CHAPTER 418: CALL IT WHAT YOU WANT, BUT I’M NOT LETTING US FAIL TWICE

"Let it fall," he said. His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. It came out flat, the kind of flat that carried more weight than shouting ever could.

"Better politics burn than cities. They can show me every ledger in clean light if they want their accounts back. If they can’t, the money sleeps until it learns honesty."

His eyes shifted to the fourth aide. "Transfers," he said. "Triple clearance on anything that even brushes close to teleport lattices, anchors, or exam infrastructure.

If a signature shows up where no hand should be, it dies right there. By noon, I want the numbers and the reasons, but I don’t need the names yet."

The fourth aide gave a short nod. "Understood."

He kept going, steady, piece after piece. Quiet watchers sent back to corners where the dust had been swept too carefully.

When Proctor rosters were checked against the extra verse of the anthem, only a handful of temples still remembered to sing.

Purchase orders for "salt" and "linen" were flagged and tagged because cults had always loved dressing heavy things up in plain words when they thought no one was watching.

It wasn’t the sort of work that makes stories. It wasn’t glamorous. But it was the kind of work that kept mornings from breaking apart.

The second aide lingered a moment longer, her voice careful. "Director," she asked, "if this pulls attention too soon?"

"We do it without banners," he said, not missing a beat. "If anyone asks, we’re auditing because midterms strain the system. That will be true too."

They didn’t argue. They left the way people leave a room after being handed something heavy, shoulders squared because the weight deserved it.

The door clicked once behind them, sealing the silence back into place. He was alone again, with the building’s hum.

He walked to the window, not for show, not for rest, only for distance. The city stared back, a scatter of small lights pretending to be stars.

His reflection floated over them, and for a moment, he didn’t recognize the face staring back. The circles had deepened. The look in his eyes hadn’t dulled. He could live with that trade.

"Balance, vengeance, order," he told the reflection. "Call it what you want. I’m not letting us fail twice."

The screens behind him shifted without sound. Silent Crescent feeds slid into place as if shadows had quietly taken their chairs.

The images were sharp, steady, and cleaner than anything human hands could have made. That was how Lilith’s people always worked when they chose to share.

There were no logos, no signatures. Only the work itself. He didn’t bother looking at the frames. He looked at the edges, the angles, the places where the watchers perched.

He keyed a string only she would read and typed a single word: Thanks. He didn’t send it right away.

He let it wait for three long breaths, then dropped it into a box that would only open if a certain door opened at the wrong hour.

Gratitude mattered, but so did not wasting her time with it.

On the feeds, people were already moving. Not in the loud, theatrical ways that make officials puff their chests.

These movements mattered—a van idling too long near a node that should have been patched on Friday.

A courier swapped satchels with another courier in an alley where no camera should have been—except there was one, and it belonged to people who preferred mornings whole.

A basement light blinking three quick, one slow, two more—a code no one outside a certain circle remembered, but he caught it and understood.

Someone was checking if a door was still locked.

He didn’t tag them all for arrest. Two he tagged for shadowing, patient hands to follow them where they walked.

One he left alone, because the tightness under his ribs told him that one led to a hand and not just a finger. He had learned to trust that sense, and it had cost him enough to earn.

He reopened the oldest file, the one marked with the first dates of cult infiltration. He traced himself back to those years when everything had been sliding quietly sideways while men in meetings smiled and said routine.

He clicked through border passes stamped with the same name spelled two ways. He checked ferry logs against bank holidays.

He found the man who had lived in a hostel under a birthday that wasn’t his, who had paid his rent in coins from three different cities because he didn’t know anybody carried that many coins anymore unless they wanted to be unseen.

The man was gone. The pattern was not.

He let the pattern sit in his head like a song, then turned it down low until he could hear other things.

The exam schedule again, the part he had circled earlier—a lull in a wing that shouldn’t have had one.

The file dared admit that a power test was moved forward an hour without reason. A senior proctor swapped places with a junior, and no one signed off on the change.

He wrote a single word—Check—where only one other pair of eyes would see it, and he set a lighthouse to blink in the old rhythm sailors once used to warn of storms.

Most had forgotten. A few hadn’t. Those few were the ones he wanted to notice.

A soft ping touched the air, not loud or demanding, just enough to indicate that someone had entered.

The door eased open a hand’s width, and a short woman in a plain jacket slipped in. She had worked with him long enough to argue when needed, and to know he valued her more for it. She carried a tablet set dim so it wouldn’t glare against the walls.

"We had pushback," she said. "Three councils. One said it out loud. Two wrote nothing but smiled while they called the same number afterward."

He didn’t ask which number. She told him anyway. He didn’t react.

"The freeze went through," she added. "You’ll have a letter about it in the morning."

"Then I’ll write them a better letter in the afternoon," he said. His voice stayed flat. "Anything else?"

She hesitated, not from fear, but because she weighed her words the way she weighed her work.