Homeroom should have smelled like dry markers and sleep. Instead, the air had that faint metal taste Aiden had learned to hate—the tang of rules arriving before their authors.
He sat two rows from the window, watching the morning light cross scuffed tile in quiet squares. The brand on his wrist warmed, not hot, not yet. Kai slouched beside him, pretending to copy notes he'd never read, whispering out of the corner of his mouth.
"You're leaking again."
Aiden glanced down. His shadow curled the wrong way from the sun, edges feathering like smoke under water. He exhaled through his teeth and flattened it with will.
The intercom popped. A voice the school had never owned came through it, smooth as lacquer.
"Good morning, students and faculty. Pursuant to the Convention's recent Cordon Ban, today's schedule includes a Safety Compliance Sweep. Please remain calm."
Kai's pencil snapped in half. "They wouldn't."
"They would," Aiden said.
The hallway lights stuttered. Glyphs bloomed and faded across lockers like bruises deciding where to settle. Outside, sirens did not sound—but footsteps did: precise, paced, inevitably polite.
Liora stepped into the classroom, gray jacket making her a line cut from shadow. No one else seemed to notice her—Forum had taught her how to be not present in rooms that couldn't afford her. Her voice found only the brothers.
"Porcelain's on the north stair. Seraph is buying us five minutes in the office. Quinn leads the patrol."
Kai's chair screeched back. "We take the roof. Cut them off."
Aiden shook his head. "This is a school. You don't meet knives in a library."
"Then what?"
"We make the library a court."
The bell rang. The sound carried all the old familiar — exams, tardies, teachers with coffee. It also carried something new: the Field listening to a city's ritual.
Aiden stood. His shadow rose with him. The brand brightened, and the world remembered his name.
"Forum."
Reality thinned like paper held to light. The classroom doubled into a low, translucent echo of the Neutral Field: tiers ghosted above bleachers, the floor tiled itself with a pale mosaic. The Clerk's attention—not their bodies, just their function—settled over the stage in the gym beyond the wall. The day remained a day. But now it had an audience.
They herded the school into the gym with the kind of procedural efficiency that turns fear into order. Enforcers in pale masks lined the walls, glyph-swords humming like disciplined thunder. Two Collectors hung above the basketball hoops like torn flags, tendrils draped, seals blinking. Teachers clustered by the doors, lips pressed white. Students filled the bleachers in a layered murmur of alarm and curiosity and the kind of hunger that loves spectacle when it isn't sure it will be devoured.
Quinn stood at center court with a ledger chained to his wrist, his slate coat unruffled by the gym's nervous air. He looked up as Aiden entered with Kai and Liora. His smile reflected the room back as merchandise.
"Contender Aiden. Timely as ever. The Council appreciates your interest in enforcement."
Aiden's voice carried without being loud. "The Ban forbids collateral in the city. Children are not collateral. This ends before it begins."
Quinn tipped his head toward the bleachers. "Children are witnesses. Witnesses are weight. Under Council oversight, weight must be recorded. We are here to record—not to feed."
One Collector dropped, tendrils skimming a row of freshmen like a blind thing seeking heat. Glyphs flared over the students' heads: PRESENCE LOGGED. WEIGHT MEASURED. PENALTY— The word hung, not resolved.
Kai swore softly. "He's pricing attendance."
Liora's hand touched Aiden's elbow. "Write, not swing."
The brand burned. His oath pulsed in bone-script: NO RULING SHALL COST THE INNOCENT THEIR DAWN.
Aiden stepped into center court. His shoes squeaked on wood the way they always had. He lifted his wrist.
"Dispute invoked. Forum convened."
The gym breathed. The tiers brightened. The mosaic inscribed a ring around the free-throw circle. Words crawled up from the paint like a second rulebook:
SUBJECT: SCHOOL. STATUS: SESSION.
RITUALS: FIRST BELL, ROLL, PLEDGE, LESSON.
DEFINITION OF DAWN: FIRST LIGHT / FIRST BELL.
Something in the Field liked that last line. It hummed.
Quinn's brows moved a millimeter. "How quaint. You intend to stretch dawn into a school day? Poetry is a weak fence."
"Law is a ritual," Aiden said. "And rituals choose their hours."
The Clerk's attention tilted as if conceding the point. The Collectors stilled, tendrils half-curled, waiting for the sentence that would tell them whether their hunger was fashionable.
Quinn's smile sharpened. "Very well. Let's be precise. Under Council enforcement, the Ban applies to collateral only. We do not harvest here. We log. Logging is not loss."
A tendril brushed a boy's jacket. The glyphs over his head changed: LOGGED. RATE: OBSERVATION. COST: 0 (DEFERRED).
Deferred. A future charge hidden in a polite now.
Aiden's teeth set. "Public Ledger."
The air above the bleachers turned to glass. Behind Quinn's dainty zero bloomed red lines: future fines tied to presence, nights of sleep taxed as weight, a university application denied because of an algorithm that didn't like stress spikes in a sophomore year data shadow. The crowd saw their futures priced by a hand that called it math.
The room shifted. Teachers leaned forward without meaning to. Students sat up straighter. Quinn's reflection in his own eyes did not blink.
"Honesty," he murmured. "Very moving."
The Magistrate of Ink appeared on the stage without walking there. Her white-and-scarlet robes took up the space of a decision made weeks ago. Her candle-blue eyes swept the gym and found Aiden.
"Trial by Oath?" she asked mildly.
Aiden shook his head. "No trial. Motion."
The Field stilled. Motions, it understood. Motions made teeth.
"Conflict-of-Interest Recusal," Aiden said. "Council oversight cannot both enforce and profit from logs. Recuse them from enforcement on this site. Default enforcement to Contender participation—to proxy."
A hush took the gym's throat in its hand.
Kai's eyes went wide. "You're—"
"—calling me what the Field recognized," Aiden said. "Proxy."
Quinn's smile did not move. "Charming. Contender participation does not mean Contender command."
"Not unless oversight is compromised." Aiden gestured to the glass of the Public Ledger. "They're logging deferred penalties on minors. Profit is the motive. Profit poisons oversight."
The tiers liked that sentence. They laughed without sound in the way crowds applaud with the skin instead of the hands.
The Magistrate's head tilted—a judge considering a new kind of hammer. "Admissible. Field to vote on Recusal."
Lights rose around the rotunda's ghost. A handful in the veils. Many among rivals. One of the Clerks' attentions pivoted—approval. A glyph wrote itself into the painted circle:
RECUSAL: CARRIED (CONDITION).
"Condition?" Liora murmured.
The Magistrate raised a palm. "Oversight recused only for the duration of this session and only on this site. Enforcement devolves to Contender agency. Appoint your Marshal."
The word hit like a bell.
Aiden turned to Kai. The boy had bled for him, laughed in front of spears, shouted at gods with his bare throat. He was unmarked. He was the most dangerous thing in the room.
"Kai," Aiden said. "Marshal."
Kai blinked, grinned like a cliff daring the ocean, and stepped forward. The Field tasted him and tried to spit him out. Aiden held his ground inside it.
"Deputize," Aiden whispered.
The cloak split a thread from itself and tied it around Kai's wrist like a band of night taught manners. It hissed and settled. Something of Aiden's teeth lived there now—not power, but permission.
Quinn's eyes flashed—first real alarm Aiden had ever seen on him. "Improper."
"Recorded," the Magistrate said, candor and amusement both. "Marshal Weiss recognized for this site."
The Enforcers shifted, masks turning. The Collectors' tendrils curled, confused by a new smell in the gym: human defiance given paperwork.
Kai rolled his shoulders like a boy trying on a coat he never thought he'd own. He pointed at the hovering glyphs above the freshmen. "Erase the deferred. Now."
They resisted for half a second—the way bureaucracy resists the first whisper that your form is missing a line—and then, one by one, they went out.
Quinn's smile returned, faint and precise. "How noble. How narrow. You've bought this room a morning."
He lifted his chained ledger. "But the Ban remains under Council oversight citywide. Your Marshalcy ends when this bell rings."
As if summoned by mockery, the loudspeaker crackled. The second bell rolled through the rafters, everyday and absolute.
The Field exhaled. The tiers dimmed. The Magistrate blurred and was gone. The ghost of the mosaic drew itself back into wood grain.
Enforcers along the walls slid their swords into scabbards that glowed and wrote the movement down. Collectors folded back up into paper wind. The gym put its noise back on in layers: coughs, whispers, someone stifling a laugh because that's the body's way to step down from cliffs.
Aiden swayed. Liora caught his elbow with the kind of grace that refuses to be noticed twice. Kai squeezed his own wrist like he could press the band of night deeper under the skin.
Quinn's shoes tapped slowly across court. He stopped an arm's length away, polite as a locked door.
"Enjoy that," he said softly. "You discovered Marshalcy. You stole five paragraphs from a book you haven't read."
He glanced up at the bleachers—faces, faces, weight. The mirror eyes softened into a thing that almost looked like pity and definitely wasn't.
"Tonight," he said, "we move the test to nightfall."
He turned and walked away the way storms leave—without apology, leaving air that won't stop telling the story.
They reconvened in the music room because the lights there made everyone honest. Seraph sprawled across a stack of choir risers, hair wild, grin not quite on. Porcelain stood with his back to the whiteboard like it had tried to summon him.
Kai sat on a piano bench, staring at his wrist like it might make a decision without him.
"That felt like a trap," he said.
"It was a trap," Liora said. "You reached across a rule and lived. We will pay for that survival."
Seraph propped her chin on her fist. "Quinn will case your Marshal trick like a burglar. He'll find the cracks. Tonight they'll stage 'safety sweeps' across the city. Libraries, shelters, aftercare kitchens—places that smell like first bell long after sun is up. Your oath will sing until your bones learn harmony."
Porcelain drifted to the window, the kind of movement that meant he was already watching the next room over. "And they will bring a clause with them you have not met."
Aiden rubbed his eyes, then stared at the note he'd tucked into his pocket and forgotten he'd forgotten: Don't stay up too late. He smoothed it once. He didn't put it back.
"We can't be everywhere," he said.
Kai's grin came back mean and bright. "Then we make everywhere up to us."
Aiden looked at him. "Explain."
"Marshal isn't a hat you wear," Kai said, tapping the band of night on his wrist. "It's a job you give. Deputize. Spread the teeth. Librarians. Night-shift nurses. Shelter cooks. Anyone who knows how to say stay and have a room obey."
Seraph sat up straight, mischief sharpening into strategy. "Distributed teeth. Neighborhood agencies under the Cordon. You'll get laughed out of the Field. Then you'll get copied. Then the Council will claim it was their idea."
"And we will still have kept them from a hundred dawns," Liora said.
Porcelain nodded once. "Build the ledger faster than they can price it."
Aiden stepped to the window. Late afternoon leaned across the parking lot, making every car into a bright shape that forgot it was heavy. The brand pulsed steady—no summons, no writ. Just presence. The city breathed.
"Draft the petition," he said. "Seraph—language. Liora—eligibility and limits. Porcelain—conflicts and recusal triggers. Kai—names. People who don't know they're brave yet."
Kai grinned like a promise. "I know a few."
Aiden pressed his palm to the glass. The gym had returned to being a gym. A janitor mopped a scuff out of the wood like that could fix history. Outside, the sky tested colors.
"Tonight they move the test to nightfall," he said. "Then we move dawn."
He lifted his wrist. The mark warmed his palm as if to say I live because you tell the day what it is.
"Condition Precedent," he whispered, not loud enough to frighten the new idea. "Neighborhood Sunrise."
The Field heard him in the way water hears stones and begins to practice corridors.
Far above any roof, veils rustled like curtains admitting weather. Seven attentions tilted, patient and amused and not ready yet to be afraid.
Interest rising, a violet hand wrote in fire.
Proliferation detected.
Prepare the clause called CURFEW.
Kai slapped Aiden's shoulder. "Come on," he said, mischievous and lethal. "Let's teach librarians to bite."
The day walked toward the edge of itself. The city sharpened its teeth. And somewhere a bell rehearsed the sound of a morning that refused to belong to the clock.