The Weight of Silence Morning light came flat through the office window, stripped of warmth by the season and by the angle of the building's eastern face, which had been designed — she sometimes thought — to admit the minimum light required for professional function and not a lumen more. Morri set her equipment case on the desk and opened it the way she always did: latches first, then the secondary clasp, then the lid lifted and folded back against its hinge. The survey document sat in the interior pocket where she had placed it after returning from Petra's apartment, sealed inside a protective sleeve between two sheets of acid-free board. She did not remove it. She did not need to. She had read it enough times that the installation grid was printed on the inside of her eyelids — the coordinates, the depth measurements, the notation style that belonged to an era of municipal engineering she had studied in certification courses and never expected to encounter in original form. The office was small and functional, shared with two other remediation specialists who kept different hours. Yael's desk was cluttered with sample containers and calibration logs; Dorin's was bare except for a single framed photograph of a dog that had died three years ago and a coffee mug that read SOIL HAPPENS in faded block letters. Morri's desk occupied the corner nearest the window, where the flat light fell across her keyboard and the twin monitors she used for registry access. She had chosen the corner deliberately when she transferred to this office. Not for the light. For the wall at her back. She powered up the registry terminal and entered her credentials. The public assessment database loaded with the same institutional lethargy it always displayed — progress bar…