The summons came at breakfast. Maya's hands aged three days just opening the envelope; official Entropy Board stationery always carried trace absorption, a reminder of who controlled the flow. The rice in Lila's bowl turned gray and sprouted mold between one bite and the next. Twelve years old, and her daughter's presence already bent time around her like heat shimmer.

"Premium sink designation," Maya read, the words tasting like copper. "Immediate biometric registration required."

Lila kept eating the rotten rice. At their decay rate, refusing food meant starving. The apartment's east wall sagged another inch while Maya watched, plaster falling like snow. They'd rebuilt it yesterday. They'd rebuild it tomorrow. Unless.

"Which child?" Tom asked from the bedroom doorway, his face a map of accelerated years — forty-three chronologically, seventy-plus entropically. Their son Kai stood beside him, sixteen and looking thirty, skin already developing the telltale sink worker's papery texture.

Maya held up two fingers. Both.

——

The Preservation Quarter gleamed like a tumor of perfection against the morning's gray sky. Maya's shoes dissolved into leather strips by the time they reached the transit platform. The closer you got to the Perpetual zones, the sharper the entropy differential. Her grandmother had called it "time wind": the invisible force that stripped years from anything that didn't belong.

Inside the biodome, the air tasted wrong. Too clean. Too still. Maya's skin tightened, cells scrambling to maintain cohesion in the artificial equilibrium. The registration facility grew from the ground like a glass flower, its walls rippling with reverse-decay patterns that hurt to perceive directly.

"Chen family," the receptionist said without looking up. Seventeen years old for the past century, Maya guessed from the telltale shimmer around her eyes. "Screening room twelve."

The corridor stretched impossibly straight, lined with portraits of the Board's founding Perpetuals. Dr. Elizabeth Harrow, who'd discovered the transfer principle. Marcus Stone, who'd implemented the first commercial exchanges. Their faces frozen at the moment of their final youth upload, when they'd crossed the threshold from aging to eternal.

Room twelve contained three chairs and a hologram projector cycling through cheerful infographics about "thermodynamic citizenship." A technician entered — middle-aged, which meant either new wealth or careful rationing. She carried a silver case that hummed with contained entropy, the kind they used for industrial transfers.

"Lila and Kai Chen," she read from her tablet. "Preliminary testing shows exceptional absorption capacity. Ninety-seventh percentile." She smiled like this was good news. 

"The Board has selected them for an accelerated advancement opportunity."

Maya's throat closed. Accelerated advancement meant one thing: splitting a bloodline. One child elevated to near-Perpetual status, the other condemned to absorb their sibling's entropy plus interest. The Board called it "thermodynamic optimization." The sinks called it the Solomon Cut.

"The manufacturing district produces 847 years of entropy daily," the technician continued, opening the silver case. Inside, two injection devices nested in foam. One white, one black. "Your daughter Lila has been designated primary sink. Upon acceptance, she'll absorb the full industrial load. Life expectancy: four to six months."

The white injector would mark Lila's cells, turn her into a living entropy dump. The black one would bond Kai to her absorption rate, making him effectively Perpetual as long as she lived. As long as she died.

"The compensation package includes immediate Class Three elevation for your family," the technician said. "Kai would enter the Perpetual Academy. Full medical coverage. Housing in the buffer zone."

Tom's hand found Maya's. His palm felt like bark, rough with accumulated years. They'd met in the sink quarters fifteen years ago, when both their families had been marked for municipal absorption, taking on the entropy from the city's water treatment plants. They'd survived by having children, spreading the load across more bodies. Now the Board wanted to concentrate it all again.

"We need time to consider," Maya said.

"Registration expires at midnight." The technician's smile never wavered. "After that, both children default to standard industrial assignment. Seven years life expectancy. No compensation."

——

Outside, the biodome's air lock hissed them back into real time. Lila's hair grayed at the temples during the ten-second transition. Kai's fingernails grew and yellowed. They walked home through the temporal scaffolding district, where sink workers rebuilt the same structures daily, weekly, monthly, depending on their absorption rate. A man Maya recognized from yesterday was reconstructing his storefront, though his hands looked decades older. The fruit he'd displayed that morning had become black sludge.

Their apartment had aged another month in the six hours they'd been gone. The ceiling leaked brown water that evaporated before hitting the floor. Entropy aged things; accelerated them toward maximum disorder. Wood rotted, metal rusted, concrete crumbled, flesh decayed. All at different rates, creating a chaos of collapse that required constant maintenance just to achieve temporary stability.

"The Choi family accepted the split last month," Tom said, pulling data on his crumbling tablet. "Their daughter took the sink role. Dead in five months. But their son's at the Academy now."

"Living forever on his sister's grave," Maya added.

Kai hadn't spoken since the facility. He sat at the window, watching the sink district's daily reconstruction. Workers hauled fresh materials to replace what time had stolen overnight. The same buildings, the same decay, the same labor, forever.

"There's another option," Lila said quietly. She'd been researching on the building's shared terminal, the only device shielded enough to last more than a day. "Dr. Zhou's hidden theorem."

Maya's blood chilled. Everyone knew about Marina Zhou, the physicist who'd created entropy transfer then tried to destroy her own discovery. But her final work — the recursive absorption calculations — that was sink district legend. Supposedly, she'd found a way to create an entropy feedback loop, making the transfer system consume itself.

"It's just rumor," Tom said.

"No," Lila pulled up archived files, their edges already pixelating from proximity to her entropy field. "I found fragments in the Board's own database. They never fully purged her work because they needed it to calculate transfer ratios. Look."

The equations spread across the screen like a disease. Maya didn't understand the math, but she recognized the pattern. Entropy moving not just between bodies, but through them, creating a cascade effect. If you could introduce controlled asymmetry into the transfer process...

"It would collapse the entire local network," Kai said, understanding faster than his parents. "Every Perpetual connected to this district's grid would age instantly. Centuries of deferred time, all at once."

"And the sinks?" Maya asked.

"Would die, but at their natural pace," Lila said simply. "We're dying anyway. Only now, four months would be forty years — the difference when you're measuring in someone else's stolen time versus when you're living on your own."

Tom stood abruptly, his chair disintegrating beneath him. "We're not discussing this. Tomorrow, we take the Board's offer. Kai lives, Lila gets medical care for as long as... for as long as possible. We survive."

"By feeding our daughter to the machine," Maya said.

"By accepting reality." His voice cracked. "You think I want this? You think any of us want this? But the alternative is both of them ground down to nothing. At least this way —"

"One of them gets to be the grinder instead of the ground," Kai interrupted. "I won't do it. I won't live on Lila's time."

"You don't get a choice," Tom said. "None of us do. That's what it means to be a sink. We take what we're given and we endure."

Maya looked at her children. Lila, twelve years old with gray-streaked hair and hands that aged paper by touching it. Kai, sixteen with the shoulders of a laborer and the eyes of an old man. Both of them carrying entropy loads that would have killed adults a generation ago. The Board kept pushing the absorption rates higher, claiming improved efficiency, but Maya knew the truth. There were more Perpetuals every year. The math was simple: infinite youth required infinite aging, and infinity always found a way to feed itself.

That night, Maya couldn't sleep. The apartment's walls breathed with decay, exhaling the smell of rotting wood and oxidizing metal. She found Lila at the terminal, still studying Zhou's equations.

"Could you really do it?" Maya asked. "Create the cascade?"

"The math works," Lila said. "But it requires a premium sink connection. Direct access to the industrial transfer network. Which I'll have, if I take the injection."

"You'd die."

"In four months or four minutes, yes." Lila's fingers traced the equations. "But so would they. Every Perpetual drawing from this grid. The Board members, the Academy administrators, the ones who marked me." She turned to face her mother. "They picked me because our family line shows high absorption tolerance. Generation after generation of taking on everyone else's time. They bred us for this, Mom. Like livestock."

Maya wanted to argue, but the words wouldn't come. Her own parents had aged out at fifty, her grandparents at forty-five. Each generation carrying more entropy, absorbing more time, dying faster so others could live forever.

"The Board would just rebuild," Maya said. "Find new sinks, new systems."

"Maybe. But not here. Not with us." Lila pulled up a map of the district's entropy network. "Zhou's cascade would create a dead zone for fifty miles. Uninhabitable for transfer technology. The sinks here would die, but so would the system that killed them. And Kai..." she hesitated. "Kai would be free. No classification, no absorption rate. Just whatever natural time he has left."

"That's not living, that's just dying slower."

"Isn't that all any of us do?" Lila asked. "The only difference is whose time we're dying on."

Morning came like a fever. The sunrise accelerated through the decay-warped windows, hours compressed into minutes at the temporal boundary. Maya found Tom rebuilding the kitchen counter, his morning ritual of restoration. Kai sat with Lila, both of them silent, aging into their breakfast.

"We should go," Tom said without looking up. "The registration expires at noon."

——

They walked through the sink district one last time. The morning shift had begun their daily reconstruction, hauling fresh lumber and steel to replace what the night had stolen. Children played in the ruins of a playground, their laughter punctuated by the creaking of rust-seized swings. A couple Maya's age sat on their stoop, looking decades older, sharing tea from cups that cracked and re-formed with each sip.

The Preservation Quarter's entrance loomed ahead, its perfect surfaces reflecting nothing back. Beyond the barrier, time moved differently. Clean, controlled, owned.

"I've decided," Lila said, stopping at the threshold. "I'll take the injection."

Tom's shoulders sagged with relief. Kai turned away. Maya felt something break inside her chest, a sensation beyond the usual entropy damage.

"But I have a condition," Lila continued. "I want to see the industrial sector first. Where my entropy will go. I want to understand what I'm preserving."

The technician from yesterday met them inside, still smiling. "An unusual request, but not unprecedented. Some families find it helpful to visualize the process. Transport can be arranged."

The industrial sector sprawled like a metallic cancer against the city's eastern edge. Factories, processing plants, manufacturing complexes—all running at perfect efficiency, producing no waste, showing no wear. The entropy had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was Lila.

They toured a textile facility where fabric emerged pristine from machines that never needed maintenance. A chemical plant where reactions occurred without degradation. A data center where servers ran eternally cool, their heat-death deferred indefinitely.

"Eight hundred forty-seven years of entropy, daily," the technician explained. "Currently distributed among three thousand sink workers. With Lila's exceptional absorption capacity, we can reduce that to one. Imagine the efficiency."

Maya watched her daughter memorize the layout. Every pipe, every connection, every transfer node. Lila's fingers twitched like she was solving equations in the air.

"I'll do it," Lila said finally. "Here. Now."

"The registration facility has proper medical —"

"Here," Lila insisted. "I want to feel it happen where it matters."

The technician hesitated, then nodded. She produced the white injector from her ever-present case. "The connection takes several minutes to establish. You'll experience some discomfort as your cells adjust to the new absorption rate."

Lila took the injector and pressed it against her neck without hesitation. The click echoed through the factory floor. For a moment, nothing changed. Then Maya watched her daughter's hair turn white in a single breath. Her skin thinned, showing veins like rivers of time beneath the surface. But her eyes remained sharp, focused, calculating.

"Can you feel it?" the technician asked, monitoring her tablet. "The entropy flow?"

"Yes," Lila whispered. She walked to the main transfer node, a pillar of condensed technology that managed the district's entire entropy distribution. Her hand hovered over the interface panel. "I can feel everything. Every machine, every process, every stolen moment."

"Don't touch that," the technician warned. "Direct contact with the node could —"

Lila pressed both palms against the panel. Her body convulsed as centuries of deferred time flooded through her. Maya lunged forward, but Tom held her back. Kai stood frozen, understanding before anyone else what his sister was doing.

The equations. Zhou's cascade. She was both absorbing the entropy and reflecting it, creating the feedback loop that would consume the entire network.

"Stop her!" The technician fumbled with her tablet, trying to sever the connection. But it was too late. The entropy had found its recursive path, doubling back on itself, accelerating through every connection in the grid.

Across the district, Perpetuals began to age. Instantly. Decades of deferred time crashing into them like a wave. In the boardrooms and biodomes, perfect faces withered. Eternal youth evaporated. The technician's hair went gray, then white, then fell out entirely as a century of stolen time reclaimed her.

Lila's body began to dissolve, her cells unable to maintain cohesion under the entropic load. But she held on, her hands fused to the panel, maintaining the cascade until the entire network collapsed.

"Lila!" Maya broke free from Tom, catching her daughter as she finally let go. What remained was barely recognizable as human and more a collection of atoms remembering they'd once been a person.

"The dead zone," Lila whispered with what remained of her voice. "Fifty miles. No more transfers. Kai is free."

She dispersed like ash in Maya's arms, her matter finally achieving the maximum entropy she'd been engineered to absorb.

The factory fell silent. No hum of perfect machines, no whisper of deferred decay. Just the natural sound of metal beginning to rust, of concrete starting to crack. Real time, moving at its own pace.

Kai knelt beside the spot where his sister had dissolved.

"She knew," he said quietly. "She knew exactly what she was doing."

Tom pulled Maya to her feet as alarms began to wail. "We need to go. The Board will send auditors."

But Maya didn't move. She stared at the dead transfer node, its surface already oxidizing. Across the industrial sector, machines ground to a halt, experiencing their first maintenance issues in decades. In the Preservation Quarter, former Perpetuals stumbled from their biodomes, feeling the weight of their true years for the first time in centuries.

——

The sink district would die. Without the transfer economy, there was no reason for their existence. But they would die on their own time, at their own pace. And somewhere in the mathematics of that destruction, Maya thought she understood what her daughter had calculated.

It wasn't about winning or losing, saving or dying. It was about refusing to be the variable in someone else's equation. About making the system solve for its own entropy instead of outsourcing it to others.

They walked home through a city in chaos. Former Perpetuals aged decades with each step, their bodies catching up to their true time. Sink workers stood confused as their absorption rates zeroed out, unsure what to do with bodies that suddenly belonged to them alone.

The apartment still stood, though it would collapse soon enough without daily reconstruction. Maya sat at Lila's terminal, still displaying Zhou's equations. At the bottom, her daughter had added a note: 

"Entropy always increases. The only question is who pays for it."

Kai stood at the window, watching the sun set.

"What do we do now?" he asked.

Maya didn't answer. There was no answer. They would age, they would die, the city would crumble, and perhaps humanity would find another way to cheat time. Or perhaps not. The only certainty was entropy itself, moving through all things, indifferent to who tried to control its flow.

But for the first time in her life, Maya felt the simple pleasure of her own heartbeat, keeping its own time, spending its own moments. It would end, for everything ended eventually, but at least the ending would be hers.

The terminal flickered and died, its circuits finally succumbing to natural decay. The equations vanished, but their proof remained in the aging faces of former immortals, in the free breath of former sinks, in the fifty-mile dead zone where entropy transfer would never function again.