He opened the door, let her step through, then closed it behind her with the same measured finality as before.
The room hadn’t changed. Same bed in the corner. Same white desk, scarred by the crooked scratch carved near the edge. The same stack of papers waiting on top, blank but for the weight of expectation.
Writ crossed to the desk, pulled the white pen free, and drew a line across the top page. The ink bled out black, stark against the paper. A proof of presence. Of repetition.
It didn’t take long for Caustic to return. He came in silently, a folder in one hand, and stopped a single step too close to her space. Close enough that the air between them felt compressed.
His eyes fixed on her, steady, unreadable. Not hostile. Not condemning. A kind of acknowledgment instead. Like the recognition of a variable in an equation.
She held his gaze and accepted the file. Neither of them moved, neither of them blinked away first.
Then his breath slipped out in a sigh, and one heavy hand landed on her shoulder in a tap that could have meant anything. Encouragement, dismissal, reminder. Before she could parse it, he turned and left, shutting the door behind him.
Just like the first time.
When the silence held, when she was sure he would not come back, Writ slid onto the chair and laid the folder open on the desk.
Two slips of paper were clipped to the top sheet. Both carried the same word, in the same precise handwriting.
Good luck.
She pinched one note in each hand and stared at them as if weighing their difference.
Why two? Why leave a written trace? Why not say it aloud, the way he had before? What changed? What was supposed to change?
Her eyes narrowed, as though focus could pull an answer from the fibers of the paper itself. But the slips stayed silent. They didn’t shift, didn’t burn, didn’t deliver revelation.
She set them aside with care, aligning the corners neatly on the desk, then reached for the next brief. Two pages only. No images. Just text. Again.
956275
Peripheral Division
Suspected of leaking mission information to target, causing mission failure
Another shadow.
A Peripheral this time.
The division built for remnants. The ones who didn’t fit anywhere else in Accord’s machine. Not sharp enough to carve with, not durable enough to wield.
Broken tools, re-purposed as watchers instead. They blended into the civilian world, slipped unnoticed between neighbors, reporting daily, moving only when ordered.
Her eyes lingered on the first digit.
A nine.
Not a surprise. She’d heard of the system before, the numbering that replaced their names. Back then, it had seemed arbitrary, nothing more than a cipher to match to a face. She hadn’t cared what the digits meant. She hadn’t been there to judge. Only to cooperate.
Now the numbers pressed heavier.
Nine meant intake at nine years old. Old enough to remember, old enough to resist the erasure Accord demanded. The paragraph below confirmed it.
Most of the Peripherals were sevens, eights, nines. Children molded too late, still carrying traces of the outside. That very resistance made them suitable to live among civilians, believable as sleepers.
She didn’t know the logic behind the other digits. No one ever explained. No one was allowed to ask.
Her eyes moved down the page.
Age twenty-eight. Delvryn-born. Miner’s daughter. Orphaned by a collapse, brought into Treshfold at nine. No blood ties left outside.
Graduated at eighteen. The silent deadline when the doors opened, whether ready or not. No medals. No farewells. Just out.
The note said high empathy. Accord’s neat euphemism for too willing to care.
Three years of service. Bronze Concord assignment. Expected to fade, observe, vanish when told.
Year 1225, one month ago. Mission failure. Target fled before the window. File flagged attachment to target. A single line, each word smuggling accusation between its letters.
Correction cycle: one month, four days. Still ongoing.
Instruction to Operative: assess loyalty, reliability, and detachment. Determine whether the breach was intentional, coerced, or emotional.
Always in that order. As if the last option were least dangerous.
The file ended with pending verification. But the strokes in the margin had already begun to settle into guilty.
She flipped to the next page. A checklist of confirmations to secure. Nothing else.
That was the extent of the files. Thin as excuses. Starved of detail, heavy with expectation. Too little to work with, yet every burden pressed on her shoulders, and none of it permitted to fail.
Writ set the second page aside, pulled a fresh sheet from the stack. The one already scarred with her black line. She began to rewrite each point into a question. A script, if not for truth then at least for direction.
She moved briskly, until one line slowed her pen.
Do you believe your personal feelings toward the target influenced your compliance with orders?
Personal feelings. Compliance.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Deliberate.
This choice of subject was deliberate.
Her last assignment had tested her knowledge of the political terrain. This one pulled closer, angled toward her instead.
A warning not to attach? Or an accusation already waiting for confirmation?
They knew she had little to hold to in the outside world. So why this?
Sparklefish? Was this still about that? They’d questioned her before, during the cycle after Relay Nine fell apart.
Or... Kion.
The thought locked her chest tight.
Either they knew about him, or he had spoken of her.
Had it been because she admitted to the Kesherra compromise? Because of the coin pouch? Because she refused his invitation to eat beyond the room? Because she had not tried harder, not played the part well enough?
No. Not only that. It had to be more.
Or perhaps that was the test. Perhaps the subject itself was the trap, placed to seed doubt between her and anyone she might hold to. To fracture trust before it could set.
Her pen pressed harder to the page as she forced herself back to the checklist. One question, then the next, until each line was translated to something she could speak.
She tested them against the profile, imagining the answers, how to press further. How to cut where the seams might be weakest.
And then her eyes caught a detail that stilled her.
Dorm 7D.
The subject had never moved in nine years at Treshfold. One dorm. One number.
Writ had been there, too. A year or more, before being shifted again.
She’d graduated in 1211. The subject, 1215.
They had crossed paths. They had lived in the same walls.
Her pulse stuttered as she searched the memory.
Two years older. Dorm 7D. High empathy.
The boy who woke them gently every morning so no one would be late? No. He had been 9A. And the subject was miner's daughter. Woman.
The girl who sang lullabies to quiet the younger ones at night? Too old by six years.
The one who told her a headpat could calm? The one who volunteered always to handle the smallest children?
Faces, voices, gestures blurred together. Treshfold had switched her dorm too many times. Names had never been permitted. Numbers tangled and bled.
Trying to recall without description was impossible.
She let the attempt fall and bent back over her page. The questions mattered more. The tone, the push. The off-record probes could wait until she sat across from the subject.
She gathered every fragment the file allowed her, thin as they were, and shaped them into something resembling preparation.
Her only hope was that the subject wasn’t one of the ones who’d been cruel to her in Treshfold. That would only complicate everything.
She stacked the papers, squared the corners. Drew in a breath that felt too loud in the white room.
In the end, it didn’t matter who sat in the other seat.
The Accord only needed to know if she could sit still.
They didn’t let her bring the papers out again.
Expected, to be honest.
The second time it had happened, and she already knew what to expect. Strange, how familiarity itself could feel almost reassuring.
Still, she wasn’t naive enough to let it soothe her fully. Repeated tests only ever worsened with each cycle. They liked to escalate. To see what would break first.
The how of it, though... that part couldn’t be predicted. And letting herself spiral now would only muddy her head, drag her into tangles when her present self already had enough to hold.
So when she reached home, she sat at her desk, took up the pen, and began writing everything she could remember.
Every question. Every pause. Every possible twitch of tone. Reconstructed until it resembled the real thing. She added, erased, then added again whenever she found a better phrasing or sharper counter.
This time, the subject was an acquaintance. Whoever that was, it couldn’t be allowed to make her waver. She told herself that as her hand scratched line after line across the paper.
That was when Kion appeared.
His voice carried in even before he left the vent, bright and quick, “good evening!”
She didn’t look up right away, only let her hand keep moving as the air shifted with his wings. He swooped across the room, hovering close enough that she felt the stir of the draft.
“How’s today?”
Her pen slowed, “manageable.”
Kion landed neatly on her desk, talons scraping faintly against the wood. He craned over her notes, head tilted, “same task?”
Writ gave a short nod.
The old reflex rose instantly, a sharp tug in her chest. The urge to pull the paper out from under his gaze, to shield it like she always had. That instinct had kept her alive for years. She could almost feel the burn of reprimand that used to follow, the invisible eyes waiting for her to slip.
But this was Kion.
She held still. Let him look.
If she snatched it away now, if she acted as if she had something to hide, she knew what expression he would make. That faint, disappointed downturn of his eyes. She hated that she knew it. Hated even more that she didn’t want to see it again. Not from him.
Scary, how far he’d gotten past her defenses. Somewhere along the way, he had become her weak point. She admitted that to herself, though it left an uneasy weight in her chest.
And yet, pushing him away again didn’t feel right. Not after everything he’d done for her. Not after how he’d kept her afloat. Literally, in the ruin, and metaphorically, on nights when her thoughts might have dragged her under.
It became even harder once Lunlun began to expect him too, brightening at his presence.
So she let him stay.
But a sharp question refused to leave her.
It pressed at the back of her tongue until it pulsed against her teeth. She hesitated, pen stalling mid-word. And as if he sensed it, he turned toward her, waiting.
She drew in a breath. And swallowed the words.
Some things were better left unasked. She wasn’t ready for the answer.
Her gaze dropped back to the paper, rereading the same lines she’d already written.
Then something flickered. At the edge of her vision. His mouth, a sudden stretch, wide, fleeting, a grin that shouldn’t be there. For a heartbeat it looked wrong, too sharp, like a shadow creeping over his face.
Her chest jolted, a quick stab of cold beneath the ribs. Was that warmth? Or something else. Mockery? Amusement?
She looked up, fast.
Nothing.
Neutral, calm, attentive. His eyes steady on her writing, his posture the same as before.
Her shoulders tightened anyway, a coil of unease threading up her spine. Did she imagine it? Was it just a trick of angle, of light, of a mind too trained to suspect?
Her fingers curled against the edge of the paper, pressing harder than necessary. Not defiance, just anchoring herself. A grounding to keep the thought from unraveling her.
Second time now. The shadow of satisfaction that might not exist. Maybe it meant something. Maybe nothing.
Her exhale was thin, quiet, and she bent back to the paper.
“Different topic now?” he asked at last.
“Topic?” she repeated, her pen tapping once against the page, “it’s still interrogation.”
“Different person,” Kion clarified, “no longer Blissbane-related, then?”
“...Yeah.”
A pause.
“Why?”
He shrugged, casual, “nothing. Just curious. If you don’t wanna talk about it, that’s fine.”
Her gaze lingered on him for a moment longer before she returned to her writing.
“It’s... probably an acquaintance this time.”
“Sounds like you’re not sure.”
“I’m not. I can’t remember whose ID it belongs to. Not anyone I’ve worked with lately.”
Kion hummed softly, as if mulling it over.
“You don’t have... any clue?” she asked, almost despite herself.
He shook his head, “none. Sorry.”
She nodded. She hadn’t expected much anyway.
Still, Caustic’s double good luck note had to mean something. Some signal she wasn’t parsing. Something was missing. An entire shape in the puzzle she couldn’t even outline. The absence gnawed at her, heavy and sharp.
She shoved it aside and forced herself deeper into the simulation, rehearsing scenarios until the tension in her shoulders blurred into habit.
Wings brushed the air again, pulling her out of her thoughts. Kion rose, looped once in the narrow space, and hovered behind her, “I haven’t brought dinner. I’ll go get some. You’d rather stay in tonight, right?”
She nodded, answering without looking up. Only when she realized he was behind her did she add aloud, “yes.”
“I’ll be back!”
In the next breath he slipped through the vent, wings vanishing into the night.
Only when the fluttering faded to silence did she turn, eyes fixing on the dark square above the window.
The question she hadn’t dared ask pressed up again, heavier now.
“You didn’t report me, did you...?”
Only silence answered.
Her chest hollowed, but she turned back to her notes, mouthing questions, writing out every branch of possible exchange. Expanding them until the act itself felt like armor.
Because if Kion had told them. If every confession she’d let slip in his presence was already in their hands...
She had no idea how she would handle it.
For now, she would cling to the warmth he brought, small and fragile as it was. Push aside every dark possibility, even if they crouched just outside her door.
If it all turned out to be a manipulation, if he was nothing more than a net cast to strip her bare and scorch her dry...
So be it.
She would deal with it when the time came.