The street was repaired before dusk.
Not rebuilt—just corrected. A few stones replaced. The broken awning taken down. The stall owner compensated quietly by someone Aron never saw. By evening, vendors returned as if returning was a kind of spell: place the baskets here, hang the cloth there, shout the same insults, laugh in the same places.
The outer districts didn't mourn loudly. They couldn't afford it.
The child was gone.
Aron didn't ask where. He told himself it wasn't his business. He told himself a lot of things on the walk home.
His hands were empty, and that made him feel exposed.
He kept expecting to feel the crate's weight under his arm, the faint hum of the seal. Instead, there was only the ache in his knee and the wet pull of his bandage every time he stepped wrong. He'd wrapped it himself with cloth torn from an old shirt, tight enough to hold, not tight enough to cut off circulation—the kind of problem you could solve with your hands.
He preferred those.
People passed him the same way they always had—too close, too fast, uninterested. Someone brushed his shoulder without apologizing. Someone stepped over a puddle and splashed his boot. A vendor called out, trying to sell him hot buns that smelled like sesame and burnt sugar.
Aron shook his head without slowing.
He should have been relieved.
No questions. No attention.
Instead, the absence felt like a weight of its own.
He replayed the moment over and over. Not the fall. Not the scream. The pause before it. The hesitation in the stone. The air thickening like a held breath. The sense—horrible in its calmness—that the street had already decided who would pay and he'd only arrived in time to be considered.
And then the snap.
The feeling of something giving way.
He'd felt it again afterward, faint but persistent. Like pressure behind his eyes. Like the awareness of a step missed by inches.
Every near-collision tugged at him. Every cart that rolled too far before stopping. Every argument that cut off just before turning violent. The city was full of small almosts; he'd never noticed how many.
Now he couldn't stop.
He reached his building and climbed the narrow stairs. His apartment smelled like dust and old oil, like yesterday's noodles from downstairs, like cloth that never thoroughly dried. Familiar. Small. Safe in the way small spaces always were.
He closed the door carefully behind him and leaned his back against it.
Nothing moved.
No hum. No pressure. No thickening air.
He slid down until he was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up. He stared at his hands.
They were steady.
That surprised him more than anything.
He'd expected shaking. Panic. A delayed burst of fear. The kind of reaction people in stories had after surviving something.
But stories were written by people who had time to be dramatic.
Aron has rent due next week.
He stood, washed his hands, and watched the water run brown for a moment before it cleared. The grime of the street spiraled away like it had someplace better to be.
He ate a piece of stale bread and forced himself to chew slowly. His jaw ached. He realized he'd been clenching it since the incident.
When he slept, his dreams came in fragments: falling objects that never landed, streets bending out of shape, faces blurring before he could recognize them. In one dream, the beam fell again and again, and he kept moving the child, and the beam kept following as if it was angry at being denied.
He woke with his heart hammering, lungs pulling air too fast. For a moment, he lay still and listened.
The building creaked. Someone coughed in the room next door. The vendor downstairs banged a pot lid.
Normal.
He got up anyway.
Work resumed. Deliveries changed hands. Coins passed palm to palm. Aron took shorter routes than usual, avoided inner lanes, and stayed where things were predictable. Predictable meant less attention. Less attention meant less trouble.
But the feeling followed him.
Not strong enough to name. Just enough to notice.
At midday, he returned to his building and found the envelope.
It wasn't handed to him. It didn't announce itself. It was simply there, resting against the doorframe like it belonged. Like it had always been waiting, and he was the one late.
The envelope was thicker than it should have been. Heavy in a way that wasn't weight so much as… presence. Aron crouched in front of it, studying the seal.
Pale blue wax.
No family crest he recognized. No courier mark. No stamp. No ink. The seal was smooth except for a shallow impression that didn't look like a symbol so much as a cut made by something sharp.
It made his skin crawl.
He didn't touch it at first.
The air around it felt settled. Not quiet—settled, like water after a stone sank out of sight.
He reached for it slowly.
The moment his fingers brushed the edge, pressure returned—not pain, not sound, just awareness. The kind that made his breath catch and his thoughts stutter.
He jerked his hand back, then forced it forward again. If he flinched at an envelope, what was he going to do at the academy? At whatever this was?
He opened it.
Inside, the letter was brief. Formal. Impersonal. It didn't use expensive language. It didn't need to.
***
Aron of the Outer Districts,
You are hereby required to present yourself at the Academy of Civic and Strategic Arts within three days of receipt. Lodging has been arranged. Failure to comply will result in corrective measures.
***
That was it.
No explanation.
No justification.
No congratulations.
Aron read it twice. Then a third time, slower, as if reading it carefully enough might reveal a hidden meaning.
Required.
Not invited.
Not selected.
Required.
His mouth went dry. He folded the letter once, unfolded it, then folded it again more neatly because his hands needed something to do.
The Academy.
He had seen it once from a distance—white stone rising above the inner city like something cut from a different reality. He remembered the way the gates gleamed and the way people around him had gone quiet the same way they did when nobles passed.
He remembered thinking, "That place is not for us."
Now, a letter on cheap paper said otherwise.
He sat on the stairs outside his room, elbows on his knees, letter in hand. People passed. Someone argued upstairs. A child laughed below. The world continued to function with the same stubborn rhythm it always had.
Aron tried to make himself think of this as an opportunity. Escape—a clean break.
The words didn't fit.
What fit was the memory of the street, holding its breath.
This wasn't a reward.
It felt like accounting.
He went inside and started packing.
Not because he needed much—just clothes, tools, what little money he had—but because every item felt like a decision. Every folded shirt is a quiet goodbye.
He paused with his boots in his hands.
The soles were worn thin. The laces frayed. He'd patched them twice already, the stitches ugly but strong. Those boots had carried him everywhere he needed to go.
He set them down and looked at the letter again.
Within three days.
Corrective measures.
He imagined men in polished boots arriving to escort him. He imagined refusing and learning what "correction" meant when spoken by people with stabilizers.
He imagined disappearing.
The thought came quickly, sharp and tempting: Leave. Go beyond the walls. Find a road that doesn't lead back here.
Then reality followed: And starve? Or get caught? Or die in a ditch where no one even finds your name?
He hated how easy it was to calculate his own limits.
Night came. He ate what he had and drank water that tasted faintly of rust. He laid out his clothes and rolled them tightly. He tucked his money into a seam inside his coat, not because it was clever but because it was what people like him did when they didn't trust locks.
He lay awake long after the lamps dimmed, staring at the ceiling.
He tried to tell himself he could handle the academy the way he dealt with the outer districts: watch, learn, stay invisible.
But the letter made his skin itch.
Because it suggested something he couldn't ignore.
That someone, somewhere, had seen him.
Not the way inspectors saw him.
Not the way vendors saw him.
Seen him like the street had—like reality itself had paused and considered him.
Aron closed his eyes and listened to the building settle around him.
In the dark, the silence felt full.
And the world, he realized, did not feel like it had finished choosing.