We met where nothing important ever happened.
That was deliberate.
An open pedestrian bridge near the river, late afternoon. Too public for violence, too exposed for surveillance to feel comfortable, too boring for anyone to remember afterward. People passed by in loose intervals—joggers, students, a couple arguing softly about groceries.
I arrived first.
Of course I did.
I leaned against the railing, looking out over the water, letting my awareness rest just short of engagement. Not probing. Not predicting. Simply… present.
Footsteps approached from behind.
Measured.
Unhurried.
Confident enough not to rush.
"Thanks for agreeing to meet," a voice said.
I didn't turn around. "You asked through a third party. That usually means you didn't want witnesses."
"I wanted consent," he replied. "There's a difference."
That was… interesting.
I turned then.
He looked exactly like he had at school—unremarkable by design. Average height. Neutral posture. Clothes chosen to avoid memory. The kind of face you could pass every day and never recall clearly.
But his eyes were sharp.
Not aggressive.
Not fearful.
Evaluating.
"You wanted to talk," I said. "Talk."
He nodded once and stepped to the railing beside me, keeping a polite distance.
"For what it's worth," he said, "I didn't expect you to come."
"I didn't expect you to ask," I replied. "Yet here we are."
A faint smile touched his lips. "Fair."
Silence settled between us.
Not awkward.
Intentional.
He was waiting to see if I'd break it.
I didn't.
After a few seconds, he exhaled softly. "My name is Damon."
There it was.
Not offered lightly.
Not volunteered by accident.
A test.
I inclined my head a fraction. "Neo."
"I know."
"Then you're ahead of schedule," I said.
His eyes flicked to me, amused. "You really do talk like someone who's already seen how conversations end."
I shrugged. "Some people repeat themselves. I don't like wasting time."
He studied the river for a moment, then spoke again.
"I'm not here on my own initiative."
"I know."
That earned him a glance.
"I didn't think you'd say that so easily."
"You didn't come with questions," I said. "You came with a message."
He nodded once. No denial.
"The Saint of Justice would like to speak with you."
There it was.
Clean.
Undramatic.
Almost respectful.
I didn't react.
Didn't stiffen.
Didn't scoff.
Didn't smile.
Just… processed.
"Directly?" I asked.
"Yes."
"In person?"
"No. For now."
I hummed quietly. "So this is a courtesy call."
"That's one way to put it," Damon said. "Another would be… professional respect."
I glanced at him sidelong. "You assume I respect him."
Damon met my gaze calmly. "I assume you understand him."
That was closer to the truth.
I looked back at the water. "And what does Justice want?"
"To talk," Damon repeated. "About the state of the board. About misunderstandings. About the inevitability of Saints finding one another again."
"Inevitable," I echoed. "That's a comforting word people use when they want to skip accountability."
Damon chuckled under his breath. "You really are different from the reports."
"I'm sure," I said. "Those are never flattering."
"They're not," he admitted. "They're… careful."
That told me enough.
"Let me guess," I said. "He believes I'm being wasted where I am."
Damon didn't answer immediately.
That pause was loud.
"He believes," Damon said carefully, "that someone like you shouldn't be operating indirectly. That if you are going to exist… you might as well be acknowledged."
I turned fully to face him now.
"And what do you believe?" I asked.
That caught him off guard.
Just a fraction.
Enough.
"I believe," Damon said slowly, "that I've been watching outcomes I didn't choose unfold around you."
Ah.
There it was.
Curated futures.
"I believe," he continued, "that I've already been late to several realizations—and that's… unsettling."
I smiled faintly.
Not reassurance.
Recognition.
"And yet," I said, "you still came."
"Yes," Damon replied. "Because Justice wants clarity. And because I want to know whether I'm being used… or educated."
I leaned back against the railing.
"Justice wants a conversation," I said. "You want certainty."
"That's accurate."
"And you're hoping those are the same thing."
He didn't deny it.
I considered him for a moment longer.
Then: "Tell Justice I heard him."
Damon's posture straightened slightly. "That's it?"
"For now."
"And your answer?"
I met his eyes.
"If he wants to talk," I said calmly, "he should finish sorting what he stole first."
Damon's expression sharpened. "You know about that."
"I know of it," I corrected. "There's a difference."
A beat.
Then Damon nodded slowly.
"I'll pass it along."
"Good."
He hesitated, then added, "One more thing."
I waited.
"You're being watched more closely than you think," he said. "Not just by him."
"I know."
"And the girl," Damon continued carefully. "Lina. She—"
"Isn't part of this," I said, voice still calm.
Not sharp. Just final.
Damon stopped.
Really stopped this time.
"…Understood," he said after a moment. "I wasn't implying otherwise."
"You were checking boundaries," I replied. "You found one."
Silence fell again.
The river moved on, uncaring.
Damon stepped back first.
"I'll be in touch," he said.
"Don't rush," I replied. "Rushed decisions tend to end badly."
A ghost of a smile crossed his face. "I'm starting to see that."
He turned and walked away, blending into the foot traffic without effort.
I stayed where I was.
Counting nothing.
Predicting nothing.
Somewhere far away, Justice would receive the message and believe—incorrectly—that this was the beginning of negotiations.
It wasn't.
It was merely confirmation.
And now that Damon had given me his name—
I knew exactly how much care I'd need to take not to ruin him before he understood what game he was really in.
⸻
I didn't start protecting Lina because I liked her.
That came later.
What started it was fear.
Not the loud kind.
The quiet, sinking realization that something had gone very, very wrong.
It happened the first time we entered my alchemy domain.
She didn't notice it. Of course she didn't. To her, it was just an impossible space—sterile light, floating instruments, formulas etched into air like memories refusing to fade.
To me—
It was a diagnostic nightmare.
At first, her presence registered as static. Normal human variance. No active bio-mark. No resonance. Nothing that should've survived inside a domain that once answered only to a Saint.
Then, as the domain stabilized around us, something shifted.
Not a spike.
A drift.
Her energy signature began to change—slowly, cautiously, like something waking up and realizing it shouldn't be seen.
I froze.
Saint-level patterns don't appear.
They announce themselves. Violently. Catastrophically. Especially in this country, where the evaluation age had long passed, where every system insisted late bloomers were statistical impossibilities.
Lina should've been impossible.
And yet—
Her resonance wasn't just strong.
It was clean.
No instability. No chaotic feedback. No malformed channels.
Perfect alignment.
The same harmonic structure I remembered from another life.
A Saint.
A real one. And I believe she is awakening as The Saint of Truth.
One of my betrayers. One of my killers.
I remember staring at her back while she joked about my "nightmare lab," my mind running through futures so fast they blurred together.
If the government detected this—even a hint—she'd disappear.
If Justice ever noticed—
I didn't finish that thought.
I didn't need to.
——
In my past life, Truth was one of only two Saints I never went to battle against—the other was the Saint of Mercy. Unlike the rest of us, they had no interest in power struggles. Because of that, I spoke with them more than I did the others.
The rest I commanded. I bossed them around because I could. None of them had the power to stop me.
But in the end, they all agreed on one thing: my death.
I'm sure Truth knew it was a grave mistake. She could have warned me. She could have stopped it. But she didn't—because she saw that I had already decided to let go.
And that was when they finally killed me.
——
So I did what Wisdom does best.
I didn't confront the problem.
I delayed it.
I engaged an old protocol. One I swore I'd never use again.
Manifestation Suppression: Gradual Bloom Inhibition.
It didn't erase her bio-mark.
It slowed it.
Stretched the awakening across years instead of weeks. Dampened the resonance. Smoothed the spikes. Made her look like what everyone already believed she was—
A lucky, ordinary human.
At the time, I told myself it was temporary.
Just until I understood more.
Just until I could protect her properly.
That was before Damon.
Before Justice.
I leaned back against the wall of my room now, the echoes of that conversation replaying in my head—not the words, but the intent behind them.
Justice wasn't curious.
He was triangulating.
And Lina had entered his equation.
I closed my eyes and expanded my perception—not outward, but inward, toward the concealed thread I'd anchored to her presence.
There.
Even suppressed, her signature was… straining.
Not breaking.
Growing.
A very, very late bloomer.
Saint-level potential doesn't like being told to wait.
"Damn it," I murmured.
I reached into the domain remotely, fingers brushing against invisible systems that had once reshaped worlds.
Protocol Adjustment.
I tightened the concealment.
Not forcefully—never forcefully. That would damage her.
Instead, I layered it.
Noise masking. Resonance diffusion. Causal smoothing.
If someone observed her now, they wouldn't see a dormant Saint.
They'd see statistical nothing.
A blind spot.
The kind of thing analysts write off and forget.
Good.
Justice could watch all he wanted.
The government could run their evaluations and audits.
As long as I was breathing—
Lina would stay out of their war.
Even if that meant standing between two Saints again.
I exhaled.
"…Guess I was right to be protective after all."
Some futures are worth collapsing.
And this one—
This one, I'd guard personally.
⸻
Justice received Neo's reply six hours later.
That alone annoyed him.
Saints didn't delay when approached by equals. They either refused outright—or they moved immediately. Delay meant calculation, and calculation implied leverage.
Justice disliked leverage he didn't control.
He stood in the same bright room as before, sleeves rolled, hands resting on the edge of a table covered in fractured data constructs. Damon's report replayed silently at the corner of his vision.
[Neo Zane Cole.
Saint of Wisdom.
Active.]
[Embedded.
Protective variable: Lina.]
Justice brought up the message again.
Short. Polite. Empty.
[If you wish to speak, send context.
I don't accept blind invitations.]
Justice smiled.
"A test," he murmured.
Of course it was.
Wisdom never stepped onto a board without first mapping who thought they owned it.
Justice turned and gestured. The projections shifted, reorganizing around a new focal point: Lina.
Civilian.
Unregistered.
Unawakened—on paper.
And yet.
Justice had learned long ago that Saints did not protect people.
They protected conditions.
Neo's phrasing echoed in his mind.
Send context.
Not why me.
Not what do you want.
Context.
As if the conversation had already begun elsewhere.
Justice tapped the table once.
"Fine," he said.
He composed his response carefully.
Not as a threat.
Not as a command.
As an equal.
[I am sorting through what was taken from your government.
Some of it predates them.
Some of it predates us.]
[There are systems here that only one Saint ever understood well enough to abandon.]
[If you are who Damon believes you are, then this concerns you.]
[And possibly… someone you're protecting.]
Justice sent the message.
Then he waited.
But even as he did, his thoughts moved—not toward Neo—but toward the implication he believed he'd just confirmed.
Neo hadn't refused.
Neo hadn't threatened.
Neo had asked for context.
That meant Wisdom was weighing outcomes, not danger.
Which meant Justice wasn't an enemy yet.
Good.
Justice exhaled slowly.
You're cautious, he thought. But you're still a Saint.
And Saints, in Justice's experience, all shared the same flaw.
They believed themselves necessary.
He turned back to the stolen data, already planning the next phase.
If Neo Zane Cole was protecting a latent Saint—
If Lina was truly a variable—
Then Wisdom wouldn't stay distant forever.
He'd come.
Not for Justice.
But for her.
Justice didn't know it yet—but in misreading Neo's restraint as hesitation, he'd made his first mistake.
⸻
Far away, in a space that did not exist on any map, Neo stood alone in the alchemy domain.
The alignment table glowed softly beneath his hand.
Justice's message hovered in the air, parsed, dissected, stripped of intent.
"…So that's how you see it," I murmured.
Not a warning. Not curiosity.
A lure.
And worse—
He thinks Lina is leverage.
That thought sharpened everything.
I expanded my perception—not outward, but inward, toward the suppression lattice wrapped delicately around Lina's bio-mark. It pulsed faintly now, strained.
Too many eyes.
Too much inference.
I adjusted the parameters.
Not stronger.
Smarter.
The concealment folded inward, diffusing her Saint-signature across probabilistic noise, smearing it into something that looked like nothing at all.
[Protocol amended.]
[Manifestation delay extended.]
[External detection probability: negligible.]
For now.
I let my hand fall from the table.
Justice wanted context.
Fine.
But he'd misunderstood something fundamental.
I wasn't hesitating because I feared him.
I was hesitating because I was deciding how much of the future he was still allowed to keep.
And as for Lina—
I would not let the world drag her into this just because it had failed to notice her in time.
Not the government.
Not Justice.
Not even fate itself.
If Saints were necessary—
Then so was silence.
And I was very, very good at preserving it.