He never announced himself.
Announcements created edges. Edges invited pressure. Pressure led to breaks.
So he passed through lives the way breath passed through lungs—necessary, unnoticed, gone before anyone could name the absence.
He rented small rooms with thin walls and views of nothing important. He took jobs that required presence but not identity: night shifts, inventory counts, transit maintenance audits where numbers mattered more than faces. Systems liked him. They ran smoother when he was near, though no metric ever proved it.
He learned rules the way one learns weather.
Not by memorizing charts—but by standing still long enough to feel when a storm was thinking about forming.
When something wanted to happen.
That was always the tell.
Violence, he learned, announced itself early—not with fists or weapons, but with convergence. Schedules tightening. Voices overlapping. Intent compressing into inevitability.
He intervened before that.
Not always.
