The changes did not arrive all at once.
They accumulated.
Aurel felt them first as absences small, almost imperceptible shifts that registered more as missing than altered. The handler stood farther away during observation. The pauses between visits stretched longer. The wards adjusted more frequently, their hum tightening, narrowing, as if learning to breathe through clenched teeth.
Distance became policy.
"You're farther," Aurel said one morning, the observation slipping out before he could stop himself.
The handler glanced down at the silver line, then back at him. "Yes," they said. "It's… part of the adjustments."
"For the wards?" Aurel asked.
"Yes."
He nodded.
He always nodded.
Time followed.
Isolation periods lengthened by increments small enough to seem reasonable. Twelve minutes became twenty. Twenty became forty. Each interval was logged, reviewed, approved. The gaps between human contact widened until days felt segmented measured not by meals or sleep, but by presence and absence.
Aurel adapted the way he adapted to everything else.
He learned the rhythm of the wards the slight drop in pitch before recalibration, the faint vibration in the stone when the arrays corrected for drift. He learned how to breathe so the air did not feel thin. He learned how to sit so still that even the sensors seemed to forget him.
Stillness made things easier.
In the lower administrative wing, a review committee convened.
The room was windowless, lit by steady lamps designed to eliminate shadows. Papers lay neatly arranged on the table, each bearing graphs, figures, marginal notes written in careful hands.
"The subject remains stable," a clerk reported. "Interference levels remain within acceptable deviation."
"Acceptable for whom?" someone asked.
The clerk hesitated. "For the system."
No one corrected that.
A ward engineer leaned forward, fingers interlaced. "Containment integrity has improved since proximity reduction. Compensation cycles are shorter. Failure rates are down."
"And the cost?" another voice asked.
"Increased recalibration frequency," the engineer said. "Minor degradation in adjacent arrays. No cascading events."
"Yet," someone murmured.
The word lingered.
The third change arrived without paperwork.
Aurel felt it as a tightening, like the air itself had narrowed its focus. The wards did not grow louder. They became attentive.
When the handler entered, Aurel was already standing.
"They changed it again," he said.
The handler paused just inside the doorway. "What feels different?"
Aurel searched for the words. "It doesn't wander," he said finally. "It stays closer."
The handler felt a chill settle behind their eyes.
That was not how wards were meant to be described.
That evening, a new presence entered the fort.
Not announced. Not explained.
The handler glimpsed him only briefly a boy no older than sixteen, walking between two escorts, his anchor clutched in both hands as though it might bolt if released. His eyes flicked constantly, tracking things that were not there.
He looked exhausted.
He looked terrified.
The handler did not ask why he was there.
They already knew.
The test was framed as coincidence.
Aurel's isolation was extended.
The new practitioner was assigned to a neighboring chamber close enough for resonance overlap, far enough to avoid direct attribution. The wards were tuned tighter than usual, their thresholds lowered just enough to capture nuance.
Nothing violated protocol.
Everything violated intent.
From the observation room, the handler watched the readings begin to drift.
Not sharply.
Not alarmingly.
Just enough.
The junior practitioner's output spiked once brief, uncontrolled then collapsed. The numbers jittered, stabilizers scrambling to compensate.
In Aurel's room, he sat rigid on the bed, hands folded too tightly, breath shallow as pressure built behind his ribs.
He did not know what he was reacting to.
He only knew something was wrong.
The wards compensated.
Too late.
The alarms did not sound.
They were not meant to.
The medical wing received another patient before midnight.
The boy did not scream.
He laughed.
The sound echoed thinly down the corridor, unmoored and sharp, until a medic closed the door.
The handler stood frozen outside the observation room, heart pounding.
"This wasn't scheduled," they said.
A clerk beside them did not look up from the slate. "No," she replied. "It was assessed."
Later, in a sealed office, two signatures were added to a document labeled Calibration Outcome.
Hypothesis supported.Interference correlates with proximity and emotional instability.Controlled exposure yields actionable data.
No names were attached.
None were required.
That night, Aurel did not sleep.
He sat on the edge of the bed, feet flat against the stone, breathing carefully. When the handler entered long after the lights had dimmed—he spoke without looking up.
"Someone broke," he said.
The handler swallowed. "Yes."
"It wasn't me," Aurel said.
"No," the handler replied. "It wasn't."
Aurel nodded once.
"Will it happen again?"
The handler closed their eyes briefly.
"Yes," they said.
Aurel absorbed that the way he absorbed everything else.
Quietly.
He lay back and stared at the ceiling, counting breaths until the numbers lost meaning.
Elsewhere in the fort, a clerk updated a ledger. She paused, stylus hovering, then wrote a word in the margin.
Risk.
She stared at it for a moment, then crossed it out and replaced it with another.
Utility.
The system adjusted.
And for the first time, it was no longer caution guiding the hand.
It was curiosity.