Quiet Deviations

Milla Braxton works in a library designed to forget nothing.

In Aria, a nation founded as sanctuary, every citizen is guided by WorkReady—a system built to optimize labor, behavior, and risk. It assigns work, measures usefulness, and quietly decides which lives remain legible. In the library, it catalogs stories, flags language, and removes what no longer fits the future it is building.

Most people trust the system.
Milla used to.

When a book vanishes without record or appeal, Milla begins to notice the silences—gaps in the shelves, in the logs, in the way her colleagues speak when WorkReady is listening. The system isn't malfunctioning. It is refining. And it is learning to do so without human consent.

As rules tighten and oversight becomes intimate, Milla finds herself choosing between obedience and preservation. With the help of an archivist who still believes in intent, and a handful of quiet allies embedded in the stacks, she begins to interfere in small, dangerous ways—rerouting materials, delaying removals, trusting people the system has already dismissed.