CHAPTER 421: WATCH COHORT TWELVE FOR ME

He widened the map by a finger, the glow shifting with his touch. Small timers appeared—hidden ones, invisible to anyone who hadn’t built the system with him.

They didn’t tick. They didn’t blink. They waited, patient and silent, like traps disguised as shadows.

Only three people alive could have recognized them for what they were. That was enough.

He nudged a maintenance order forward six hours, subtle as breathing, so that a lift would be out of service on the exact morning someone tried to ride it into a room they had not earned.

Nothing dramatic. Just one door that wouldn’t open, one hinge that would hold them a second too long.

He shifted a bus route by a single block, sent out the notice with a typo because real notices always carried mistakes while fakes never did.

He sent two plainclothes teams to drink coffee two doors down from where they wanted to be.

He told them to keep their jackets off the backs of their chairs so their posture would not be slouched. He liked small truths, which held better under load than big performances.

He turned back to the exam gate queue. Not to reread the neat words written there, but to listen for rhythm. Schedules had their own music.

Bad players always rushed a note or dragged one. He tilted his head, let the cadence run through his bones, and there it was: three half-beats where there shouldn’t have been any.

Someone had pressed too hard on the strings. He circled them in quiet red, a mark only one other pair of eyes would ever notice, and wrote a single word beside it. Watch.

He sat for one breath, the chair catching him, then stood again before it claimed him for longer.

Both hands pressed flat against the desk, not gripping, not pushing, just anchoring. The building hummed differently under him, a shift small enough that only someone who had lived with it would hear.

The trams far below had begun to roll. He pictured the city answering in its ordinary ways: a baker lighting ovens with flour still on his hands.

A coffee machine in a corner store decides whether to work and finally sighs itself into doing the job.

A child asking what day it was was told by a tired parent to sleep ten more minutes, which turned into twenty.

The city pretended it had nothing to do with gods or bones, and in pretending, protecting itself.

He thought of the elders, how they made every room smaller just by existing. He respected them but didn’t mistake that respect for permission to hand them his work.

He thought of Lilith and the way she had scraped their misses out of his corners. She hadn’t scolded him. She hadn’t had to.

Her hands, cleaning the rot, had said enough. He promised her in his head that the floors would be cleaner this time.

He pulled up the five bait sites again, the embers glowing faintly across the glass.

He counted the steps between each door and the nearest safe exit, not once but twice, the way you count a child’s fingers even when you know the number is right.

He texted no one. He drafted no speech. He made a note to himself and tucked it into the panel only he could open.

He breathed low once and spoke into the quiet because the room had earned it. "All right," he said softly. "We’re ready. Come ahead."

Neither hunger nor spite was driving him now. Good. He sent three more orders, quiet as breath.

Bait site one would open a shutter at the wrong hour, leave one hinge loose enough to wobble, tempting enough to make someone lean closer.

Bait site two would log a crate as misrouted on a network that still pretended to be private.

Bait site three would dim a single light on a single monitor in a room where a certain watcher would be sure he had found a blind spot.

He told the city nothing, and he told it everything, the way a man sets a table before guests arrive and leaves the door unlatched.

He closed his eyes and saw Sera at the gate. Her calm mouth and brow creased faintly, as they always did when students looked at her, as if she were the only grown-up who could be trusted.

He saw Ethan with the twins flanking him. The boy’s stillness stretched thin like a held note, and the girls soldered to his edges like they couldn’t imagine the day pulling them apart.

He let the picture pass. Holding it tighter wouldn’t make it truer.

He keyed a single line, a message only one proctor would see. "Watch Cohort Twelve for me." No titles. No names. No weight added. It would be enough.

He blinked, and the glass changed. It gave him a classroom.

Clean lines. Tiered seats. Thirty students were scattered more widely than the space required because teenagers never chose the front rows when they could avoid them.

The walls carried holo screens like windows that opened onto patient light. The instructor stood at the front, posture straight as though carved with a rod set into their back.

They were not vain, not theatrical, simply steady. Their eyes missed nothing but judged little. Their hands stayed folded behind them, perhaps to avoid pointing too soon.

Ethan sat halfway up. Evelyn had claimed the seat at his right, her arm planted firm on the armrest he never used.

Everly had taken the left, her feet propped on the support bar like she did in every room that allowed it and half the rooms that didn’t.

The three of them formed a small island in the middle of the sea, a weather system of their own.

The buzz of talk thinned when the subject arrived. The teacher lifted one hand, and the sound fell away like dust swept clean.

It was not anger. It was just finality—the kind of tone a kitchen carried when someone said, "Listen."

"Today," the teacher said evenly, "we begin the class that will test more than your power. It will test your ability to survive."

There were no theatrics, no fanfare. The screens brightened a fraction, displaying plain type across them.

Field Preparedness I. Beneath it, smaller lines that meant more than the students wanted them to: Navigation under stress, team cohesion under unknown command, resource use without confirmed resupply, and controlled fear.