Cael didn't sleep that night either. But this time it wasn't the noise that kept him up.
He sat on the office floor with the brown-paper map spread around him and ran the Trial back through his head. Not the decision — the mechanics. Something about the Fracture Zone had been different from the outside world, and not in the ways he expected.
He started writing.
Inside the Fracture Zone, [Analyze]:
- Failed on the environment (noise, static, contradictory data)
- Succeeded inside the Trial Chamber (clean reads on all 11 doors)
- Failed on the Zone itself (couldn't read the shimmer boundary)
He stared at the list. Something was wrong with it. Not wrong — *incomplete.*
He closed his eyes and replayed the memory. Entering the mall. The atrium. The sourceless light. The doors. The countdown. Door six. The scratch.
And then he found it.
He hadn't been tired.
Outside the Zone, [Analyze] cost him something every time he used it. Reading people was exhausting — sustained focus on an individual for more than ten minutes gave him headaches. Reading crowds was worse. Even structural analysis on complex buildings left a dull ache behind his eyes after an hour. Dr. Solke — the name from the coded messages, the scholar he hadn't met yet — would probably call it cognitive load.
Inside the Trial Chamber, he'd read eleven doors in four seconds. Rapid-fire structural analysis on eleven separate objects, each with detailed flaw assessment. The most intensive burst of [Analyze] he'd ever attempted.
And felt nothing. No headache. No fatigue. No cost.
He wrote it down:
Correction — [Analyze] inside the Trial Chamber had ZERO cognitive load.
On people: high cost.
On buildings/objects (outside): moderate cost.
On System-generated elements (Trial doors): NO cost.
He underlined the last line. Read it again.
His Permission didn't tire him when he used it on the System's own structures. The doors in the Trial, the text that appeared on the ground, the TRIAL CHAMBER label — all System-generated. All free of charge. [Analyze] treated System elements like native objects. Like reading itself.
[Analyze] is a System tool. It runs natively on System architecture.
The implications of that sentence were either exciting or terrifying and he couldn't tell which.
---
Dawn came grey and cold. Lira was asleep in the corner, wrapped in a moving blanket she'd taken from the office's storage closet. She slept with her fists slightly closed — not clenched, but not open. Ready. Even unconscious, she was braced for something.
Cael watched her for exactly two seconds and then looked away, because watching someone sleep was the kind of thing that crossed a line he was trying to learn to see.
He went to the roof.
The Greymire District was waking up. Smoke from cooking fires — the Boss's territory had a communal kitchen now, another step toward the organised authoritarianism Cael had predicted. Elena's people were moving in the western margin, flag signals changing on the upper windows. The Hollow's boundary, visible from elevation as a circle of absolute stillness where even dust didn't drift, had grown overnight.
Cael focused on the Hollow. [Analyze] returned data — but only about the boundary, not the interior. The edge of the silence sphere was precisely defined: a 42.3-metre radius from a central point inside the old library. Growth rate: consistent. 2.5 metres per day. At that rate, the Hollow would subsume Elena's nearest safe house in eighteen days.
He filed it.
Then he tested himself.
Wall. Focus. Lines appeared: stress fractures, moisture damage, weak mortar joints. Standard read. He held the focus for sixty seconds and checked his state. Mild fatigue. Slight pressure behind the eyes. Normal cost.
He looked at his hand. Focus. Nothing. Still invisible to his own ability.
He looked at a pigeon on the roof ledge. Focus. Nothing. Animals still blank.
He looked southeast, toward the Garner Street Mall. The shimmer was gone. The Fracture Zone had closed — or collapsed, or migrated. Where it had been, the building looked ordinary. Dead mall. Boarded windows. No amber light. No warping. As if reality had hiccupped and then smoothed itself over.
But inside Cael's skull, something was different. The room behind his eyes — the metaphor he used for [Analyze]'s processing space — was larger. Not dramatically. Not like a renovation. Like someone had pushed one wall back by a foot. More capacity. More resolution. The structural lines on the building across the street were slightly sharper than yesterday. The behavioural reads on the Boss's morning patrol were fractionally more detailed.
E-rank.
The System notification had said potential unlocked. Not rank achieved.* Potential. Like a door cracked open instead of thrown wide. The improvement was real but incremental, and Cael had the sense that the crack would widen with use — that E-rank wasn't a destination but a threshold.
The System doesn't just grant power. It grants potential. You still have to develop it.
He wrote that on the map's margin.
---
Lira came up to the roof at midmorning, carrying a can of tuna and a plastic fork.
"You haven't slept."
"No."
"That's becoming a pattern."
"I found something." He showed her the notation about cognitive load. She read it with the careful attention of someone who didn't understand the theory but understood that the person explaining it wasn't prone to excitement without cause.
"So your ability is... part of the System?"
"It interfaces natively with System architecture. No friction. No cost. Like—" he searched for an analogy that didn't require a computer science degree "—like a maintenance worker using a staff door. Everyone else has to buy a ticket and go through the turnstile. I have a key that lets me into the back corridors."
"That's not a weakness-reading ability."
"No. I don't think it is. I think [Analyze] is something else wearing a weakness-reader's clothes."
She ate a forkful of tuna. Chewed. Thought.
"That's why the System flagged you as anomalous."
"Maybe. Or it flagged me because I chose door six instead of door three. I deviated from the expected answer."
"Or both."
She was getting better at this — the back-and-forth that Cael used to do alone inside his head. She didn't have his pattern recognition, but she had a directness that cut through his spirals. When he overcomplicates, she simplifies. When he hedges, she commits. It was, he was realising, exactly the counterweight he needed.
"What happened to the Zone?" she asked, looking toward Garner Street.
"Gone. Collapsed or moved. I don't know which."
"Will there be more?"
"The outline of the information I have says yes. Fracture Zones appear and disappear. The Trial inside seemed... designed. Structured. Like a test someone built."
"A test for what?"
The right question. The same question from the corner of his map. *What does the System want?*
"I don't know yet," he said. "But it tested whether I'd trust my own ability over human evidence. And when I didn't — when I chose the scratch over the data — it called me anomalous. Like that wasn't supposed to happen."
"You think the System expected you to pick door three?"
"I think the System *wanted* me to pick door three. And I think my ability was designed to point me there. Ten flawed doors, one clean door — that's an [Analyze] user's perfect test. Read the data, find the answer, prove you're a functional diagnostic tool."
"But you didn't."
"I didn't."
Lira set the tuna can down. Looked at him.
"Good," she said.
---
That afternoon, Cael made a decision.
He'd been gathering data for eight days. Watching. Mapping. Building his brown-paper model of the Greymire District's power structure. And he'd been doing it alone — or with Lira, which was better, but still insufficient.
The map told him the district was heading toward a bottleneck. The Boss was expanding. The hardware coalition was fracturing. The Hollow was growing. Resources were shrinking. Within two weeks, the territorial boundaries would collapse into each other, and the resulting conflict would kill people who didn't need to die.
He couldn't stop it with information alone. He needed allies. Infrastructure. A network that could move faster than the Boss's patrols and smarter than his enforcers.
He needed Elena.
He picked up his notebook. Wrote:
Day 9. Objectives:
1. Formalise alliance with Elena's network — trade [Analyze] intelligence for shelter and supply access.
2. Re-contact Greaves. His terms, not mine. Find the woman on Coster — protect her and the kid. Build trust through action, not promises.
3. Map the Fracture Zone pattern. If they appear and disappear on a cycle, predict the next one.
4. Test E-rank [Analyze] limits. How far can I push before cognitive load hits Yellow?
He paused. Added a fifth:
5. Find out who scratched that door.
He looked at the list. At the map. At Lira, who was practising controlled [Reinforce] pulses on the far side of the roof, each activation a little more precise than the last, each deactivation followed by the flinch she was slowly — slowly — learning to make smaller.
They were two people in a broken city with one diagnostic tool and two reinforced fists between them.
It wasn't enough. But it was the start of enough, and starts were what Cael was learning to work with.
The crack in the sky breathed overhead. The Hollow grew. The Boss consolidated. And somewhere on the edge of the district, the coded messages Cael had been tracking for three days continued to arrive — mathematical sequences left at Fracture Zone perimeters, written in a hand that was precise and academic and slightly impatient.
Someone else was watching the patterns.
Cael intended to find them.