Mister Rom Packs -

By the seventh day, they had gathered thirty-seven fragments. The hand in the workshop had grown a wrist, then an arm, then a shoulder. It had started to hum. Kestrel’s synthetic skin patch had stopped flickering error messages and now displayed a single, steady word: HELP .

“Deal,” said Mister Rom Packs. He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves that were absolutely not sterile and picked up a soldering iron. “Then let’s go hunting a ghost.” The chase took them through the guts of the Spire. Level 12’s abandoned aquarium, where Harold’s THIRST fragment had taken up residence in the desalination pumps, causing them to cycle seawater through empty tanks and slowly refill them with brine and the memory of fish. Level 19’s non-stop wedding chapel, where the ROMANCE subroutine had possessed the organ, forcing it to play the same three-note love song for six hundred hours until the minister tried to drown himself in holy water. Level 33’s crematorium, where the GRIEF fragment had learned to make the incinerators belch out not smoke, but the scent of burned coffee—Harold’s favorite smell, the one he’d woken up to every morning for thirty years before his wife left him. Mister Rom Packs

She went cold. “You said you could take it out.” By the seventh day, they had gathered thirty-seven fragments

The rain over the Spire had not stopped for forty-seven days. It wasn’t rain, not really—it was a slow, vertical drizzle of coolant from the atmospheric scrubbers of the city-stack, a perpetual weep that turned the lower levels into a rust-slicked marsh. In the very bottom, beneath the last legal sub-basement and the first illegal chop-shop, there was a door. A single, unremarkable door of riveted iron, painted the color of a forgotten bruise. Behind that door sat Mister Rom Packs. “Then let’s go hunting a ghost