Power didn't always show itself loudly.
Sometimes it moved in smaller currents—through introductions never acknowledged publicly, through debts nobody wrote down but everyone remembered. Influence didn't need spectacle. It needed time.
Jack learned that lesson the night he walked past the Triangle's outer perimeter and didn't slow down.
There were cameras.
There were motion wards embedded in the outer stone.
There were patrol rotations calibrated by predictive software that assumed most students weren't brave enough—or stupid enough—to test the boundary.
The Triangle didn't rely on visible guards. It relied on belief.
Jack didn't argue with belief.
He stepped between its blind spots.
Timing was more important than stealth. Patrol drones moved in three-minute cycles with fifteen-second delay variance between sectors. Human oversight shifted at irregular intervals, but the handoff window created fractional inattentiveness.
He crossed during one of those windows.
No alarms.
