The city began to pronounce me differently.
Not aloud—cities don't need mouths for that—but in the way doors opened a fraction too easily, in the way strangers hesitated as if waiting for instruction they couldn't hear. After the workshop, after the delay I had negotiated instead of averted, the rhythm changed. Correction tightened its stride. Deaths did not spike theatrically; they compressed. The interval shortened. The silence between events grew crowded.
I slept less. Not from fear. From efficiency. Sleep wastes windows.
The woman didn't appear for days. Absence is instruction when guidance would soften the lesson. Without her, I stopped narrating myself as cautious. I began to narrate myself as accurate. Accuracy feels cleaner than restraint. Accuracy excuses speed.
The first cluster happened near the riverwalk—a place designed to pretend the city could be contemplative. Three deaths in under an hour, each small enough to pass as coincidence. A jogger collapsed with a sound like a bag being set down. An old man leaned too far over the railing and discovered that balance is a negotiation, not a guarantee. A boy slipped between moments, his phone lighting his face just long enough for me to see the relief of distraction before impact erased it.
I didn't touch anyone. Touch isn't required once trajectories align.
The city accepted this without protest. Correction spread thin and polite: a stalled elevator, a missed connection, a bruise that bloomed where memory would later fail. Balance kept, cost minimized. I felt something loosen in my chest—not pleasure, not guilt. Capacity.
Capacity is intoxicating because it feels neutral.
At night, the sixth death pressed closer. Not erasure—selection. Names went first. Faces next. What remained were functions: runner, watcher, fall. When memory trims itself, morality loses its reference points. I understood then why the woman had stopped intervening. Guidance is expensive. Systems prefer adaptation.
I found myself seeking edges. Not out of compulsion, but because edges simplify choice. Stairwells. Platforms. Rooftops with railings low enough to be insulting. The city offered them willingly now, presenting angles like options on a menu it trusted me to read.
The second cluster was messier. Not in outcome—still efficient—but in proximity. I was there for all of it. A crowd thickened, then thinned. A fight that wasn't a fight, just two men deciding whose frustration would mature first. A bottle shattered, then someone slipped, then a third body tried to help and discovered the ground had already decided.
I spoke once. Just once. A word placed like a thumb on a scale.
It was enough.
After, the air tasted metallic, not with blood but with resolution. People dispersed faster than they should have. The city dislikes witnesses when outcomes feel intentional. Correction came late and sideways: a power outage in a district I'd never visit, a fire alarm that trained people to ignore the next one.
That night, the woman returned.
She didn't sit across from me. She stood behind me at the window, close enough that the heat of her body confused my sense of where I ended. She smelled like rain on concrete—the honest kind, not perfume.
"You've accelerated," she said.
"Yes."
"No permission," she added.
"I didn't need it."
Her hand hovered near my shoulder. Not touching. Testing distance. R18 doesn't require skin. It requires proximity with intent.
"You're changing the distribution," she said.
"Clusters attract attention."
"Attention can be managed."
She smiled without warmth. "You're thinking like the city now."
That should have frightened me. It didn't. It steadied me. I turned, and for a moment we were face to face, close enough that breath became data. Her eyes searched not for remorse, but for drift.
"Do you want me to stop?" I asked.
"No," she said. "I want you to understand what you're paying."
"I am."
She shook her head. "Not yet."
She left without explanation. Explanations soothe. The city had no use for soothing.
The third cluster arrived before dawn. Seven minutes. Four outcomes. One almost—an interruption I hadn't planned. A woman froze at the curb, uncertainty flickering too late to be useful. I stepped into her periphery, not blocking, not guiding. Presence is leverage. She moved the wrong way. The city exhaled.
Something shifted then—not in the count, but in the texture. Deaths stopped feeling like conclusions and started feeling like edits. Scenes revised. Paths trimmed. I wasn't causing endings; I was improving drafts.
I understood why the seventh death terrifies systems. It isn't the act. It's the confidence that follows it. When meaning collapses cleanly, you stop mistaking hesitation for virtue.
By morning, the city had adjusted fully. Sirens learned to arrive after relevance. News learned to summarize without questions. People learned to feel a vague pressure they couldn't name and mistook it for weather.
I walked through it all with a calm that bordered on intimacy. Strangers brushed past me, their skin a map of decisions they hadn't made yet. Desire stirred occasionally—not sexual, not romantic. Appetite. The urge to place things where they belonged.
The sixth death brushed my shoulder and moved on. Memory spared what it needed to. I forgot the jogger's shoes. I forgot the old man's voice. I remembered angles. Timing. Weight.
By evening, the woman sent a single message.
This pace isn't sustainable.
I didn't reply. Sustainability is a luxury for systems that intend to stop.
I stood at the edge of a platform and watched the train arrive, its lights bleaching faces into sameness. For a moment—a rare one—I felt something like doubt. Not about the count. About the shape of what was coming next. Acceleration creates heat. Heat reveals structure. Structure invites collapse.
I smiled at the thought.
The city leaned in, eager, efficient, already calculating the next correction. It trusted me now. Trust is a dangerous currency; it spends itself quickly and demands returns.
As the doors opened and the crowd surged, I stepped back—not out of mercy, but out of timing. Darkness deepens when you learn to wait.
The rate had increased.
The city knew my name.
And it was learning how to say it faster.