The sirens howled, then failed.
For a second the apartment returned to ordinary sounds: the tick of a tired wall clock, the humming refrigerator, a pipe somewhere in the building coughing air. Then a fresh siren grabbed the night again and stretched it thin.
Kael turned off the television because the news anchor's voice had broken into fragments. It kept looping the same torn phrases, like paper fed through gears. Not yet clear. Medical advisories. Remain isolated. If you can hear this. Stay where you are. He had watched the loop six times before noticing that the emergency crawl at the bottom was not moving anymore.
He picked up a pen. Numbers calmed him. He used numbers the way some people used prayers. He wrote on a ruled pad:
Rice: 2 kg
Beans: 4 tins
Crackers: 1 box, half
Water: 5 liters
Bleach: 1 small bottle (half)
Soap: 2 bars
Tools: hammer, duct tape, utility knife, small nails
He wrote the date and time next to it, then boxed the list in a rectangle, drew a line under it, and waited to feel his heart slow down.
It did not slow. The window kept pulling his eyes. He went to it and lifted the edge of the blackout cloth to peek.
From the seventh floor he could see the ridge where the downtown towers began. Fire licked at that ridge as if the city had been outlined in gasoline and someone had set a match to the drawing. Plumes rose in separate columns that leaned like tired pillars. Red flashing lights skittered in the streets and then vanished, like insects burrowing into dark. Somewhere close, a car alarm refused to learn its own irrelevance.
Kael stood with his palm on the cold glass. He felt the faint vibration of some distant concussion run under his skin. He did not try to name the sound. He added a small note to the corner of his pad: distant low - frequency pulses, intermittent, not thunder.
His coworkers called him slow. They called him careful when they were feeling generous and stubborn when they were not. Years had taught him that slowness, like silence, was a tool that hurt nothing when used in excess. Tonight his hands shook, but habit reached through the tremor and began arranging things the way they always should have been arranged.
He double - locked the door. He pushed the sofa against it and then stopped because the sofa did not brace correctly. He stared at the angle, trying to feel where force would travel if someone on the other side hit the door at running speed. He changed the angle until its legs pressed into the opposite wall's baseboard, until the path of force had to move through the sofa's frame and into wood instead of skidding along polished floorboards. He tested the contact by leaning his weight into it. He nodded to himself even though nobody was there.
He filled a pot with water and set it to boil. A boiled liter was a solved problem. He found the bleach and set it next to the sink as if proximity could make cleanliness happen.
The television went from fragments to pure white snow. The room brightened with it, an ugly light that made the dust on every surface look like a conspiracy. Kael ignored it, and the siren that kept dragging its long finger across the night, and the car alarm that insisted on its private grief. He opened the refrigerator and counted the eggs. Four. He closed the door and wrote Four on the pad and underlined it twice for no reason he could immediately explain.
He was still holding the pen when it happened.
Not a voice. Not a hallucination. The air in front of him changed. Thin, translucent lines inscribed themselves into existence like frost on a windowpane, except the pattern had grammar.
[System: Initialization]
Host Identified - Kael.
Survival Protocols engaged.
Knowledge Grid detected: Dormant.
Audit Capacity: Minimal.
Points of Knowledge (PC): 0.
Modules: 0.
Safe Windows: 0.
Kael did not move. There was no sound to the text, but the room felt quieter for containing it. He blinked once, slowly, to see if the lines would smear. They did not. He lifted his hand experimentally. The lines did not follow his hand. They did not cast a shadow. They were simply present, as if the air had decided it would rather be language.
More text poured itself into being.
[System: VIEW_TREE]
Branches: - Engineering (locked) - Bio/Chemistry (locked) - Energy/Electrical (locked) - Information/Sensors (locked) - Logistics/Governance (locked)
Available Knowledge Packs: - Bases of Mechanics (cost: 2 PC + 1 Safe Window 10m) - Bases of Biology (cost: 2 PC + 1 Safe Window 10m)
Kael lowered his hand and looked around his kitchen to check if the room still obeyed ordinary reality: walls there, table there, pot on the stove beginning to whisper about steam. He looked through the window slit again. The city was still burning. Nothing in the world changed except that something had decided to draw a map of knowledge in front of his eyes.
He tried words aloud to see whether the System would care. His voice was hoarse from disuse.
"What do you want?"
The text did not answer as a person might. It simply offered a small line at the bottom of his vision, like a status bar that had chosen restraint.
Status: Host stable.
Recommendation: Acquire fundamentals.
Constraint: PC = 0. Safe Window = 0.
Action Path: Create an audit.
Kael breathed in and out once. The smell of the boiling water reached him and filled his head with a very ordinary task: if he had soap and bleach and boiled water, he could control some disease vectors. The System's language tapped lightly at the back of his skull like a spoon on glass. He turned to the pad and wrote again, because writing had always been his way to make the future agree with the present.
He drew a new box beneath the inventory and labeled it AUDIT. He listed the door status, the sofa brace, the water boiling, the bleach position, the food, the window coverings, his own physical state. He wrote small because small letters were steady letters. - Door: double - locked. - Brace: sofa against opposite baseboard, good angle. - Window: blackout cloth in place, kitchen window cracked for steam only. - Water: 1 L boiling. - Food: see inventory. - Hygiene: bleach present; soap present. - Tools: hammer, duct tape, utility knife, small nails. - Health: heart rate elevated; no wounds. - Risk: unknown infected presence in building; smoke infiltration risk. - Plan: remain isolated; ration food; establish daily check ritual.
He pressed the pen into the paper hard enough to leave dents in the next page. Then he signed the bottom of the box with his initials as if he were approving his own proposal.
The text brightened.
[System: Audit Complete]
+1 PC gained.
Points of Knowledge: 1.
His laugh startled him. It sounded like someone else's voice had fallen out of his throat by accident. He covered his mouth with his hand until the sound stopped, then he kept that hand there for a few seconds longer to make sure the control was real. When he lowered it, the boiled water was hissing. He turned off the heat and set the pot to the side. The coil clicked as it cooled.
"Fine," he said. "Fine."
The System's tree still hovered. Locked branches, locked nodes except two faintly luminescent packs that pulsed at the edges as if asking to be touched. Bases of Mechanics. Bases of Biology. The costs glowed beside them like price tags he could not yet afford. 2 PC each. He had 1.
Constraint: PC = 1.
Advice: Repeat audit or perform micro - mission.
Micro - missions generate PC when completed without detection or with minimized noise.
He opened the refrigerator again and took out the eggs. He put two back. He cracked two into a bowl and stared at the yellow that spilled into white. The fork he used to whisk them made a sound too loud for the room. He apologized to the air without meaning to. He cooked the eggs on low heat because he did not want the smell to go far.
He carried the plate to the table and ate exactly half. He placed the other half in a container and labeled it with a piece of tape, writing the date. He drank a cup of boiled water. After the third swallow he felt his heart slow two notches, like a cup set down on a lower table.
He wrote the food action in the audit's margin, then he drew a tiny square and colored it in. The square meant Done. He used that square for everything now. A line under the square meant Done at cost. Two lines meant Done with luck. He made himself use only one line.
The System wrote back immediately.
[System: Audit Update]
+0.5 PC gained (ration discipline).
Points of Knowledge: 1.5.
"That is a ridiculous number," Kael said. "No such half should exist."
Status: Accumulated fraction. Next unit at 2.0 PC.
He found himself smiling without humor at an interface that did not care for his aesthetics. He stood and walked the apartment, not because he thought he had missed something, but because movement kept panic from sitting on his chest. He checked the bathroom fan. He opened the supply drawers and made a second inventory of batteries, candles, matches, a single flashlight that flickered weakly when he tested it. He wrote all of it down, boxing each category, then drew a square next to Boxes Rewritten and colored it in.
[System: Audit Update]
+0.5 PC gained (completeness).
Points of Knowledge: 2.0.
Advice: Fundamentals available.
Kael did not sit. He braced his hands on the back of the chair and stared at the faint two - pack glow as if the decision could be argued with. Bases of Mechanics. Bases of Biology. He thought of hospital waiting rooms and the smell of antiseptic. He thought of window frames and the way they creaked when you leaned on them wrong. He thought of the word fundamentals the way a starving man thinks of calories.
"Learn," he said quietly. He focused on the pack called Bases of Mechanics and the glow responded. Something like a menu opened, but simpler.
[Pack: Bases of Mechanics]
Effect: Assimilate fundamentals of mechanical systems.
Levers, pulleys, torque, structural integrity, fasteners.
Unlocks Engineering Tier 0 nodes.
Warning: Cognitive fatigue (minor).
Cost: 2 PC + 1 Safe Window (10m).
Kael looked at the last line.
Constraint: Safe Window required.
"What is a Safe Window?" he asked.
The status bar at the bottom of his vision shifted.
Safe Window: a measured interval with reduced threat probability, established by controlled conditions.
Generate a Safe Window by creating a low - noise environment, establishing a perimeter, and setting a countdown without interruption.
He considered the door brace and the boiling water's silence. He considered the sirens outside. They came and went. He could not control the city's noise but he could control his own. He turned off the refrigerator because the compressor hum annoyed him and because a few minutes would not spoil anything. He turned off the bathroom fan. He set his phone to airplane mode and put it face down in the drawer. He wrapped a towel around the clock to erase its tick. He breathed in and out and listened to the building.
The building did not care about him. That helped. He glanced at the tree again.
"Safe Window," he said, more to himself than to the air. He set the timer on his stove to ten minutes and pressed Start. He floored his fear like a pedal and let the logic engine take the load. The System recognized the signals.
[System: Safe Window established]
Duration: 10 minutes.
Interruptions: none so far.
"Learn," he said again, but this time he meant it the way he meant breathing. The apartment thinned out around him. For a second it felt like he was falling forward without moving.
The knowledge arrived without ceremony and with absolute indifference to his previous ignorance. His head filled with the plain truth of machines. A hinge is a contract between rotation and support. A screw's pitch translates rotational work into linear force. A lever is a sermon on distance and effort. A frame properly braced can turn a weak door into an unwilling friend. Nails are not small; they are decisions about load paths. A room is a box; a box is a tool; anything that wants to come through can be taught to change its mind if you respect angles.
He gripped the back of the chair and let his jaw flex until the sudden rush passed. It did not hurt in the way that pain hurts, but it made space in him by taking up all the space that had been wasted on not knowing.
[System: Knowledge Pack Assimilated]
Bases of Mechanics acquired.
Effects: +15 percent assembly success, - 20 percent repair time, - 30 percent noise from tool use.
Unlocked: Engineering T0 nodes.
Fatigue: minor (12 minutes).
PC remaining: 0.0.
Safe Window remaining: 4 minutes.
He breathed in and out. He lifted the chair gently and felt how its joints talked to his hands. He set it down, and the shy little creak it made did not annoy him. It informed him.
He had four minutes left. It would be foolish not to try to acquire the other pack, but he had no PC now. He looked at the pad, at the boxes in neat lines, at the tiny filled squares. Points had come from audit. He could get more.
He tested the door brace again, then he adjusted it because what had been good enough for a nervous man was not good enough for a man who understood that a door could be taught to learn. He took the duct tape and cut it into strips so that the handle could be bound to the brace in a way that would make surprise unlikely. He took two nails and a length of string and tied the string to the inside knob, then ran it back to a chair leg and anchored it there so that any jostle on the knob would tug and make a sound, but the string sat slack enough that wind would not set it off. He wrote STRING on the pad and drew a square and colored it in.
[System: Micro - mission Complete]
+0.5 PC gained (noiseless reinforcement).
PC: 0.5.
He looked at the kitchen window. It would be the way a thing could think it could get in. He measured the frame with his eyes and then with the side of his hand. He cut wedges from a scrap of pine he kept for... he did not remember why he kept it. He had kept it because some part of him believed it would be useful one day. He tapped the wedges into the frame so that an upward lift would fight friction it did not want to fight. He wrote WEDGES and colored a square.
[System: Micro - mission Complete]
+0.5 PC gained (window wedge minimal noise).
PC: 1.0.
He unscrewed the refrigerator's vent cover and cleaned the dust with a little brush because a quiet machine takes less energy and might live longer. He replaced the cover carefully so it would not rattle when the compressor woke again. He wrote DUST. He colored a square.
[System: Micro - mission Complete]
+0.5 PC gained (preventive maintenance).
PC: 1.5.
He listened for the stairwell. He heard nothing but the building's old bones. He stood very still and counted breaths. When he reached fifty he did not feel ridiculous. He felt honest.
He had 1.5 PC. He needed 2. He did not want to go into the hall yet. He looked at the bathroom. He could filtrate water if needed. He took a T - shirt and cut it into neat squares to make a first stage filter. He wrote FILTER CLOTH and colored a square.
[System: Micro - mission Complete]
+0.5 PC gained (resource pre - stage).
PC: 2.0.
The Safe Window clock ended with a small beep. He did not jump. He put the T - shirt squares in a Ziploc bag and labeled it with tape. He washed his hands in hot water for twenty seconds with soap because fundamentals are not exotic.
He looked at the hovering tree again and said, quite simply, "Learn."
The biology arrived in diagrams that were not quite images and not quite words. Cells existed first. Pipes and tubes existed inside people. Infection was not a monster; it was a load of tiny insists that moved from place to place because nobody had interrupted them. Heat, bleach, friction, filters, time. Anatomy existed at scales his hands understood. He watched a wound in his head and then stepped back from the image. He did not have a wound. He was watching a wound that might exist and that deserved the correct answer.
[System: Knowledge Pack Assimilated]
Bases of Biology acquired.
Effects: +20 percent infection resistance (procedural), +efficiency mixing antiseptics, +first - pass diagnosis for common trauma.
Unlocked: Bio/Chemistry T0 nodes.
Fatigue: minor (10 minutes).
PC: 0.0.
He stood up straighter. The room seemed a little smaller and a little more manageable the way a notebook page does when you realize you know how big your handwriting should be.
Someone knocked at the door.
Not the System's rhythm. Not a siren. Human. Three knocks, then three more, too fast.
He did not say Who is it. He looked at the string attached to the inside knob and watched it tremble only with the memory of the last knock. He put his eye to the peephole. The hallway looked tired. The light at the far end flickered. A thin slice of floor and a slice of opposite wall made a frame for a sliver of person.
A voice hissed through the door. "Kael, please. It is Mira. Open up. Something is out there."
He did not open. His new knowledge did not make him brave. It made him correct. He breathed once and let his voice be as flat as a floor.
"Describe," he said.
"Man on the stairs," the voice whispered. "He bit someone. Blood. He looked at me. I shut my door but the latch broke and I ran. Please. Please."
He felt his teeth touch. He considered probabilities. He looked at the clock. He looked at the inventory pad. He looked at the sofa brace. He listened to the hall beyond the voice. There was another sound in the space, a wet dragging like someone moving a bag without lifting it high enough.
He made the decision as if he were drawing a line under a column of numbers. He slid the sofa just enough. He undid the lock. He held the hammer in his right hand and the duct tape in his left. He pulled the door open a hand's width and then a body's width and murmured, "Now."
Mira came through like a knife thrown underhand. She stumbled past him and hit the wall with a little gasp. He pushed the door shut and turned both locks. He moved the sofa back and watched the string settle into its slack again.
"Thank you," she said in a voice that did not want to be thanked. Her hair stuck to her forehead. She held a kitchen knife in a grip that would have been funny if the hall were not what it was. She wore a university hoodie and one shoe.
He said, "Describe," again, because it mattered.
She made herself talk. "On five. Man and woman arguing. He pushed her. She screamed. I called down from the landing. He looked up. His face... his mouth..." She stopped and swallowed. "I ran. The latch on my door snapped. I ran. He was coming up. I could hear... I could hear his nails on the steps."
Kael's hands had stopped shaking without asking permission. He said, "Sit," and pointed to the chair. She sat as if the order had been promised to her since birth. He set a cup of water in front of her. She gulped twice, then stopped like she had learned something in the first two gulps.
He kept the hammer in his hand and walked to the door. The string did not move. He put his eye to the peephole again. The hall returned his stare without sharing its secrets. He leaned his ear against the wood. He heard something. The something made smaller somethings in his head. He waited until the smaller somethings stopped.
He turned to Mira. "We remain quiet," he said. She nodded and put the knife down and then picked it up again as if her hand and the knife were magnets and she was too polite to refuse physics.
He wrote in the audit: Companion gained - Mira. Status: unstable. He drew a square and left it uncolored because the line for Done did not feel earned yet.
The System paid attention.
[System: Encounter Logged]
Threat: unknown infected presence (Tier 0 assumed).
Companion: acquired (Mira).
Options: Passive (fortify, avoid detection). Active (engage, eliminate).
Reward: +1 PC for survival outcome.
Kael closed his eyes and whispered part of a sentence that slid into his mouth like it had been waiting there. "We do not need to be brave," he said. "We need to be correct."
Mira made a small sound that could have been a laugh hiding under a cough. "That sounds like you," she said. "Or like you would like to be."
"It is doctrine now," Kael replied, and surprised himself by liking the word doctrine. He reached for the pad again. He wrote the sentence beneath the audit and drew a box around it. Then he labeled the box DOCTRINE SEED.
[System: Doctrine Seed planted]
Effect: +1 PC per day if doctrine is repeated during audit, contingent on compliance.
They ate crackers because eating took space in fear's mouth. He gave her two and took one for himself. He opened a tin of beans and split it, and she recoiled as if the tin had done something rude. He told her that protein was a good idea and that beans could be a friend. She choked on the first bite and then swallowed and then looked like someone who had chosen to live a little longer.
They listened to the building learn new ways to make old sounds. Somewhere above them a door slammed. Somewhere below, something metal rolled and then rolled again and then stopped quietly. The siren outside grew tired and fell asleep without telling anyone. The television, which had been forgotten in its own blizzard, finally gave up and went black.
Kael stood and walked the room in a tight circle to give his muscles the message that they could work later. He found a small length of white thread in a drawer and tied it between the chair leg and the cabinet handle so that it just kissed the surface of the floor. He wrote in the audit: trip thread inside kitchen, test for draft, test for heavy footsteps. He colored the square. He caught himself enjoying the square more than he should.
[System: Micro - mission Complete]
+0.5 PC (internal early warning).
When he finally told Mira to sleep, he did not tell her where. He set a folded blanket on the floor near the sofa because the door was a thing that wanted a friend to lean against. She lay down, knife in both hands, and fell asleep the way only exhausted people can.
Kael did not sleep right away. He stood in the dark and watched the rectangle of the door outline itself against the less dark of the hall. He imagined the path of force again and felt the relief of doing a math problem that delivered the same answer twice.
When he sat at the table, he did not pick up the pen immediately. He looked at his hands. They had never been large hands. They were not calloused in the way of men who introduced themselves to engines, but they were hands that now knew the idea of a torque wrench the way a throat knows the idea of speaking. He set those hands down carefully and then picked up the pen and wrote the closing audit of the day. - Food rationed: 1 tin shared, 3 crackers total. - Water: 1 L consumed. - Companion: Mira acquired; status unstable but compliant. - Door: brace good; string alarm installed; wedge placed; trip thread inside kitchen. - Windows: blackout cloth stable; kitchen cracked only for steam earlier; closed now. - Hygiene: hands washed; surfaces wiped; bleach staged. - Knowledge: Engineering T0 acquired (Bases of Mechanics). Bio/Chemistry T0 acquired (Bases of Biology). - Doctrine: We do not need to be brave. We need to be correct. Repeated once. - Risk: unknown infected presence in stairwell; probable return. - Plan tomorrow: establish Retreat Node 1 on landing; observe; avoid contact; map corridor; begin language for nonverbal signals.
He drew his square. He colored it in slowly.
[System: Audit Complete]
+1 PC gained (daily).
+1 PC gained (doctrine repetition).
+0.5 PC gained (companion compliance).
Total PC: 2.0.
He blinked at the number. He felt a part of him that counted rub two smooth stones together inside his chest and make a small warm spark. He glanced at the tree. It now displayed more than packs. Several Tier 0 nodes had lit up faintly, not yet unlocked but willing to be. Hygiene & Antiseptics. Perception & Metrology. Inventory & Audit. DC Basics. He did not touch them. Not yet. Fatigue hovered at the edges of his vision like a polite houseguest who knew it was time to leave.
He stood, turned off the light, and lay on the floor by the door. He did not sleep, exactly. He observed the space behind his eyelids and let sleep steal pieces of observation when it could. The building's noises flattened out into something like rain. His breath counted itself. The rectangle of the door waited.
He woke to the smallest of sounds.
Not the stairwell. Not the city. The sound came from the other side of the door, close enough that the tiny string on the inside knob shivered by the thickness of its own diameter.
He did not speak. He pressed his hand against the wood and felt a faint vibration, like someone leaning on the other side to decide if leaning was a kind of knocking.
Mira stirred. The knife made a whisper against the blanket. Kael lifted his other hand, palm down, and she stilled without argument. He waited. The pressure on the door released like a breath that had finally remembered that lungs empty.
They lay there a long time.
The light that came eventually was thin and embarrassed by itself. Kael sat up without letting his bones complain. He checked the string again. He looked through the peephole. A smudge on the opposite wall caught his eye, a smudge that had not been there the night before.
It was a smear of blue. Maybe paint. Maybe something else. It was too small and too dumb to be a message, and also too deliberate to be an accident. It was at knee height, as if someone had trailed a finger while passing, or as if someone had wanted to draw a line under the sentence that did not yet exist.
He did not open the door. He did not touch the smear. He stepped back from the peephole and wrote in the audit margin: blue smear on hall wall at knee height, outside. unknown.
Mira's voice was small and croaky. "Is it morning?"
"It is whatever is on the other side of the door," Kael said. "We will call it morning if it helps."
"What are we going to do today?" she asked. The question had a child's rhythm, and he did not punish it for that.
"We will establish a retreat node on the landing," he said. "We will observe and not interact. We will practice a nonverbal ring so that doors can ignore us safely. We will not die."
She nodded as if those four sentences were a bowl she could carry without spilling. "I am ready," she lied. He chose to grade the lie as a pass because the alternative would not be useful.
They ate a small breakfast of repetition: a third of a tin, a cracker, hot water that smelled like something clean even if it was nothing at all. He made her wash her hands for twenty seconds again. They taped her hoodie sleeve where it had torn. He gave her his extra shoe because the day would be longer if she was not limping. He made her practice holding the knife with her thumb pinned properly to the handle, not wandering around the spine like a tourist in an unfriendly city.
He moved the sofa. He undid the top lock, then the second, then unhooked the string gently so as not to sing it. He opened the door. He listened to the building decide whether to notice.
The hallway smelled like old dust and a night spent thinking about fire. The blue smear looked duller in the new light. The stairwell at the end of the corridor held its usual promise of gravity.
Kael stepped out first, hammer low, eyes using corners the way a reader uses margins. Mira followed with her knife and her borrowed shoe and her mouth closed like a skill. He pulled the door almost shut behind them. The room was safer with a little air inside.
He wanted to set the retreat node at a point on the landing where two lines met: safety and speed. A hole at shin height under the radiator cage looked like the right place for a little truth. He knelt and threaded a thin nylon line across the mouth of the gap, at ankle height, darkened with dust to disguise its self - importance. He made the knot so the smallest brush would confess. He dabbed a tiny chalk dot on the knot so he would know if the knot had told the truth later.
He labeled it inside his head: RN - 1. He wrote on the pad while kneeling because writing could happen in any posture.
[System: Node Established]
RN - 1 created. Early warning trip. Signature low.
+1 PC.
"It is just thread," Mira said.
"It is just enough," Kael replied.
They tested the rhythm they would use on doors if they needed to ask for silence without words. Two finger taps, pause, two finger taps, a waiting posture that said this is not an emergency, we do not need you, go back to sleep. They did not touch any doors. They practiced in the air. Mira's first tries were too bold. Kael corrected her wrist with a small touch and waited until the taps were apologies instead of commands. She smiled without showing her teeth and got it right three times in a row.
A shadow moved above them on the stairs. Kael raised a finger and Mira froze. The figure that leaned over the banister was thin. A man's eyes found theirs. His finger lifted to his lips. Quiet, he mouthed. He vanished again. Human. Still human.
They retreated and resecured the door and rehooked the string and put the sofa back against physics. They sat and breathed and let their new knowledge sit beside their old ignorance without asking the two to fight.
Mira asked, "How are you not screaming?"
"I am screaming," Kael said evenly. "I am simply not wasting the air."
They took inventory again, and he made her read the list out loud. He divided rice into smaller portions and bagged them, writing the weight on each. He showed her how to weigh by hand until her estimates were not guesses. He made her wash the knife and the plate and the cup and taught her the way to dry a knife that keeps edges honest.
When the day had grown tired, they did not reward it by stopping. He wrote the day down until it made sense. He read it aloud because saying is a kind of sealing.
[System: Audit Complete] - RN - 1 established. - Nonverbal ring practiced. - Blue smear observed. - Hallway: human presence detected; no contact. - Companion: Mira training begun; compliance good. - Food and water rationed with intent. - Doctrine repeated.
+2 PC (missions + doctrine).
Total PC: 4.0.
[System: Knowledge Available]
Information/Sensors T0: Perception & Metrology (cost: 1 PC).
"Learn," he said.
[System: Knowledge Acquired]
Perception & Metrology installed.
Effects: +signal/noise discernment, +timing accuracy.
PC remaining: 3.0.
He lay down by the door and let the rectangle be a god he could live with.
"What if the blue on the wall is a sign?" Mira whispered.
"It is a sign," he said.
"What does it say?"
"It says not yet."
"To what?"
"To everything. To fear. To hope. To opening. To dying. To being loud. To touching. To letting go. Not yet."
"Okay," she said finally. "Not yet. We do not need to be brave."
"We need to be correct."
He slept with his hand on the floor, fingers touching fine dust ready to read. Outside, two floors down, someone wrote three small rectangles in blue chalk under the rail at knee height, spaced exactly a palm apart.
Morning would come later and invite curiosity. For now, correctness went on breathing.