Arlyss hadn't drawn her blade in six days.
She used to measure time in strikes and splinters. Debt enforcers didn't have schedules—they had targets. But now, she stood beside Sykaion's shop with her arms crossed, watching people cry over tokens and ledgers and nothing at all.
It made her itch.
Because Arlyss knew how the city worked. And it didn't care about kindness. It cared about weight, leverage, and violence written in legal font.
She remembered when Sykaion first offered her a place at his side. She had laughed.
> "You want a guard? You're gonna need a saint."
> "No," he'd said. "I need someone who remembers what lines should never be crossed."
> "And if I've crossed them all?"
> "Then you know exactly where they are."
Now she watched as a girl gave away her voice for a promise. A man offered his sleep in exchange for peace. And the System logged each transaction not with punishment—but with curiosity.
Arlyss turned the edge of her boot against the ground.
A group of enforcers moved down the street.
She didn't flinch.
They didn't stop.
They passed Sykaion's shop like it didn't exist.
She felt it then. The boundary.
Something old had rewired the rules around this place. Not by law. Not by revolt.
By belief.
She stepped inside.
Sykaion looked up.
"You want to trade?" he asked, half-teasing.
She pulled out a page.
It was crumpled. Bloodstained. A copy of the first Article. One she had confiscated during a riot months ago. She'd never thrown it away. She didn't know why.
"Tell me if this still matters," she said.
He read it.
He didn't speak.
Instead, he turned it over.
Wrote something new beneath the original line:
> To risk is not to rebel. It is to remember what power once cost.
She took the page back.
Didn't say thank you.
Didn't need to.
Outside, a child stood in front of the door, too scared to enter.
Arlyss knelt.
Held out the page.
"Do you want to borrow a truth?"
The child nodded.
And something deep in Arlyss—a knot of survival and regret—loosened.
She drew her blade.
Not to fight.
But to carve a line in the stone beside the door.
A mark.
Her mark.
Not as an enforcer.
But as someone who would now stand for what this shop refused to forget.