“Power without memory is just muscle. Power with memory? That’s when the Dominion starts to get nervous.”

— Field Marshal Imbogo Osei, Watcher Command, 2086

It was a quiet pub in one of Harmont’s border states — probably the only place in the Dominion where foreign names washed up like driftwood and never floated back. The sign inside buzzed weakly, one letter flickering between life and death. As if that weren’t enough, the tables swayed under the weight of their years, their surfaces tattooed with burns, bottle marks, and stories no one cared to tell.

Two men sat at a booth in the far corner. One was older, skin weathered like old leather, his sleeves rolled up like he’d been fighting the sun all day. The other was younger, cleaner, but carried the weight of someone who knew silence better than speech.

The older man lifted his glass and grinned.

“You know what I always say?” he slurred, sloshing some of the amber liquid down his chin. “Let the Dominion call us the Inclusion. Let them laugh. Let them stamp our papers in blue. But we —” he tapped his temple, “— we’re smarter than they are.”

The younger man, Tarungian by his accent, sipped water and said nothing.

The old man kept going. “Every country in the Dominion’s busy wringing their hands about Awakened. ‘Oh no, they burned a house down in Ibadan!’ ‘Oh no, one of them snapped and ate a judge in Lusaka!’ But here? Us foreigners? We ship them off the moment the pulse reads green.”

He laughed loud and long.

“Straight to the ports. Slap on a badge, tell the Dominion it’s our gift to unity, and—pfft.” He flicked his fingers. “No mess. No revolts. No parents screaming. Just a nice little export. And you know what they do?”

He leaned in, grinning wider. “They send us benefits. Food. Infrastructure.”

His voice dropped, eyes darting slightly. “Even the Watchers.”

Then he chuckled low, almost reverently. “That’s why I’m in this country, you know its safer and cleaner here.

The Dominion looks after us too.”

He raised his glass again. “Let the others sneer. I sleep easy.”

The man from Tarungi exhaled softly. “That’s because it’s not your relative getting shipped.”

“Pfah.” The old man waved him off. “Spare me the sermon. We’ve got stability. And in this Dominion, that’s rarer than a clean oath.”

“You ever pass them through the proper screening?” the Tarungian asked. “Through the full Coz threshold and recall stressor?”

“Of course,” the old man said, feigning offense. “We’re not savages. It’s all standard procedure. Lock them in for a night. No light. No sound. Little bit of pressure. You’d be amazed what comes loose under emotional stress.”

He knocked back another sip.

“One lad, maybe sixteen, started whispering whole poems in a language no scanner could trace. Eyes glowing like stormglass. Didn’t even know his name anymore. That’s how you know it worked.”

The younger man said nothing. Just stared into the table grain.

The old man smiled like a dog with a buried bone. “We let the Dominion do the paperwork. And we keep the calm. No vigilantes. No rogue manifestations. No Wild World mess leaking into our streets.”

He leaned back, tone sharp now. “You hear what’s happening in Avod? In Tarungi?

Imagine monsters awakening. Imagine how strong they would be.”

He clinked his glass against the table. “Smart, eh?”

The man from Tarungi finally looked at him.

“You’re not smart,” he said.

The old man blinked.

“You’re just lucky no one’s come back yet.”

The silence that followed was long. And in it, somewhere outside, thunder rumbled against the wall of the sea.