The Citadel had doors for everything.

Doors for honor. Doors for punishment. Doors that opened to practice halls and doors that opened to quiet rooms where policy was made in whispers. And then some doors were only pretend entrances on paper that were kept closed because the real traffic moved in the cracks.

Maris favored those cracks.

She stepped through the outer gate wearing the uniform of a transfer technician—a canvas jacket, a satchel of innocuous tools, a face that said she belonged nowhere and therefore everywhere. The gate guard glanced at her papers, at the forged transfer brief, at the way she moved like someone who had learnt how to carry heavy secrets without spilling them. He stamped, he smiled, he gave her the way people provide the Citadel with permission to be routine.

When he turned away, Maris felt the guard's curiosity like a warm hand on her shoulder. It should have made her nervous. It didn't.

She moved like she was already invisible.

Sevran watched from a place that had no official name, a room where screens mapped the world like constellations. Maris's progress pulsed on his lattice. He adjusted nothing, only enjoyed the geometry.

"Keep the distance small," he said into the channel. "Eyes, not hands."

"Understood," came her reply—calm, clipped. Maris slid down corridors that smelled of oil and discipline and the faint metallic tang of Shuryoku training. She avoided the patrolled routes. She walked where the Citadel had learned to believe no one would.

Which meant she saw everything.

Her first stop was logistics. A roster-screen and a bored clerk who barely glanced at the satchel. She smiled the type of smile that read as apology and apology alone, then asked for a maintenance routing schedule. Clerks liked being needed. They liked the instructions. She took four photocopies and tucked them away where no one looked.

Next was the training yards.

She lingered behind a column and watched cadets move in lines, their Shuryoku signatures like colored threads in the air. Royushi was easy to find, not because he was loud but because he had an odd rhythm, like a metronome with a thumb on it. He was almost meditative when Maris first saw him—walking alone, then joining a drill and letting his mistakes be strange. She watched him move with that peculiar, self-imposed wrongness. It was like watching a musician intentionally miss a beat to see whether the audience noticed.

Maris recorded. She didn't touch anything. A simple thing: an audio spike, a thermal blip, a pattern in the way his breath matched the stepping. She fed it back to Sevran's mesh. The response arrived instantly: "Good. Stay unnoticed. If possible, introduce a variable that asks a question."

A variable, Maris thought. A question, not an answer. Her mouth curled in a way that could have been a smile. She had done this before.

Master Devrik liked the silence that had meaning.

He read silence the way others read maps. It told him when students hid fear in posture, when instructors hid guilt in instructions, when the Citadel itself cleared its throat and prepared to swallow. Today, the silence in the training hall felt like a held breath.

He stood by the observation archway and watched Royushi move. He had not intended to be present for any scheduled training—he had appointments, and a temper that wasn't easily tamed by ceremony. But the pattern Royushi made last week had kept him awake at night like a bad ledger.

Devrik let the drill finish, let the instructor send the cadets off. Then he walked down to the floor as if by accident. People moved aside. People made room for old authority, as if it were considered polite to do so.

"Cadet Kairo," he said simply. "A word."

Royushi looked up from where he had been tying laces. He blinked, a second of startled motion like a bird answering at sound.

"Yes, Master Devrik?" he asked, too composed for someone who had been moving like an improvising clown for days.

Devrik's eyes moved over him in pieces. Anybody else would have noticed only posture; Devrik noticed the weight in the shoulders, the small, careful way Royushi kept breath in reserve. He had seen similar stances in soldiers who had learned to count their losses.

"Come with me," Devrik said.

They entered a small chamber off the main hall—no windows, a padded floor, a tally of old techniques carved into the wood. The room smelled faintly of linseed and memory. It was a place to test resolve without drama.

"Stand in the center," Devrik instructed.

Royushi did.

Devrik walked a slow circle around him, hands clasped behind his back. There was no flourish. No flourish was necessary. "Tell me why you breathe like a man who is saving one breath for himself."

Some questions demanded only time, and others demanded honesty. Devrik did not shout. He didn't have to.

Royushi swallowed and said, careful as always, "Because I want to make sure I can use it when it matters."

"That is rational," Devrik agreed. "It is also cowardice dressed in practicality. Do you know the difference?"

Royushi blinked. "I think so."

"Show me."

Devrik crouched and dropped a small bag of practice weights at Royushi's feet. Not for the sake of lifting. For the sake of weight. For the sake of choice.

"You can pick them up," Devrik said. "One at a time. Or you can keep your breath saved. Which do you choose?"

Royushi's face twisted with a faint, ironic smile. "Both sound terrible."

"Then choose anyway."

He did.

He bent. The first weight fit into his palm and felt oddly like a coin, buying time. The second was heavier. The third made the small, precise muscles in his forearms burn.

Devrik watched him like one observes a slow algebra.

"Now," Devrik said after a moment, "walk to the threshold and back, three times. Hold the weights. Breathe in a steady rhythm."

Royushi obeyed.

The weights were not hard. They were a nuisance. The act of carrying them made his breathing match a new metronome. Devrik watched how, after the first circuit, Royushi began to let rhythm change into flow; after the second, his breath coordinated with muscle; after the third, his arms held steady without conscious thought.

"You are not a man of empty pockets," Devrik observed. "You hoard effort like currency."

Royushi almost laughed. "It seems to be my one strategy."

"And what would make you spend some?" Devrik asked.

Royushi hesitated. His answer was not practiced. It came softly, like the precise place where a stone needs to be placed in a wall. "If I am seen for who I am in a way that doesn't cost others."

Devrik considered him then. Not the answer—he'd heard similar ones—but the way Royushi's eyes didn't dodge; they only looked small and honest. There was a crack there that might be fixed or widened.

"Good," Devrik said finally. "Now I will ask you to throw the weights."

"What?" Royushi was very certain he misheard.

"Throw them," Devrik repeated. "Throw them as if you want to miss and then correct."

This was not a physical test; it was a question wearing a simple disguise. Royushi looked at the weights in his hand, wind circling the room through the slit of the door.

He threw.

The first one arced and landed cleanly against the far wall. The second landed with a dull thud. The third hit the mat and skidded. They were not elegant. They were not beautiful.

Devrik studied them.

"You deliberately wreck grace to draw attention away from accuracy," he said. "Why?"

"Because if I am beautiful, people want more of it," Royushi answered. "If I am messy, they shrug and move on."

Devrik's mouth did not smile. "And if someone decides to pick your mess up and examine it?"

"Then I become the thing they decide to keep," Royushi said.

A pause. The kind where dust settles, and decisions form.

"Try something else," Devrik said. "This time, throw them to a rhythm. Not perfect. Not precise. But true to you."

Royushi exhaled. He threw them: a count, feel, and breath woven together. The throws landed with an odd harmony, imperfect but connected.

Devrik nodded. "That is the start of presence. Not performance."

Maris slipped through the corridors and found herself where the training floor opened into the practice hall. She had no identification as an observer; she had learned to wear curiosity like an invisible cloak. She leaned against a pillar and observed Devrik. Not because Sevran required it—because she enjoyed the way the old master could ask a question and receive one in return, like trading keys.

Her comm-link transmitted a whisper into Sevran's private lattice: Observation: Devrik present. Subject displaying coordinated breath pattern. The candidate does not appear aware of external monitoring.

Sevran's reply was clinical: Do not act. Let the wall crack further.

Maris watched Royushi from the shadow of her column. He was not performing. He was, instead, learning how presence could be made into armor.

She liked him then for a reason she did not allow herself to explain.

Then an instructor passed by her pillar and almost noticed the satchel. Maris's heartbeat ticked, compact and steady. She sighed softly, invisible like a practiced ghost.

The hall emptied. Devrik left Royushi with a final note murmured into the air between them.

"People will come with knives at the edges," he told him. "You don't need to be loud. You need to be inconvenienced in the right ways. Make the wrongness useful."

Royushi nodded, wrapping the memory of weights into his shoulders. "I'll try."

Devrik's gaze held for a beat longer. "Try for yourself, not for others. If you are honest, you will make better mistakes."

Royushi left the chamber and felt the press of eyes again. He had learnt something, though it was small. The weights had taught him rhythm. Devrik had taught him the ethics of being messy. He climbed the corridor with a steadier step and found Ishara waiting at the corner.

"You're late," she said.

"I was having a philosophical fling with old man Devrik," he answered.

She arched an eyebrow. "That sounds like trouble."

"Only with respect," he assured.

Her eyes flicked over his hands. "You smell of sweat and purpose."

"Both go well with mint," he said.

She didn't llaughh but she didn't laugh either. That was close enough.

Maris finished her sweep and fed the final notes into her channel. Sevran read them, eyes like knives.

Subject: Royushi Kairo. Behavior: presence becoming deliberate. Devrik: potential mitigator. Action: escalate observation; introduce non-lethal variable into patrols; keep Devrik distracted.

Sevran folded his hands. "Send the handler," he said. "Quietly."

"Yes, sir."

He was patient, but not indifferent. He had decided the chessboard would be tilted before it became dangerous. That was the nature of his philosophy—not to crush with immediate force but to own the shape of possibility before the possibility grew teeth.

The Citadel moved on, unaware of a scout in its veins and a man rearranging maps far away. Royushi walked into the night with weights still echoing in his arms and Devrik's instruction in his chest.

Between breaths, in the small steady hum beneath his skin, he felt the circulation settling into something like a decision.

Above them all, the midnight sky kept its indifferent watch.