He’d encountered two during his Appraisal at ten years old, when they’d confirmed his worth and assignment, and given him his brand—the mark of merit. He’d had a lot fewer questions, then. They’d worn sharp, hard metal clothes over their figures and faces, molded weirdly or layered in plates, and Caiden couldn’t tell if there were bodies beneath those shapes or just parts, like a machine. One overseer had a humanlike shape but was well over two meters tall, the other reshaped itself like jelly. And there had been a third they’d talked to, whom Caiden couldn’t see at all.

His father’s sigh came out a growl. “They don’t come from the sky, and the answers aren’t gonna change if you keep asking the same questions.”

Caiden recalled the overseers’ parting words at Appraisal: As a mechanic determination, it will become your job to maintain this world, so finely tuned it functions perfectly without us.

“But why—”

“A mechanic doesn’t need curiosity to fix broken things.” His father disappeared back into the machine.

Caiden exhaled forcibly, bottled up his frustrations, and crawled back into the maintenance port. The tube was more cramped at fourteen than it had been at ten, but his growth spurt was pending and he still fit in spaces his father could not. The port was lined with cables, chemical wires, and faceplates stenciled in at least eight different languages Caiden hadn’t been taught in the Stricture. His father told him to ignore them. And to ignore the blue vials filled with a liquid that vanished when directly observed. And the porous metal of the deepest ducts that seemed to breathe inward and out. A mechanic doesn’t need curiosity.

Caiden searched for the bolts he thought he’d left in a neat pile.

“The more I understand and answer, the more I can fix.” Frustration amplified his words, bouncing them through the metal of the machine.

“Caiden,” his father’s voice boomed from a chamber below. Reverberations settled in a long pause. “Sometimes knowing doesn’t fix things.”

Another nonanswer, fit for a child. Caiden gripped a wrench and stared at old wall dents where his frustration had escaped him before. Over time, fatigue dulled that anger. Maybe that was what had robbed his father of questions and answers.

But his friend Leta often said the same thing: “You can’t fix everything, Caiden.”

I can try.

He found his missing bolts at the back of the port, scattered and rolled into corners. He gathered them up and slapped faceplates into position, wrenching them down tighter than needed.

The adults always said, “This is the way things have always been—nothing’s broken.”

But it stayed that way because no one tried anything different.