The city called them opportunity permits.
Nadi printed three hundred of them every Thursday and watched people leave the coast smiling.
The permits were cream paper with a silver thread through the middle. Each one authorized a resident to cross the seawall, take the inland train, and register for housing in one of the elevated districts. The official explanation was simple: limited space meant a forecasting system had to rank applicants.
Nobody at the permit office used the word evacuation.
At 10:16 that morning, Nadi’s father appeared on her screen.
Kiran Vale. Sixty-two. Bicycle mechanic. Applicant number 8-441-02.
Status: APPROVED.
Her father had applied after dinner one night while complaining that the inland districts charged twelve credits for tea and did not know how to repair anything without replacing it. When he pressed submit, he raised his glass to Nadi and said, “If they accept me, the machine is broken.”
Now the machine had accepted him.
Nadi opened the scoring panel. Employees were not supposed to inspect individual factors unless an applicant appealed, but she had access because she audited errors on Thursdays.
His work score was ordinary. His family score was low. He had no dependents and no job waiting inland.
Then she saw the line marked DISTRICT CONTINUITY.
North Quay: 0.14.
She clicked it.
Projected municipal service viability below threshold within 61 months. Resident relocation reduces future emergency burden.
North Quay was her father’s district. It was also where she had grown up, where his shop sat between a bakery and a tailor, where the houses leaned into one another as if the street were always turning a corner.
The city’s public resilience map showed North Quay in yellow: monitor, reinforce, maintain.
The internal model had already colored it black.
Her supervisor, Pela, found her staring at the screen.
“Family?” Pela asked.
Nadi showed her the continuity score.
Pela did not look surprised.
“How long have you known?” Nadi asked.
“Known what?”
“That the system is moving people out of districts the city still says it plans to protect.”
Pela pulled over a chair. “The system models possibilities. Policy decides what happens.”
“It approved him because it expects North Quay to fail.”
“It approved him because relocation has a benefit under one scenario.”
“A scenario with fourteen percent continuity.”
Pela looked through the glass wall at applicants waiting beneath a sign that said YOUR NEXT CHAPTER STARTS HERE.
“If the city announced every internal projection,” she said, “people would leave based on models that change every month. Property prices would collapse. Businesses would close. Then the prediction would help cause the thing it predicted.”
“So we move them quietly instead?”
“We give people a choice.”
“Without telling them what the choice is about.”
Pela stood. “Your father can accept the permit or refuse it. Do not turn a forecast into a promise.”
At lunch, Nadi called him.
Her father answered from the shop. She could hear the bell over the door and the rattle of a wheel spinning freely.
“Guess what arrived,” he said.
“You opened it?”
“Of course. Your machine has excellent taste.”
“Are you going?”
There was a pause.
“I thought I might look.”
Her father had refused to leave North Quay during two storm closures. He repaired neighbors’ bicycles for free when the trams stopped. For thirty years he had insisted that the district was not merely where he lived; it was a set of people who knew which shutter stuck in winter and who had spare keys to whose roofs.
Now a silver-thread permit had made inland life imaginable.
“They said housing is guaranteed for a year,” he continued. “And the train pass. I could take tools.”
Nadi looked again at the hidden score.
Sixty-one months.
She could tell him. He would tell the baker. The baker would tell her brother at the credit union. By evening, half of North Quay might be trying to sell homes no one wanted to buy.
Or she could say nothing and let him decide with information the city had deliberately withheld.
“Dad,” she said, “why did you apply?”
He laughed softly. “To prove the machine was stupid.”
“No. Why did you finish the form?”
This pause was longer.
“The stairs,” he said. “My knees. The last storm. The shop roof. Maybe I wanted somebody else to tell me leaving was allowed.”
Nadi looked through the office glass. A woman was holding her permit against the light to see the silver thread.
The system had not invented her father’s tired knees or the leaking roof. But it had arranged those facts beside a future he had never been allowed to see.
“Come for dinner,” Nadi said. “Before you decide.”
After the call, she reopened the scoring panel.
At the bottom was a field marked APPLICANT EXPLANATION. The default text said: Selected through the City Mobility Opportunity Program.
Nadi deleted it.
She typed: Your application was partly prioritized because long-term municipal forecasts show increased service risk in your current district. Forecasts are uncertain and do not represent a final closure decision. You may request the factors used in your assessment before accepting.
The system highlighted the paragraph in amber.
NONSTANDARD DISCLOSURE. SUPERVISOR REVIEW REQUIRED.
Pela’s name appeared beside an empty approval box.
Nadi sent it.
For several seconds, nothing happened.
Then Pela looked up from across the office.
She did not smile.
She did not reject it either.
Outside, another applicant stepped to the counter and placed both hands on the desk.
Nadi called the next number.