“So there’s no washing machine.”

  Tess stood in Duke Amos Tertian’s receiving hall, trying to keep her breathing steady. The floor was actual quarried stone rather than ferrocrete or composite, polished until she could see her reflection in it. Her work boots looked wrong against it. Like grease stains on silk.

  The Duke sat in a chair that probably cost more than the freighter. Real wood frame. Hand-stitched leather. Something that belonged in a museum, not under someone’s ass.

  “Of course there’s a washing machine.” Duke Amos Tertian looked genuinely confused. “Why else would I call you?”

  Now that she’d had a moment to process…how was it that this guy looked better than his holos. Gray at the temples, beard trimmed to geometric precision. The gold chains across his chest caught the light from fixtures that didn’t flicker, didn’t hum, just provided perfect warm illumination like the sun she’d barely seen through clear atmosphere.

  BEE: Tess? Your heart rate is climbing past safe parameters.

  “I’m fine,” Tess muttered.

  The Duke tilted his head. “I’m sorry?”

  “Nothing. Talking to my… equipment.”

  BEE: I am detecting stress indicators in your vocal patterns. Are you in danger?

  Behind the Duke, a massive window overlooked Sector 5. Actual glass, floor to ceiling. Through it, haulers moved between towers, their running lights cutting clean lines through air that wasn’t yellow with industrial contamination. The view alone was worth more than she’d make in a lifetime.

  “Duke Amos Tertian really has a broken washing machine,” Tess said, more to Bee than anything.

  Bee: Tess… I can contact Marcus on the freighter. Let him know if you are in trouble.

  “I do.” The Duke gestured to a different man standing by the door. Older, immaculate uniform, House Tertian colors pressed sharp enough to cut. “Jeremy can show you to it. It’s been offline for three days.”

  Three days. In Sector 7, a broken machine stayed broken until someone cobbled together parts from six other broken machines. Here, three days was apparently a crisis.

  “Why me?” Tess kept her voice level. “I’m sure you have house technicians. Why call someone from the dock district?”

  The Duke smiled. It reached his eyes, and for a second Tess forgot why she was annoyed.

  “Because you saved my daughter’s life. I wanted to meet you.” He paused, and his expression shifted to something almost sheepish. “Can we maybe not tell Petra I called you? She made me promise to leave you alone.”

  The ruler of Tertius-Prime was asking her to keep a secret from his daughter.

  About a washing machine.

  “You want me to lie to Petra? You’re breaking a promise,” Tess said.

  BEE: This constitutes deception. Probability of a negative outcome: rising.

  “Technically bending.” The Duke’s smile turned rueful. “There really is a washing machine. I simply also wanted to meet the woman who saved Petra’s life.”

  The receiving hall smelled wrong. No trace of recycled air, burnt coolant, or the omnipresent chemical tang of Sector 7. It smelled like nothing—just clean, invisible air, the way it was supposed to smell.

  “I’ll look at the washing machine,” she said. “That’s it.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.” The Duke stood. Even that movement looked expensive, smooth and controlled. “Jeremy will show you the way. If you need anything, ask.”

  BEE: Tess, you have agreed to something, but the context remains insufficient. Please elaborate when safe.

  Jeremy stepped forward with military precision. “This way, Miss Rivera.”

  Tess followed him out of the receiving hall, her work boots loud against the stone.

  The corridors were worse than the receiving hall.

  Art hung on the walls. Actual paintings with actual paint, not prints or holos. Thick paint that glittered differently depending on the angle. Tess had seen a painting once, in Vera’s shop. Water-damaged, half the canvas rotting. Vera said it might have been worth something twenty years ago.

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  These paintings looked as if they’d been hung yesterday.

  “First time in a formal estate?” Jeremy asked. His tone gave nothing away.

  “First time in Sector 5.”

  “Ah.”

  They passed a side table. Just a table. Nothing on it except a vase with fresh flowers. Real flowers, not synthetic, not preserved. Cut flowers that would die in days, existing just to be beautiful for a few moments before being replaced.

  Back home, Tess had seen people cultivate algae in buckets. But flowers?

  “Twenty-three years,” Jeremy said, answering a question she hadn’t asked. “I’ve worked here twenty-three years. Started in maintenance back when the dungeon was still active.”

  Tess looked at his hands. Calluses on the palms, old scars across the knuckles. “Still do repairs?”

  “When necessary. His Grace values competence over ceremony.”

  His Grace.

  They turned a corner. The corridor opened onto a junction where three hallways met. The ceiling rose four meters, and a chandelier hung there. Crystal, real crystal, each piece throwing perfect points of light.

  BEE: Tess, you have not spoken in 127 seconds. Status update requested.

  “Still here,” she murmured to Bee.

  They descended the staircase. The steps were worn smooth from decades of use, but worn evenly. Maintained. Cared for. The air grew cooler as they went down, and the aesthetic shifted. Less art. More exposed infrastructure.

  “Service level,” Jeremy explained. “This is where the real work happens.”

  The corridor here was wider, with conduit running along the ceiling. Network-standard power regulation, installed maybe twenty years ago. But underneath, Tess saw older infrastructure. Pre-Network. Smooth curves instead of brutal efficiency.

  “Original construction?” she asked.

  “Seventy years old. His Grace’s grandfather built this place before the Network standardized everything.” Jeremy’s pride leaked through his professional tone. “Most of the original systems still work.”

  “Except the washing machine, clearly.”

  “Indeed.”

  They passed doors marked for different systems. POWER REGULATION. ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL. WATER PROCESSING. Each room she glimpsed through small windows was organized, clean, and maintained. No jerry-rigged patches, no cascading failures, no desperate fixes holding everything together with determination and recycled wire.

  It was infrastructure that worked because someone made sure it worked and not because someone kept it barely functional out of necessity.

  Perfect systems. Maintained because they could be, not because they had to be.

  BEE: Tess, your emotional indicators suggest increasing agitation.

  “I know,” she muttered.

  Jeremy stopped at a heavy door marked with warning placards. HAZARD - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  “Here we are.” He hesitated. “I should warn you. It’s worse than I indicated upstairs.”

  “Worse how?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He pressed his palm against the access panel. The door unlocked with a solid mechanical thunk that meant actual security, not the electronic chirp of a cheap lock that any street kid could bypass.

  He pushed it open.

  The smell hit first. Ozone, burnt ceramic, melted polymer—the cocktail of scents that meant catastrophic electrical failure. But underneath it all, something else made the hair on her arms stand up: burnt Aether pathways.

  “Ugh, that’s awful,” Tess said, pulling her sleeve up to her nose.

  Jeremy handed her a filter mask, and she put it on.

  The laundry room was massive. Industrial equipment lined the walls. Washers, dryers, filtration systems. All of them pristine except for the scorch marks radiating from the center of the room.

  The washing machine sat there like a corpse at a funeral.

  The front panel hung from twisted hinges. The crystalline substrate was exposed, beautiful even in destruction. Skill crystals sat in their slots. Three of them were shattered, their fragments embedded in the surrounding housing like shrapnel. Aether pathways flickered with dying light, occasionally sending up sparks.

  “A few nights ago,” Jeremy said. “Three in the morning. The monitoring system caught the surge and cut power automatically.”

  Tess approached slowly. The blast pattern was wrong. Normal explosions went outward from a single point, but this had blown outward from three points simultaneously—the skill crystals.

  She crouched beside the machine and activated [ANALYZE].

  The pattern that bloomed in her vision showed the problem immediately. It didn’t even have enough structure to display in the normal format.

  Everything was everywhere, like a literal bomb had gone off in the circuitry. The main skill was still online: [CLEANSE], with subsets for temperature, agitation, chemical balance, stain removal. Each subset had its own modulation parameters.

  The design was almost artistic in its complexity.

  The rest of the machine had been brutally murdered.

  The power regulation pathways were bypassed. Safety limiters were disabled. Aether flowed directly into the primary skill array with no throttling. The crystals had been forced to channel power they were never designed to handle.

  BEE: Tess, your heart rate has spiked to 162 BPM.

  “This was sabotage,” Tess said.

  Jeremy went still. “What?”

  “Someone accessed the control interface, disabled every safety protocol, and forced a full-power cycle through crystals rated for a quarter of that load.” She traced the burn patterns with her eyes. “The machine tried to process it. The crystals overloaded and detonated simultaneously.”

  “That’s…” Jeremy’s composure reasserted itself. “Ah. More than likely a scorned housekeeper.”

  Tess stood slowly. [ANALYZE] revealed the ghost of what the machine had been. Elegant patterns, careful construction, decades of faithful service.

  Whoever did this wanted the damage found. Wanted it understood.

  “Miss Rivera.” Jeremy’s tone was measured. “Can you fix it?”

  Tess surveyed the wreckage—shattered crystals that would need complete replacement, fused Aether pathways that would have to be rebuilt from scratch.

  Her credit balance, the jobs waiting in Sector 7, the way she’d been manipulated into coming here—it all pointed to someone who definitely knew this wasn’t a simple repair.

  Then she thought about the Duke asking her to keep a secret from Petra. The way he’d said it like a father who loved his daughter but still had his own agenda.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I can fix it.”

  BEE: Tess, I must express concern. This situation presents multiple red flags.

  “I know,” She pulled out her tools and started tracing the damage. “But they’re paying, and I need the work.”

  And maybe, just maybe, she wanted to know who would sabotage a washing machine on the Duke’s own estate.

  Because whoever it was, they weren’t subtle.

  And they wanted someone to notice.