The incident happened twelve hours later.
Not near a known seam.
Not in a pressure zone.
Not anywhere Arav was watching.
That was the point.
It was a residential building — old, narrow stairwells, shared balconies, the kind of place where people knew each other's routines without ever really knowing each other.
A man jumped from the third floor.
He didn't scream.
Witnesses said he looked calm.
Almost relieved.
Arav read the report twice.
No shadows mentioned.
No distortion recorded.
No supernatural markers flagged.
Just a line buried in the details:
Subject displayed sudden emotional detachment prior to incident.
Detached.
Arav felt the word settle badly in his chest.
"That building wasn't on your map," Ira said quietly.
"No," Arav replied. "It shouldn't have been."
Tiku stared at the screen, unusually silent. "People don't just… detach."
Arav didn't answer.
Because he knew what that detachment meant.
They visited the site that evening.
Flowers already sat near the entrance. Candles burned low, unattended. Neighbors spoke in hushed tones.
"He'd been fine," one woman said. "Quiet, but fine."
Another shook her head. "The last few days, though… it was like he said everything he needed to say."
Arav stood near the stairwell.
He felt it then — faint, diffuse.
Residuals.
But not fear.
Absence.
Whatever pressure had built here hadn't erupted.
It had been emptied.
"That's not suppression," Arav said softly.
Ira turned to him. "Then what is it?"
He swallowed. "Overcorrection."
That night, Arav didn't sleep.
He replayed the Water District intervention again and again — the redirection, the dispersal, the relief on the civilians' faces.
He'd shifted pressure away from one place.
But pressure didn't vanish.
It redistributed.
Into places with no witnesses.
No seams.
No chance to intervene.
Inside his head, the system acknowledged the outcome with brutal neutrality.
Secondary Impact Detected
Containment Method: Effective
Collateral Influence: Acceptable
Arav's hands clenched.
Acceptable.
Someone was dead.
Ira sat beside him on the floor, knees drawn up.
"This is because of you?" she asked quietly.
Arav didn't deflect.
"Yes."
She flinched — not in fear, but in grief.
"You were trying to stop harm."
"I was trying to manage it," Arav said. "That's the mistake."
Tiku spoke up softly. "Bade Baba… if every choice hurts someone… how do you choose?"
Arav looked at the dark window, at the city reflected back at him.
"I don't know yet," he said. "But I know this—"
He turned to them.
"I won't let the system decide who counts as collateral."
The words felt heavier than any vow he'd made before.
Because this time, he knew the cost.
Far away, in a room without screens, Devavrata Rathod listened as the incident summary concluded.
"Containment held," the report said. "Public stability maintained."
Devavrata closed his eyes briefly.
Not in relief.
In calculation.
And elsewhere, Rudra Dhawan read the same outcome and exhaled slowly.
"That's it," he murmured. "Now it hurts."
In the quiet spaces between awareness and memory, something else shifted.
Not pleased.
Not alarmed.
Interested.