The patrol station’s common room smelled of damp wool, old coffee, and fatigue men had stopped noticing. Soren had signed reports at the same table and taken orders from the same board for years. Today the room felt wrong.
The pattern itself had not changed. Soren had begun to hear the extra beat inside it—the point where habit became obedience and obedience asked not to be examined.
He was reading the rotation sheet when Theron Vale arrived.
Theron was thirty-two and had been a Gamma for eight years, which meant he had spent almost as much time in the patrol station's common room as Soren had. He moved through the space with the ease of a man who had found a level in the structure that fit him and saw no reason to examine the foundation beneath it.
He poured coffee, sat across from So
