The room was quiet in the way important places often were.
Screens glowed softly along the walls, each one showing a different corner of the world. Fires extinguished. Floods contained. Conflicts paused, not resolved, managed.
Koffi stood alone at the center of it all.
The ash around him was stable now. Controlled. Held in place by invisible fields and measured by numbers scrolling too fast to read. He could feel it how carefully everything was being watched.
"How do you feel?" the recruiter asked from behind him.
Koffi did not turn.
"I feel present," he said. "That is not the same as being free."
The recruiter smiled faintly, as if expecting that answer.
"You're safer this way," he said. "The world is safer this way."
Koffi finally turned.
"Safer for whom?" he asked.
The recruiter gestured toward the screens.
"Look at what you've done," he said. "Look at the impact. You've saved thousands. Tens of thousands. You are more than a story now."
Koffi looked at the images.
He saw faces relieved.
He also saw faces waiting.
Somewhere beyond the screens, he felt a pull that never reached him. A call filtered out before it could touch the ash.
"Not everyone who needs help is allowed to ask me," Koffi said quietly.
The recruiter's expression did not change.
"We prioritize," he replied. "That's how systems work."
Koffi lowered his gaze.
"And if the system decides a village is not worth the cost?" he asked.
The recruiter paused.
"That's not personal," he said.
Koffi nodded slowly.
"I know," he replied. "That's the problem."
The recruiter stepped closer, his voice calm, reasonable.
"You're a symbol now," he said. "People need symbols. They need something simple to believe in."
He gestured toward a screen where news anchors spoke excitedly, the same word appearing in multiple languages across the world.
ASHMAN.
"They've given you a name," the recruiter continued. "It helps them understand you."
Koffi looked at the word.
A name he had never chosen.
A name that traveled faster than the truth.
"My parents don't call me that," Koffi said.
The recruiter smiled again. "The world does."
Koffi turned back toward the screens.
Toward the managed crises.
Toward the silence where some calls used to be.
And for the first time since accepting the deal, he allowed himself to ask the question he had been avoiding.
Am I protecting the world…
…or helping someone manage it?
Far away, beneath an African sky that still remembered fire and ash, lanterns no longer burned in the night.
But something else was waiting to be lit.