They did not arrest Kael with spectacle. The Authority preferred formality; it eats ritual like a man eats salt—without show but with appetite. An escort in a tidy jacket tapped his shoulder during a handoff between shifts, read a terse memo that smelled of legalese and inevitability, and folded him into a corridor that had been designed to make ordinary men feel like anomalies. The processing room was white and efficient and smelled of disinfectant. Paperwork slid across tables like small indictments.
He knew the choreography. Strip, scan, biometric print, a hand that closed a badge into a receptacle and then withdrew it as if a man's name could be temporarily deposited. The clerks did their job with the kind of politeness that kills patience slowly. Maris—if that was the woman's name—led him through the steps with a voice that sounded like policy. She did not scream. She corrected. She asked for clarifications that were impatience in gloves.
They put him in an interrogation room that had been tuned to silence: padded walls in industrial gray, a single bare bulb that hummed at a frequency designed to make the edges of thought fibrous. The chair was bolted. There was a table that caught the light and returned it in a glare. The camera in the corner looked like an object that had learned to be invisible. The air tasted like bureaucracy. It was the kind of room that does not need violence—the procedure is itself a kind of slow undoing.
Maris opened with the ritual of records. "You were present at a mirror cluster when a duplicate was extracted," she said, and the sentence slid into the room like paper into a shredder. "We have questions about your actions that night and about your contacts with unregistered mediators."
Kael answered with what had kept him safe these months: the ledger‑voice of an executor. "I acted under emergency doctrine," he said. The phrase had as much legal weight as an oath. "I authorized transfers to preserve life."
She nodded at the script she held, each question a scalpel. The interrogation flowed in procedural arcs: the seed, the insertion, the transfer. They asked for timestamps and tokens and for the paper trail. She was efficient, unfurling administrative cruelty with the precision of someone who'd practiced the art of not looking at faces.
And then he began to hear it.
At first it was a small thing—an aftersound, a mechanical tick that might have been the bulb or the camera's servos. He told himself it was part of the room; he told himself many things. The tick found the gap the Authority did not intend to measure; it found his skull. It landed on the Echo beneath his skin like a coin on a table and set a rhythm that was not the interrogator's cadence.
It amplified.
The diagnostic kit they used—standard equipment, sanctioned by Halbrecht's own protocols—should have measured pulse variance and implant sync and returned a polite graph. Instead the instrument stuttered. Its readout flickered, then showed a resonance the technicians had no language for: phase-lock anomalies, micro-tempo deviations that matched nothing in the normative profile. Maris' face did not register surprise; the room was trained to hide interest behind procedure. But she felt it. The technicians felt it. The device, intended to categorize human deviation into neat boxes, produced a curve that implicated something else.
Kael heard the ticking as if it were happening inside his teeth: a hard, precise cadence with a clinical accent. It did not belong to any clock he had known; it was granular, additive, a quietly cruel insistence. Each tick folded into a memory not his and yet intimate: the hiss of a mirror clearing a buffer, the soft motor of a donor pump, the low whine of a maintenance drone recalibrating an allocation. The room's hum conspired with the Echo until the boundary between machine and man felt porous.
Maris moved toward a different set of questions, the kind that shrink a man by making the abstract intimate. "You are associated with Lyra and with unauthorized maintenance routes," she said. "Why did you access the mirror cluster? Who authorized the transfer token?"
He deflected with care—truth shaped into procedure; he gave them data that could be verified in the ledger's grammar and left out the parts that would make auditors look at their own hands. He could not tell them how he had folded the Fracture Code into a clean message or that the strip he'd used was half Raze's hardware and half improvisation. The room wanted confessions; the ledger wanted arithmetic.
They tightened the net. Threats arrived under the soft language of consequence: Raze's procedural detention unless cooperation increased; a suggestion that the Harbor Council's new protections would be reconsidered under the scrutiny of expanded oversight; hints that family vulnerabilities—small things like utility checks and donor reports—could be re‑classified if the audit demanded it. The interventions were legal instruments presented as options and therefore as inevitabilities.
Kael's training taught him to replace panic with documentation. He filed answers in his head and offered them as statements. Still, the ticking inside his head grew louder. The device's graphs refused to separate his Echo from the room's cadence. The technicians ran another sanctioned probe; it returned with an error that Maris annotated in her folder: unsynchronized chronometric signature. "We will need a longer calibration," she said, clinical, and for the first time her tone contained a small, unhidden interest.
They left him alone in the holding cell with a cot and light that mimicked dusk. The door sealed with a bureaucratic neatness. He sat and drew the ledger of his breath in his mind as if to count himself back into ownership. The ticking did not stop. It swelled until it became less sound than a pressure: something aligning in time with his nervous system, with the grafts of minutes he had coaxed into existence. The Echo—once an ailment, a private anomaly—felt now like a transmitted reading and a tether.
In the silence he realized an uncomfortable geometry: they could measure his Echo. If they could measure it, they could map the fingerprints that corresponded to fracture pulses and mirror hops. If they could map them, they could trace the Harbor's seam by tracing the pulse in him. The room intended to make him small. Instead it had broadcast the location of a vulnerability the Board had not intended to admit.
He lay on the cot and listened to the clock in his skull clicking a language the Authority had yet to name. The interrogation had not broken him—yet—but it had folded him into evidence. The procedural walls had teeth after all: they could turn an executor into a node to be read, parsed, weaponized. The thought made his throat dry.
Outside the cell a distant PA announced a system alert with the same sterile cadence as everything else. The word they used in the corridor—Chronos anomaly—was delivered like a laundry list. A technician hurried by, eyes furtive, and someone muttered: "Engine drift." The term landed like a stone.
Kael propped himself up and felt the Echo thrum against the thin skin of his neck. He had thought the worst consequence of his ledger-smuggling would be punishment; he had not expected the Authority to do the arithmetic that made his own body the map to their countermeasures. If they could read him, the Harbor's seams would be at risk. The interrogation had begun as procedure. It had become intelligence gathering.
He understood then that the Board did not merely want confessions. It wanted patterns. It wanted to convert the human cadence into a forensic index. The ticking behind his teeth was no longer just an annoyance: it was a beacon they could, if they chose, use to find the people who made time slip for a living.
He closed his eyes and listened until the ticking matched his breathing. The clock in his head was patient. It counted.