By day five, the Greymire District had a king.
Cael didn't know the man's real name yet. The civilians at the civic centre called him "Boss." His enforcers — the four Awakened who'd flanked him on the steps — called him nothing at all. They just followed. The tall man with [Harm] had expanded his territory from the municipal building to a six-block radius in four days, absorbing every supply cache, pharmacy, and clean water source in central Greymire with the efficiency of a company executing a hostile takeover.
Cael watched it happen from the fifth floor of an abandoned office building two blocks outside the perimeter. He'd relocated from his apartment on day three, after someone kicked in his building's lobby door a second time. The office had better sightlines, a functioning deadbolt, and — critically — a roof access stairway that let him observe the civic centre from elevation.
He spent fourteen hours a day watching.
[Analyze] worked differently on crowds than on individuals. On a single person, it returned clean data — posture, tells, injury markers, the faint traces of Permission signatures. On a group, it returned something else. *Patterns.* Social fault lines. The invisible architecture of who feared whom, who deferred to whom, who was pretending to defer while actually calculating.
It was, Cael realised on the morning of day five, exactly like reading a spreadsheet. Each person was a data point. Their relationships were the formulas. And the output — the thing the spreadsheet calculated — was power.
He'd started a map.
---
The logistics report was full. He'd stolen a roll of brown packing paper from the office's supply closet and unrolled two metres of it across the floor. On it, in his anxious-printer handwriting, he was building the Greymire District's new political topology.
The Boss — [Harm] — controlled the centre. Six blocks. Maybe three hundred civilians under his protection-or-else arrangement. He had four Awakened enforcers and was recruiting more. His operation was crude but functional: food distribution, water rationing, patrol routes. He ran it like a foreman running a construction site — bark orders, expect results, punish failures publicly.
Cael had [Analyzed] him from three different angles over three days. The reading was consistent: genuine belief in his own authority, high physical confidence, low strategic imagination. The Boss solved problems by being the strongest person in the room. When that stopped working, he would break.
South of the Boss's territory, a looser coalition had formed around a hardware store. Three Awakened — two with minor physical abilities, one with something environmental that Cael couldn't identify from distance — had fortified the building and were trading supplies for labour. Less authoritarian than the Boss. Also less stable. Cael's [Analyze] read the coalition's social structure as *fragile — built on convenience, not loyalty. Will fracture under pressure.*
East, nothing. The eastern blocks had been hit hardest during the Fracture. Two buildings had collapsed — one from an Awakened losing control, one from the hum's infrastructure degradation. The survivors had scattered west and south. The eastern zone was a dead zone, inhabited only by rats and the growing edge of something Cael had been tracking for two days.
The Hollow.
He'd first noticed it on day three — a silence. Not quiet. *Silence.* An area near the old public library where sound simply ceased. Birds didn't fly over it. The hum — omnipresent everywhere else — vanished at its boundary. Cael had walked to within a block and felt his ears pop, like descending in an airplane. [Analyze] mapped the boundary: a sphere of total sensory nullification, roughly forty metres in diameter.
Growing.
On day three, it had been thirty-five metres. On day five, forty. Whatever was inside was expanding its influence at approximately 2.5 metres per day.
Cael drew the sphere on his map in red ink and wrote: *Don't go near this.*
---
The western edge of the district was where the interesting people were.
Not the powerful ones — the *interesting* ones. The survivors who hadn't received Permissions but also hadn't submitted to the Boss or the hardware coalition. They lived in the gaps between territories, moving between buildings at night, sharing food in whispered exchanges, developing the invisible economy of the powerless.
Cael had found them by accident on day four. He'd been scavenging in a residential block when he heard voices behind a laundry room door. His first instinct was to run. His second was to [Analyze] the door.
Seven people inside. No Permission signatures. Behavioural reads: *cautious, organised, non-threatening.* One individual's posture read as *leadership — earned, not imposed.*
He'd knocked.
The woman who opened the door was in her fifties. Filipino, short, with a nurse's practical stare. Her name was Elena. She ran a small network of unawakened survivors — twelve people across four buildings, sharing resources and information through a system of signal flags hung from windows.
"You're Awakened," she said, looking at his eyes. "You do the thing where you stare at things too long."
"I see structural weaknesses."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
She'd laughed — short, humourless, honest. "Finally. An Awakened who's as useless as the rest of us."
He'd liked her immediately.
---
By day five, Cael had mapped the district into twelve zones. Each had a power structure, a resource profile, and a threat assessment. He colour-coded them on his brown-paper map: green for stable, yellow for volatile, red for dangerous, black for unknown.
The Boss's territory was yellow. Stable for now, but built on a single point of failure — the Boss himself. If he was killed, injured, or challenged by someone stronger, the entire structure collapsed. No succession plan. No institutional framework. Just one man with [Harm] and the willingness to use it.
The hardware coalition was yellow trending red. Internal tensions were growing. One of the three Awakened wanted to expand north. The other two wanted to consolidate. The disagreement would become a fracture within a week.
Elena's network was green. No power, no territory worth fighting over, and a distribution system that made them useful enough to ignore. They survived by being small.
The Hollow was black. Growing. Unknown.
And threading through all of it, visible only to Cael's [Analyze], were the social fractures — the invisible stress lines in the district's new human architecture. Who was dangerous: the Boss, obviously, but also the quiet enforcer who stood at his left side, the one Cael's ability flagged as *higher threat than his rank suggests — watch this one.* Who was bluffing: half the Awakened who strutted through claimed territory showing off abilities they barely controlled, burning through cognitive load they didn't understand, heading for crashes they couldn't see coming. Who would break: the father of three in the Boss's territory who flinched every time an enforcer walked past his door, the young Awakened woman with the environmental ability who kept scratching her wrists when she thought no one was looking, the coalition leader who drank water from a flask that Cael's [Analyze] confirmed was not water.
Everyone had cracks. Some were structural. Some were human. Cael could see them all, and the weight of that seeing was starting to press on something behind his eyes that felt less like cognitive load and more like conscience.
---
On the evening of day five, Cael returned to the office building and updated his map. He added Elena's network in green. He updated the Hollow's boundary. He drew new patrol routes for the Boss's enforcers, updated from twelve hours of observation.
Then he sat back and looked at the whole thing.
The brown paper covered the floor like a battlefield command map from a history documentary. Every data point was a person. Every line was a relationship. Every colour was a verdict he'd passed on someone's stability, danger level, and breaking point — all without speaking to most of them.
He was doing the thing his mother had warned him about. The thing that had cost him her final moments. He was analysing instead of being present. He was mapping the world instead of living in it.
But the world was a map now. That was the truth of it. The Fracture had turned civilisation into a territory game, and territory games had rules, and rules had patterns, and patterns were the only weapon Cael Arison had.
He picked up the pen and wrote in the corner of the map:
The Boss solves problems with strength.
The coalition solves problems with trade.
Elena's network solves problems with invisibility.
None of them are asking the right question.
He paused. Wrote:
The right question: What does the System want?
The Fracture wasn't an accident. 11:47 was specific. 0.3% was specific. The Permissions have categories. There are rules. Rules imply a rulemaker.
Someone — or something — designed this.
Why?
He underlined it three times.
Outside, the crack in the sky pulsed its slow rhythm. The hum vibrated through the floor. The Hollow grew another 2.5 metres. And somewhere in the Boss's territory, a man with [Harm] was settling into a throne he'd built from fear, convinced that strength was the new law.
Cael looked at his map. At the cracks. At the patterns.
Strength wasn't the new law. Strength was what people reached for when they didn't understand the actual law.
And Cael was starting to understand.