Six days later, Amaron made the mistake of taking his lunch to the Guild hall's outer steps.
It was a reasonable decision at the time. The cartographer's shop was three minutes from the Guild on foot, the outer steps were usually quiet at midday, and he had a survey report to review that required better light than Ossian's back room provided. He arrived, sat on the third step from the bottom, unwrapped his bread and hard cheese, and opened the report.
He had been there approximately four minutes when Livia Jewel came through the Guild's side gate at speed, slightly out of breath, satchel swinging, and sat down on the second step from the bottom because it was the nearest available surface and she apparently needed a moment.
She did not notice him immediately. She was busy locating a piece of paper in her satchel with the intense focus of someone who had misfiled something important and was trying not to catastrophize about it. He watched her work through three separate compartments before finding what she was looking for — a contract addendum, by the look of it — and exhaling with the full-body relief of someone defusing a small personal crisis.
Then she looked up and found him watching her from one step above.
"Oh," she said. "Hello again. You're the board person."
"The board person," Amaron repeated.
"Secondary board. Left corridor. Missing sign." She tucked the addendum back into the satchel with considerably more care than everything else inside it. "You saved me at least another ten minutes of wrong turns. I owe you something."
"You don't," Amaron said.
"I feel like I do." She settled back against the step and looked at the street with the easy comfort of someone who could make themselves at home on Guild steps at midday without self-consciousness. "Are you waiting for someone?"
"Eating lunch," he said. "And reviewing a report."
"I'm interrupting."
"You're sitting one step below me."
She laughed — short and genuine, the kind of laugh that didn't require an audience. "Fair point." She produced her own lunch from somewhere in the satchel's depths, which explained part of the morning's urgency, and they sat in a silence that was, against all reasonable expectation, not uncomfortable.
— ◆ —
Amaron ate his lunch and reviewed his report and was aware, with the particular low-grade awareness of someone trying not to be aware of something, that Livia Jewel ate her lunch with the same unselfconscious ease with which she did everything else. She read her contract addendum. She made a small note in the margin. She watched a cart horse navigate a tight corner in the street below with genuine interest, as if the cart horse were doing something worth paying attention to.
She was, he thought, either entirely without pretension or had achieved a level of social ease so complete it was indistinguishable from the absence of it.
He was on the last third of his report when the Guild's main doors opened and Elian Solhart came out.
Naturally.
Elian stopped at the top of the steps, apparently looking for someone or something in the street below, and then his gaze dropped to the steps themselves and found Livia, and the expression that crossed his face was the specific expression of someone who had not expected to see a particular person and was recalibrating faster than they wanted to show.
"Jewel," he said. The name landed with the particular weight of someone who had decided, recently, to use it.
Livia looked up from her addendum. "Solhart." Equally weighted. Equally recent.
They had known each other for six days. They were already doing the surname thing.
Good grief.
He turned a page of his report.
— ◆ —
"You submitted the Harren contract," Elian said, coming down two steps. Not accusatory — more the tone of someone raising a point they had been thinking about.
"I did," Livia said. "It was a good contract."
"We agreed to take it together."
"We agreed to consider taking it together. Then you went to the eastern branch for two days and I had a window and I took it." She looked up at him with the calm directness of someone who had prepared for this conversation and found it less dramatic than anticipated. "I left you the Maren survey contract. The commission is actually better."
A pause. Elian processed this. Then: "I haven't checked the board today."
"I know. I checked it for you." She said this with the complete absence of smugness that was somehow more effective than smugness would have been. "You're welcome."
Amaron reviewed a set of survey coordinates that he had already reviewed twice. He was sitting eighteen inches from this conversation. The steps were not wide. He had considered leaving approximately thirty seconds ago and had determined that standing up now would draw more attention than staying still.
He stayed still.
He was, he reflected, directly inside what the story considered a private moment. The protagonist and the female lead, six days into their acquaintance, already arguing with the comfortable shorthand of people who had sized each other up and found the measurement interesting. In his first life this had happened somewhere he wasn't. The story had unfolded at a remove, a series of reports and observations and second-hand accounts that he had assembled into a coherent picture without ever being close enough to see the actual texture of it.
The actual texture of it was, if he was being fully honest with himself, somewhat different from the assembled picture.
The assembled picture had been: protagonist meets female lead, mutual interest develops over several months, romantic arc progresses according to standard narrative conventions.
The actual texture was: two seventeen-year-olds on Guild steps, doing a bit, enjoying themselves enormously, completely unaware that they were being observed by a man who had watched the end of their story and found it more complicated than either of them was currently equipped to imagine.
I'm going to need to find a different lunch spot.
— ◆ —
Elian sat down.
Not at the bottom of the steps, where there was room. On the step directly above Livia, which was the step Amaron was occupying, which meant he sat down approximately one foot to Amaron's left with the casual disregard for personal space of someone who had not yet registered that the step was already in use.
Then he registered it.
He looked at Amaron. Amaron looked at his report. A beat passed.
"Sorry," Elian said. "I didn't see you there."
"It's fine," Amaron said.
Another beat. Livia had turned to look at this exchange with the alert interest of someone cataloguing new information.
"He's the board person," she told Elian, with the air of someone providing a helpful clarification.
"The board person," Elian said.
"Secondary board. He knew where it was."
Elian looked at Amaron with the open, assessing quality of someone who had never needed to be subtle about their attention. "Are you Guild?"
"Auxiliary rolls," Amaron said. "Support grade."
"F-rank?"
"Yes."
This was said without weight on either side — Elian asked it the way you ask a clarifying question, Amaron answered it the way you answer a factual one. The rank sat between them and meant nothing except what it said, which was: a person with limited mana capacity doing low-level support work for the Guild. Unremarkable. Unmemorable. Background.
"Right," Elian said, and turned back to Livia and something about the Maren survey contract's access provisions.
Amaron turned another page.
— ◆ —
They talked for eleven minutes. He knew because he tracked it, not out of interest but out of the same methodical attention he gave to everything that might matter. In eleven minutes he learned that Livia had a younger brother currently ill with mana fever, that Elian had taken the Guild's advanced track placement exam twice before passing, that they had a mutual acquaintance in a C-rank Hunter named something Amaron didn't catch who had apparently said something worth arguing about, and that both of them found the Guild's auxiliary contract system unnecessarily complicated and had opinions about how to fix it.
He also learned, without particularly wanting to, that they were good together in the specific way of people whose minds ran on compatible rhythms — she moved fast and trusted her instincts, he moved carefully and tested everything, and somewhere in the overlap between those two approaches was a quality of conversation that had a different texture from either of them alone.
The original story had rendered this as a romance. That was not wrong. But sitting eighteen inches from it, Amaron thought it was also something else — the specific pleasure of finding someone whose thinking sharpened yours, which was rarer than attraction and lasted longer and was considerably harder to walk away from.
This observation was not useful to him. He filed it anyway.
— ◆ —
Eventually Livia stood, said she had a meeting in the eastern wing in four minutes, and left at the same speed she'd arrived. Elian watched her go with the expression of someone not watching someone go.
Then he looked at Amaron.
"Sorry about that," he said. "We talked over your lunch."
"I finished it," Amaron said.
"Still." Elian stood, brushed dust from his coat with the unselfconscious efficiency of someone comfortable in their own movements. "F-rank support — you're mostly doing rift monitoring work? The outer district contracts?"
"Mostly documentation. Cartographer's assistant."
"Steady work." Not condescending. Just noting a fact.
"Consistent," Amaron said.
Something in that answer seemed to register — not the word, but the quality of it, the slight distinction between steady and consistent that didn't announce itself as a distinction. Elian looked at him for a moment with the particular focused attention he gave to things that had caught his interest, and Amaron looked back at his report with the practiced emptiness of someone who was not having an inner experience.
"See you around," Elian said, and went back inside.
Amaron sat on the step for another three minutes, finished reviewing the report, folded it, and stood.
— ◆ —
Walking back to the cartographer's shop, he ran a brief internal audit.
Cover: intact. Neither of them would remember him specifically — he was the quiet F-rank on the steps, background detail, furniture. Elian's attention had moved on in the same breath it had arrived. Livia had filed him as the board person, a category that carried no narrative weight.
Deviation from plan: minor. An unplanned interaction that had produced no meaningful information and no significant risk. He had said eleven words across the entire encounter, none of them interesting.
Unexpected variables: one.
He stopped at the corner of Mender Lane and acknowledged the unexpected variable with the honesty he applied to everything that might matter.
He had sat eighteen inches from Elian Solhart and Livia Jewel doing the opening movement of a ten-year story, and he had found it — not the romance, not the protagonism, not the narrative convenience of two significant people meeting on Guild steps — but the actual texture of them, the specific quality of how they thought together, considerably more interesting than the assembled picture had suggested.
This was not a problem. It was an observation. Observations were not problems until they changed behavior, and his behavior was unchanged.
He filed it in the section of the Memory Index he had labeled, without great originality: complicate later.
Then he went back to work.
[ VOID SYSTEM — DAY 29 STATUS ]
[ MANA RESERVE: 623 units ]
[ CONTROL PATHWAY: FOREARM TO FINGERTIP — STABLE ]
[ ITERATION POINTS: 1 ]
[ ACTIVE FLAGS: 2 ]
[ FLAG 1: PROTAGONIST PROXIMITY — UNPLANNED. SECOND OCCURRENCE. ]
[ FLAG 2: FEMALE LEAD — DIRECT INTERACTION LOGGED. ]
[ RECOMMENDATION: ADJUST LUNCH SCHEDULE. ]
He read the last line twice.
Even the system.