Ari did not go looking for a person.
The person emerged.
He noticed them the way he noticed everything else now—by absence before presence. A missing variable in a familiar routine. Someone who lingered where others passed through. Someone whose schedule overlapped with the quiet hours he had already mapped.
The choice was circumstantial. That mattered.
He told himself he was not choosing a who, but a when. A convergence of access, silence, and opportunity. He watched the pattern repeat over several nights, verifying it without haste.
The person worked late. Left alone. Took the same route every time.
Ari did not assign meaning to this. He did not wonder if they deserved anything. Deserving was irrelevant. Morality had never helped him regulate the noise.
He observed distance. He observed timing.
He observed how the environment responded to the person's presence—and how quickly it forgot them once they were gone.
That forgetting mattered.
Ari followed at a remove, testing proximity without contact. He measured his own responses—heart rate, breath, muscle tension. The noise rose, sharp and insistent, but it did not overwhelm him.
He could manage this. He returned to his room and slept.
Over the next days, he refined details. He noted lighting changes. He learned which doors locked automatically and which didn't. He identified a moment where the city exhaled—a lull between movements, between attention.
This was not fantasy. Fantasy had softened into preparation.
Ari did not rush to action. He let the decision settle, checking for resistance inside himself. He waited for guilt, doubt, hesitation.
None arrived.
What he felt instead was alignment—the same sensation he'd felt when exhaustion dulled the noise, when access created options, when planning steadied his breath.
The decision locked quietly, without ceremony.
That night, standing in the stairwell he'd marked weeks ago, Ari placed his hand against the cool concrete wall and closed his eyes. The noise surged, then steadied, as if recognizing the path ahead.
He did not smile. He did not tremble.
He understood that this was not escalation for its own sake. It was the next step in a system he had been building for years.
As he opened his eyes and stepped back into the hallway, Ari carried no hatred with him.
Only intent.
And somewhere beneath the pressure, beneath the readiness that had replaced restraint, a single, unwavering certainty held:
This time, the silence would last longer. And he was prepared to do what it took to keep it.