CHAPTER 31 – The Net Tightens
Week 1.
The first seven days passed in a rhythm that felt both natural and inevitable, each one tightening the pattern Olivia had projected with clinical precision.
Day 2: She arrived mid-morning with two cups of tea, just as she'd planned. The gesture landed exactly as intended—small enough to seem spontaneous, significant enough to register as care. She asked about his morning, referenced something from the teahouse, shared a minor frustration about Bamboo bureaucracy. Five minutes. When she left, Chris felt lighter than he had in months, and the feeling lasted until afternoon when her absence made the walls press closer again.
Day 3: She came after lunch. Asked if he was settling into the work rhythm. Listened when he mentioned the repetitive nature of cross-checking forecasts. Suggested he "find small moments of satisfaction in the precision—that's what keeps us sane in places like this." Twenty minutes. He realised halfway through the afternoon that he'd been watching the door all morning, and the realisation unsettled him less than it should have.
Day 4: She didn't appear until late afternoon. He'd spent the day in quiet panic, wondering if yesterday had been the last time, cataloguing every word he'd said for signs he'd pushed too far or revealed too much. When she finally came—just a quick question about a ledger discrepancy—the relief was physical. Shoulders dropping, breath evening out, the knot in his chest loosening. She noticed. He saw her notice. She smiled slightly. Said "See you tomorrow" like a promise.
Day 5: Morning and afternoon. Twice. The timing unpredictable, which meant he couldn't anticipate when she'd appear. Had to stay ready. Stay alert. Stay hoping. The second visit lasted three minutes, but those three minutes made the entire evening bearable.
Day 6: Mid-morning. She brought a small pastry from the commissary, said she'd bought two by accident. "Thought you might want it." He almost refused—accepting food felt like crossing some threshold—but the offer was so casual, so human, that refusal would have seemed stranger than acceptance. They ate in companionable silence for four minutes. It was the most normal he'd felt since arriving in the Republic.
Day 7: She came once, late morning, but stayed longer. Eight minutes. Asked if he had plans for the weekend. He admitted he didn't. She suggested he "take care of himself—this work grinds people down if they don't remember to step away." The concern in her voice felt genuine. When she left, he caught himself thinking: She worries about me. And then, more dangerously: Someone worries about me.
By the end of Week 1, the pattern was set. He measured his days by her presence. Before-Olivia and After-Olivia. The hours between were just waiting.
Week 2.
He changed his route to work again. The side street by the tram depot cut ten minutes, but the depot fed the edge of the exile blocks, and lately the relief vans queued there—white coats, paper crates, faces he did not want to recognise. He looped three corners wider, past shuttered stalls and the bakery that opened before dawn, collar high and hands deep, a man pretending the chill explained his pace.
Inside IP Oversight, the hum of keys should have been a shelter. Numbers did not accuse and ledgers did not point, yet the promise of safety in routine had thinned to thread. Every lift chime struck like a knock. Each quiet conversation on the far side of a partition made his shoulders climb. He had stopped using the canteen at lunch because cleaners cycled through there—men and women with the exhaustion of the exile districts stamped into their posture—and the sight of them iced his gut. If any reject knew his face from the semi-VR floor, or had seen him around the old Wall Pod, a glance could end him. Better to stay hungry and invisible at his desk.
He told himself this was sensible. Survival, he said, is a discipline.
Mid-morning, she drifted down the aisle like a change in weather. Plain scarf, slim folder, no emblem; Olivia wore anonymity the way others wore rank. She asked after a licensing split, touched the top sheet with a fingertip, and let a small, exact smile lift the corners of her eyes when he answered. It took seconds to complete and left his pulse steady, as if someone had pressed a hand to a thrumming wire. For a quarter hour after she moved on, he could breathe without counting exits.
It became a pattern. He measured the day by her presence: the moment she stepped through the glass, the moment her shadow crossed his desk, the moment she left and took the warmth with her. He promised himself not to watch the door and then watched anyway. The relief she brought was not rational or earned, but it was the only time the Republic felt survivable.
At night he lay in the dormitory and tried to game out futures whilst the radiator ticked in a damp, patient rhythm. Quit Oversight and vanish into maintenance? He pictured himself pushing a mop down a silent transit tunnel, nameless and unseen, and felt a hollowing, as if he had pulled his own centre out by hand. Run entirely, slip beyond the walls to road crews and dust, never return? The thought tasted like relief for a heartbeat and then like grief. Every path that moved him away from her erased the last proof that he belonged anywhere.
He hated the need and could not deny it. The Bear Patriarch's vow still rang behind his eyes— we will hunt you, we will find you, and justice will be done—and yet he built his days around the quiet he only found when Olivia was near. Dependence was a word he did not want to inspect, but each morning his feet chose the long route to avoid the exile blocks, and each afternoon his breath steadied only when she appeared, and each evening he promised he would decide tomorrow.
Tomorrow did not arrive. There was only the tide: fear and her, fear and her.
Once, leaving late, he turned a corner and nearly walked into a knot of men spilling from a white van. Grey jackets bore a green leaf; crates of bandages and rice rode their hips. One of them looked up fast, eyes raw with sleepless alertness, and Chris flinched so hard he clipped his shoulder on the wall. He took the service stairs two at a time, breath scraping his throat, every nerve certain a hand would drop. It did not. He braced against the cool brick, furious at the tremor in his hands, and made himself take the longest way home—past the bakery, past the shuttered stalls—until no one looked twice at him.
The next day he kept his head down and his pace even, but the sense of narrowing walls returned the moment he sat. Bears moved somewhere behind him; Serpents threaded questions through the row ahead; the registry line he was reconciling refused to lie flat and seemed to wriggle out of his grasp. He was working numbers whilst listening for footsteps, and in both directions he expected the tug: a ledger that showed its seam or a palm on his shoulder with a single word—come.
Near the end of the shift, as the hall thinned and screens dimmed into standby, Olivia paused at his station again. She did not startle him; she announced herself with a soft scrape of the folder against his desk, a sound that had become as distinct to him as his own name. She asked for a quick cross-check and watched his hands find the figures without shaking. When he looked up, she held his gaze long enough to still the noise in his chest.
"You're steady," she said lightly, as if reporting on weather he had survived. "Let's keep it that way."
She closed the folder and angled it beneath her arm. At the mouth of the aisle she half-turned back, and the fluorescent wash caught the line of her cheek.
"We'll speak again," she said. "Tomorrow. Same time."
It landed like a small weight placed in his palm, something real to hold through the night. He felt the urge to run skid and lose purchase, the plan to vanish into tunnels falling apart under a promise that gave the next day a shape. He did not name the feeling. He only knew that he would be at his desk when she said, and that the thought of not being there hurt more than any fear of a knock.
He walked out with the rest of the clerks into a corridor that smelled faintly of toner and rain. Trams shuddered on the ring line. Somewhere beyond, the exile districts shifted like a dark sea. The vow still lived in the city's air, iron and unblinking, but for the span between this evening and the next mid-morning he could breathe. He carried that span home like a hidden ember and guarded it with both hands.
Olivia
The Bear House liked clean conclusions. Olivia made sure they found none.
By dawn a dozen Bamboo vans rolled towards the exile blocks under a flag of charity. Their side panels bore the leaf: clinics, soup, clean water. On paper the programme read like a mercy—"mobile aid to reduce unrest." In briefing, she had made the rules simple: hands soft, eyes open, mouths shut. Every ladle of broth, every bandaged hand, every tablet packet exchanged for a question asked gently and remembered perfectly.
You didn't need to beat secrets out of people if you could map the streets they travelled on.
From her study she watched the city styled as heat and pulse on a wall-sized map—where bodies clustered, where rumour ran, where fear thickened like fog. When a Bear investigator's team pivoted towards a tenement in Sector 8B, a "sighting" of a reject courier lit up two blocks away, convincing the wolves to veer. When an informant in the south docks muttered about a backroom archive, Olivia's people delivered blankets to the same building the next morning, loaded with questions about someone else entirely, scattering attention like seed. A rival gang was coaxed into a turf dispute with a few misplaced deliveries; a loudmouth who loved to improvise truth was quietly "rehoused" in the night and replaced with a woman who only ever repeated what she'd been given to say.
Control the noise, and you could write the silence.
She had a second layer folded beneath the mercy. Selected rejects left their alleys with Bamboo clinic bracelets clipped around their wrists—thin, stamped with a serial grid. At the triage tent, a nurse pressed her thumb gently over the grid, leaving a faint smear of oil that ordinary eyes would miss. It wasn't chemical; it was behavioural. A promise of a hot meal and a night indoors tomorrow, but in a different district. The marked ones arrived, were fed, were asked different questions. The ones who said too much disappeared into new names. The ones who knew nothing were sent home swaddled in gratitude and thin quilts that shed counterfeit rumours when shaken.
All of it bought time. All of it bought space.
She needed both. Because the anomaly wasn't a ghost you could grab; it was a pattern that formed when a certain man brushed against the edge of a system and something in the world bent to meet him. If the Bears tore down enough doors, they might eventually find a fragment of the trail, and then they'd break it out of spite. She had no intention of letting them own what they couldn't understand.
So she fed them paths that looped into themselves and kept her people sweeping the ground where the real tracks would appear.
Late afternoon she walked the exile edge in a plain jacket and low boots, her scarf tucked close, no mark of rank on her. A queue snaked from a clinic tent, steam curling up from vats and breath. She moved through it as if she belonged, listening more than speaking, cataloguing names she'd hear again tomorrow. A boy with ink on his fingers asked twice about "the vault that broke into pieces." A woman with a scar above her lip swore she'd seen wires glint in a gutter like fish. Olivia smiled, thanked them, and set both aside with a pin in each: one to disperse; one to follow.
By evening a report slid across her console: Bear teams had hit a warehouse in Sector 9 and pulled three couriers and a locked crate the size of a suitcase. The crate held plumbing fixtures and a mink-scarred ledger—the wrong ledger from the right syndicate. She allowed herself the smallest curl of satisfaction. The Bears would trumpet a minor win and file three more requisitions. They would be very busy. They would be very far away.
She turned from the map to her other work.
Chris's pattern had become clear enough to set a metronome by. Appearances calibrated to his breath: a pass through the aisle at mid-morning; a question over a column of figures at noon; a glance by the door at dusk. Never long enough to spook. Always warm enough to anchor. Each contact another knot tied in a line he didn't notice tightening. His dependence was no longer hypothesis; it was data—measurable in the way his shoulders loosened, in how quickly his eyes found hers, in the way his voice steadied when he said "ma'am" and then forgot to say it at all.
Trust would give her the anomaly. Not because he would confess anything outright—he didn't know what he carried—but because trust would let her place him near what she needed to observe. A hollow node was nearly ready: a dummy intake point laced with recorders and redundancies, safe enough to watch the world bend if it chose to bend again. But not yet. He needed one more turn of the wheel. One more week of presence until he believed she was a fact of his days.
He would think she kept him safe. She would keep him close.
A soft chime. Another message from a van lead: the south docks cluster had scattered as ordered; two talkers transferred to the far quarter; one courier marked for dispersal had elected to vanish of his own accord. Clean. Denied to the Bears. Useful to Bamboo.
Olivia closed the feed and pulled on her scarf. She had one last stop before the lamps came on. Not an audit, not an interrogation. Just a moment at a doorway under a weak light to say a single word that would keep a man steady for another twenty-four hours.
"Tomorrow," she would say, and smile.
And the Houses would keep chasing the shadows she cast, whilst the answer she wanted moved, breathing, exactly where she could reach it.