trays rattled against steel rails, and the exhaust hood over the grill droned overhead.
Luke was already sitting at a small laminate two-top by the tall perimeter windows, two trays set out, an iced tea waiting beside a basket of chips. He was scrolling through a PDF on his phone, a pen tucked behind his ear.
I slid into the plastic chair opposite him, dropping my badge on the table.
"Batch processing?" he asked, pocketing the phone.
"Typographic em-dashes in a vendor file," I said, unscrewing the cap on the tea. "Someone let an accounting package touch raw component metadata."
Luke shook his head, unwrapping his sandwich. "Barbarians."
"How's the real world?"
"Boring," he said, taking a bite. "Integration has the rig in Stage 2 load testing in Bay 3. Other people are turning the wrenches. Feels weird to walk past the glass and not hear anything squealing."
"Everything held?"
"Rock solid," Luke said, leaning back. "It’ll outlive the building."
We ate without urgency, talking around the edges of our desks—a machine shop order that had been delayed, Landon's ongoing delusion that his floating shelf was an architectural triumph, the fact that Asteron’s parking lot repaving was going to force everyone into the north gravel lot by Thursday.
When he finished his sandwich, he pushed the basket aside and leaned his forearms on the table, his hand resting on the laminate close enough that his knuckles brushed my sleeve.
"What's your afternoon look like?" he asked.
"Cleaning up the rest of the import, then an architecture review at three."
"Four hours of safety documentation for the crane bay for me." He made a dry, pained face. "Riveting stuff."
"Try not to fall asleep on the clipboards, Hayes."
"No promises."
He walked me back as far as the second-floor stairwell.
The corridor was busy with people heading back from the courtyard, badge lanyards swinging, voices echoing off the linoleum. We paused near the heavy fire doors. Luke gave my shoulder a quick, familiar squeeze, his fingers lingering for a second before he stepped back.
"See you later, Claire."
"Don't choke on the paperwork."
He grinned, turned, and headed down the corridor toward the prototype bays.
I took the stairs up to the fourth floor, pushed through the double doors, and walked back into the steady quiet of Systems.
Priya was still at her terminal, a half-eaten bag of chips open on her desk, the log scrolling green on her left monitor.
"Batch two cleared," she said as I pulled out my chair. "Batch three threw an error on line twelve hundred."
I hung my blazer over the chair, cracked my knuckles, and pulled the keyboard toward me.
"Pull up the raw text," I said, leaning in. "Let's find it."