The city never slept, and neither did she. From her window on the fourteenth floor, she watched the grid of lights pulse and falter like a living thing — a thing that breathed and forgot and breathed again. She had been here three weeks. It felt like a decade.

Progress, she had learned, was never linear. It was more like tidal — advance and retreat, advance and retreat, each cycle leaving a faint residue of change. You could not see it happening. You could only measure it in retrospect, if you were lucky enough to have the vantage point.

She closed the laptop. Outside, the city was still going — indifferent, enormous, relentless. She had known, on some level, that this was how it would end. Not with a bang but with a realisation so quiet it barely registered. She would need time to understand what it meant.

But first she needed sleep.