Cael heard the fight before he saw it.
Day seven. He was running a supply route through the western margin — Elena's territory, where the unawakened survivors traded in whispers and kept their heads low. He'd mapped this corridor on day four: a back-alley path between a condemned laundromat and a row of shuttered shops that bypassed the Boss's patrol perimeter by thirty metres. Safe. Predictable.
Until it wasn't.
The sounds came from around the corner. Not the chaotic noise of a brawl — something structured. Impact. Grunt. Silence. Impact. Grunt. Silence. A rhythm to it, like a metronome set to violence.
Cael pressed himself against the laundromat wall and focused.
[Analyze] reached around the corner before he did.
Two men. Both Awakened — faint Permission signatures in their posture, the micro-tremors in their hands that said they'd been using abilities recently. One was large, shaved head, [Harm]-adjacent based on the residual energy pooling in his fists. The other was wiry, twitchy, with something environmental — heat distortion around his fingers, visible to [Analyze] as a low-grade thermal signature.
They were circling a woman.
She was maybe his age. Shorter than both of them, built like someone who'd spent years doing something physical — not gym-physical, not aesthetic. Functional. The kind of muscle that came from repetition, from thousands of the same movement done until the body stopped distinguishing between thought and action.
She was standing in a boxer's stance. Left foot forward, weight on the balls of her feet, hands up. Classic orthodox guard.
And she was glowing.
Not literally — not like the woman on day one who'd grown walls. This was subtler. Cael's [Analyze] mapped it instantly: a thin film of energy coating her forearms and fists like armour. Not generating force. Not projecting anything. *Reinforcing.* Whatever her Permission was, it made her harder. Denser. Her fists weren't weapons — they were weapons wrapped in something that turned bone and skin into something that shouldn't break.
The shaved man lunged.
He was fast. D-rank physical enhancement, maybe higher — his muscles fired with a chemical urgency that said his Permission enhanced his baseline. Cael's [Analyze] mapped the attack in real-time: right hook, telegraphed by the shoulder drop, predictable trajectory, impact point aimed at the woman's jaw.
She didn't dodge. She didn't need to.
She raised her left forearm and blocked.
The sound was wrong. Not flesh-on-flesh. A crack — hard, ceramic, the noise of two materials meeting where one of them refused to compress. The shaved man's fist hit her reinforced forearm and stopped dead. Cael saw the shockwave travel through the man's wrist, up his radius and ulna. [Analyze] flagged the damage: hairline fracture, third metacarpal. The man's own punch had broken his hand against her guard.
He screamed. Pulled back. The twitchy one stepped forward, heat shimmering around his fingers—
She hit the shaved man while he was still processing the scream.
A right cross. Short, compact, thrown from the hip with the snap of someone who'd thrown ten thousand right crosses before this one. The reinforcement on her fist flared — Cael saw it pulse brighter on impact — and the shaved man's jaw dislocated with a sound like a branch breaking underwater.
He folded. Hit the concrete. Didn't move.
The twitchy one hesitated.
That was the wrong thing to do. She closed the distance in two steps — not a charge, not a lunge, a *step-step* — and drove a left hook into his ribs before his thermal ability could activate. The reinforced fist sank into the space between his seventh and eighth ribs. He doubled over. She grabbed the back of his head, pulled it down, brought her knee up.
Done.
Both men on the concrete. Neither moving. The fight had lasted nine seconds.
She stood over them, breathing hard, fists still up. The reinforcement flickered on her forearms like a dying signal. Then it faded.
And she flinched.
Not from pain. Not from injury. She looked at her right fist — the one that had broken the man's jaw — and her fingers uncurled slowly, one by one, as if they didn't belong to her. She stared at her knuckles. They were unmarked. The reinforcement had protected her completely. Not a scratch, not a bruise, not a single sign that she'd just dismantled two grown men with her bare hands.
She made a fist again. Looked at it.
Flinched again.
He didn't need [Analyze] for this.
Her jaw was clenched — not from the fight, but from something older. The tension sat in the muscle like it had been there for years, worn into the bone the way water wears grooves into stone. Her right hand trembled when she unclenched it. Not fatigue. She'd just hit two men hard enough to break bone and her fist was unmarked, undamaged, perfectly fine. The tremor wasn't physical.
She hated it. She had just fought with the precision of someone who'd trained for years, and she hated every second of it.
Her shoulders curled inward. Not defending against the men on the ground — defending against herself. Against what her hands had just done, and how easily they'd done it, and what that ease meant about who she was.
Cael knew that posture. Not from data. From the parts of being human that no diagnostic could map.
Somebody had taught her to fight by fighting her. And she'd learned the lesson so well that the skill and the wound were the same thing.
He stepped backward. His boot hit a piece of broken glass.
She turned. Fast. Fists up, reinforcement blazing back to life on her forearms. Her eyes — dark, furious, terrified — locked onto him.
"I'm not armed," Cael said. He raised his hands. "I'm not with them."
She didn't lower her guard. Her weight was forward. Ready.
"I saw the fight," he said, keeping his voice flat. Calm. The tone he used for customer service calls and insurance arguments and every other interaction where showing emotion was a tactical disadvantage. "You won. I'm not here to test that."
She studied him. He could feel her reading him the way he read everyone — not with a Permission, but with the hard-wired threat assessment of someone who'd grown up calculating danger.
"You're Awakened," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"What can you do?"
He told her the truth, because lying to someone who could reinforce her fists to the density of concrete seemed like a bad long-term investment.
"I can see where things are weak."
Her expression didn't change. "That's it?"
"That's it."
"Can you fight?"
"No."
Something shifted in her face. The guard dropped — not the physical one, which stayed exactly where it was, but something behind it. A wall made of habit rather than energy.
"Then what good are you?"
Cael looked at the two men on the ground. At the alley. At the escape routes [Analyze] had already mapped — three exits, two viable, one with structural weaknesses in the fire escape that would slow a pursuer.
"I knew this alley was safe twenty seconds before you did," he said. "I can see the patrol routes two blocks ahead. I can tell you which buildings will collapse in the next week and which ones won't. I can see that the big one has a hairline fracture in his third metacarpal and won't be throwing right hooks for at least a month, and that the skinny one's thermal ability runs off adrenaline — he needs to be scared to use it, which means in about forty seconds when he wakes up, he's going to be very dangerous for about three seconds and then very tired."
He paused.
"I can't fight. I can see everything around the fight."
She stared at him. The reinforcement on her forearms flickered and died. Her hands opened slowly, palms down, fingers spread — the deliberate unclenching of someone for whom a closed fist meant something worse than combat.
"Lira," she said.
"Cael."
"Those two took a family's food supply three blocks north. I tracked them here."
"I know. I watched."
Her eyes narrowed. "You watched."
"I watch everything. It's all I can do."
Something passed between them that wasn't trust — trust was earned, and they'd known each other for ninety seconds. It was something more practical. Recognition. Two people standing in an alley over two unconscious bodies, each holding a skill the other lacked.
She could fight.
He could see.
The math was obvious. Even to someone who hated math.
"The family," Cael said. "Where are they?"
"Building on Cramer. Third floor. Two kids."
"I know a safe corridor back. No patrols, no territories. Twenty minutes."
Lira looked at him. At his raised hands. At his complete lack of physical threat. Then she looked at her own fists — those weapons she carried like inherited sins — and something in her face cracked. Not broke. Cracked. The way a wall cracks before it lets in light.
"Show me," she said.
---
They walked in silence for three blocks.
Cael led. He narrated in short, clipped phrases — the kind of observations that [Analyze] fed him without being asked, background noise he'd learned to translate into useful speech.
"Left here. The alley's clear for eighty metres."
"Avoid the green building. Foundation's compromised."
"Two Awakened in the apartment above us. Both sleeping. One's cognitive load is elevated — he'll be irritable when he wakes up. Move past quietly."
Lira followed without questioning. Her footsteps were light — trained. She moved like someone who'd been coached, or who'd coached herself, to make as little noise as possible in hallways and stairwells and the kinds of spaces where being heard meant being found.
At the four-block mark, she spoke.
"You said you can see where things are weak."
"Yes."
"People too?"
"Yes."
"What do you see when you look at me?"
He'd known this question was coming. The honest answer would end the conversation. The dishonest answer would end the trust before trust could begin.
He chose a third option.
"I see someone who fights like she's been doing it since she was a kid," he said. "And who hates that she's good at it."
Silence. Three steps. Four.
"That's not the same as a weakness," she said quietly.
"No," Cael agreed. "It's not."
It was. He'd seen it — the flinch, the unclenching, the jaw that clenched like it had been clenching since childhood. Her strength and her wound were the same thing, braided so tightly that pulling one meant unravelling the other.
But some things you didn't say to someone you'd known for twelve minutes. Some things you filed away, and respected, and didn't weaponise.
His mother would have been proud of that restraint. It was the kind of *being present* she'd always wanted from him.
They reached the building on Cramer. Third floor. Two kids, a mother, an empty pantry. Lira returned the stolen food — four cans, a bag of rice, bottled water — without ceremony. The mother cried. The children didn't understand. Lira stood in the doorway and watched them eat with an expression Cael didn't try to read.
Not because he couldn't. Because some things didn't need dissecting.
Lira Voss was watching a family eat food she'd recovered with fists she hated, and she was happy.
Just happy.
He looked away. Wrote nothing in the notebook.
Some data wasn't for maps.