CHAPTER 413: WHAT HAVE YOU PREPARED?

"Men who mistake caution for balance. Women who have collected favors and do not like seeing the jar opened. They will call me reckless."

"Let them," Taaros said. "We are the pillar they claim to admire when it keeps their roofs level. They do not need to know when we lean our shoulder into the beam to help."

Mariel’s voice softened more, and somehow that made it heavier. "We are not taking your work from you," she said.

"We are placing our hands under the fulcrum. When Valakar tries to tilt the world, we make sure the lever does not move as far as he thinks. You will still need to pull."

"I intend to," he said.

A brief quiet took the room. It was not an empty quiet. It was the kind that comes when people who do not waste time are satisfied they are speaking to someone who will not.

The director let himself look at them without measuring—old beings who could break his headquarters by accident and had chosen to come gently.

He felt the ache in his shoulders shift from tired to ready.

"What have you prepared?" Mariel asked finally, though she had already seen the answer in the map. The question was for him.

He did not turn back to the wall screen. Instead, he turned to the smaller display embedded in the desk and brought up a simpler picture.

A circle. Inside the circle, ten nodes are shaped like small lanterns. Some bright, some dim, one flickering as if deciding whether it was night or day.

Each node had a name; no public list was used. Each had a single thread that led to a switch a long way off and a note in his own shorthand that said what would happen when it was flipped.

"Lighthouses," he said. "If they try to take the exam while pretending to be storms, these lights will call their current by name and ground it.

If they use people, we cut wires, not throats. If they use beasts, we raise fences they cannot smell through. If they use prayer, we drown them in bureaucracy."

Taaros laughed, short and pleased. "Paper as weapon," he said. "Our favorite kind. The only blade that files its own edge."

Mariel’s mouth did not move much when she smiled, yet the room felt it. "Better," she said. "Now, the last thing." She set her palm on the desk near the tether and leaned in just a little.

"If other ancients come. If the scent of a waking god brings more out of their holes. Do not try to make a speech.

Do not stand on the roof and point at the sky. Keep the city eating breakfast. Keep the trains running. Let the world say afterward that nothing happened."

The director’s eyes cleared further. "Understood."

Taaros drew his hood again, and Mariel did the same. The weight in the room did not lessen because they planned to leave.

It eased because a choice had been made. He walked them to the place where the air had wavered. He did not touch his hand to his chest.

He did not bow again. He inclined his head the way workers do at the end of a job that has a second day.

Taaros paused. "Your sister will scold you for not sleeping," he said, amusement low.

"She can try," the director said, deadpan. It was almost a joke. It felt good in his throat.

Mariel’s eyes softened, and for a moment she looked like every mother in every kitchen who has ever put a hand on a boy’s shoulder and sent him out the door.

"Eat something that was not brewed," she said. "Before dawn."

"I will," he said, and it was a promise this time.

They stepped through the seam and were not there. When they left, the air did not ripple. It smoothed itself at once, proud of having behaved well.

He stood for a moment with his hand near the tether, then finally closed his fingers around it. It was heavier than it looked.

Not unpleasantly. Solid. Honest. He slid it into the inner pocket where he kept nothing else, then turned back to the map.

He zoomed in on the quiet district Taaros had touched until it filled the wall. He pulled up the old repair order and the hand that had signed it.

He followed the hand back thirteen years to a committee that had never met and a budget note that had paid for a thing that did not exist.

He followed that to a woman who had taken a job in another city and never arrived, then to a man who had inherited a position he had never trained for and did it perfectly for five months before leaving without a forwarding address.

He drew a thin line with his finger. The thin line made a shape.

"Found you," he said softly, not to gloat but to mark the truth out loud so that it would be real in the room and not just in his head.

He had not called anyone yet, and he had not sent a message. He put a small tag by the shape and wrote a word only he and one other person would recognize: Dawn.

He reached for his tea and made a face when it touched his mouth. It was cold. He looked at the cup as if it had failed him personally.

Then he laughed, short and dry, and set it down. He pressed a button, and the wall panel slid. A kettle breathed. He did not watch it.

He watched the sleeping city drawn in lines, and the exam schedule, and the list of students his sister cared about too much to say their names while she was working.

He added one more layer to the map. It was not a line. It was a circle that sat at the edge of everything, like a ring someone wears to remind themselves not to be foolish.

The circle was labeled with nothing. It meant everything: wait for the gate.

He poured new tea and did not forget it this time. He sipped. The heat woke a part of him that had gone quiet.