Resistance doesn't break all at once.
It fractures.
Quietly.Unevenly.Along the lines it tried hardest to hide.
I felt it before I saw it—not as pressure, but as misalignment. The city's responses no longer arrived in sequence. One department softened while another hardened. One route normalized while another doubled down on policy language.
The system had stopped agreeing with itself.
Arjun noticed first."The bus came late here," he said, checking his phone, "but early two blocks over."
"That's not optimization," Aaryan replied."That's disagreement."
The girl watched a facilitator argue quietly with a transit worker across the street."They're not synced anymore."
"No," I said."And that's where fractures form."
The other Ishaan aligned, voice precise.
Systems fracture when accountability outruns authority, he said.Someone has to own the cost—and no one wants to.
✦
We returned to the clinic—not to sit, not to anchor.
To observe.
