The first time I saw the people who kill Blaze up close, they were throwing candy.
Not spells. Not executions.
Candy.
They marched down the main street in white coats cut like armor and boots that swallowed cobblestones without a sound. Kids ran alongside them, hands outstretched. A few of the Wardens—"line wardens," officially, but nobody bothered with the first word—tossed wrapped sweets into the crowd.
"Stay back from the edge," Leria said, one hand on my shoulder.
"I am back," I said.
"You're leaning," she replied.
She was right. I was.
From the balcony we'd squeezed onto, I had a clean view of the procession.
Wardens in white. Line runners in gray. A single cart carrying a warped piece of stone sealed under glass—a Scar fragment, for show. Banners with the city's crest. The festival drums behind them beating a rhythm that said, over and over: We have this under control.
Someone had decided it was a good idea to call this "Blaze Day."
"Shouldn't we not name a celebration after the thing that kills people?" I'd asked when I first heard.
"It's not a celebration," Daren said. "It's a reminder. And a performance."
"A performance?" I repeated.
"You'll see," he said.
So now we were seeing.
From a distance, Wardens looked the way stories painted them: clean, composed, breath fogging in the cold air as they walked in step.
Up close, they looked tired.
Lines at the eyes. Stiffness in the way they turned their heads. Fingers that flexed and checked belt pouches by habit. Nothing wild. Nothing dramatic. People who expected things to go wrong and had memorized the steps for when they did.
One of them glanced up toward our balcony as he passed under it. Our eyes met for a second.
There was no hero's spark there. Just busy calculation:
Balcony load, spacing, potential debris, frightened mother, thin kid leaning too far.
His gaze flicked to the ward sigil painted above our window, checked it with a glance, and moved on.
He reminded me of Daren, a little.
That bothered me more than the white coat.
The performance part came after the march.
Down in the open plaza by the Office, the Wardens broke formation and moved to the marked circle in the center. Lines had been chalked on the flagstones ahead of time—concentric rings, intersecting angles, sigils at cardinal points.
"This is for the visitors," Leria muttered.
"Visitors?" I asked.
"People who don't live under lines," she said. "Who think Blaze is something that happens to other cities, to other people. The Council likes to show them we're clever and calm."
The clever and calm demonstration involved a volunteer.
"Not infected," Daren said under his breath when I tensed. "They don't use hosts for this."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"I've been the man in the circle," he said.
That image stuck in my head like a nail.
Down below, a young Warden—barely older than the older apprentices I'd seen at the Line Office—stepped into the chalk circle. Another Warden stood at the edge, hands raised, palms outward.
A third one addressed the crowd.
"When the lines distort," she said, loud enough to carry, "we don't wait for collapse. We contain. We cut. We bleed the pressure off safely. No city in the ring has lost a district in twenty-two years."
People clapped at that line because they'd been trained to.
The Warden in the circle closed his eyes.
The one at the edge traced a pattern in the air. The chalk lines on the ground lit in sequence, like waking snakes. My ribs vibrated in sympathy as the wards hummed.
I knew this feeling now. The pre-Flare tension. The way magic and mind both tightened.
Only here, the tightness didn't spike out into chaos. It rose to a point and then slid sideways, along the chalked paths, into the anchored stones at the circle's edge.
The Warden in the middle exhaled slowly and opened his eyes again.
"That is what we do," the speaker said. "Every day, in streets and homes and fields. When your children feel a shiver and tell you, don't ignore it. Don't poke at it. Call us."
Leria's hand tightened on my shoulder.
The crowd clapped again. Louder this time.
I watched the Warden in the circle shake out his hands like they'd gone numb.
The demonstration had been neat. Controlled. Clean. It didn't look anything like the man folding in the street. It didn't look anything like the bar.
That was the point.
Show them this, so they don't think about that.
On the way back, vendors shouted Blaze Day prices for fried dough and skewers. Children spun little firecrackers on strings. The Wardens slipped away through side streets once they'd done their duty of being impressive.
At home, the smell of festival food and chalk stayed with me, even after we shut the shutters.
"You've done that circle thing?" I asked Daren while we ate.
"Something like it," he said.
Leria frowned.
"You told me you've never stood a flare circle," she said.
"I told you I'm not Warden," he said. "Lines cross flares regardless. I've closed channels under them. It's not the same."
She didn't look convinced.
"So if someone starts to Blaze near you, you can stop it?" I asked.
"No," he said. "I can steer it." He looked at me. "Stopping is their work. Mine is making sure it doesn't turn three houses into a Scar instead of one."
"That's still stopping, a little," I said.
"A little," he agreed.
Leria put her bowl down with more force than needed.
"They take that 'little' and call it heroism," she said. "And then they say people like Harun's boy should be grateful to sleep under their roof."
"He'll be alive," Daren said. "Ungrateful is fine."
Leria looked away.
I watched them both, quiet. Their arguments always started from the same place—fear—and walked in different directions.
"That Warden up there," I said slowly, "he looked at our balcony and checked the ward. Just like that. Before he even threw candy."
"That's what they're trained to see," Daren said.
"I could do that," I said.
Leria snorted softly. "You're seven."
"Seven and a half," I corrected.
She almost smiled. Almost.
School after Blaze Day was loud.
Everyone had an opinion about the Wardens.
"They look so cool," a boy in the row ahead of me said, smacking his hands together. "Did you see the woman with the big braid? She made the lines light up without even touching the ground."
"My uncle says they get paid more than councillors," someone else offered.
"My father says they're butchers," a girl at the window muttered. Nobody argued with her. Her older brother had been taken two years ago and hadn't come back yet.
Our teacher, Marel, clapped once. The noise dropped in a wave.
"All right," she said. "Everyone who wants to dress up as a Warden next festival can settle that later. We have forms to fill."
She tapped a stack of thin boards on her desk. Each had three columns etched lightly into the surface.
General track. Trade track. Line track.
"Kinder exams are in two years," she said. "But the Office likes to know which direction you're leaning. It helps them plan seats. You'll mark first and second choices and take these home for your parents to sign."
"Do we have to pick?" someone asked.
"You can leave it blank," Marel said. "Then they'll pick for you."
Nobody liked that idea.
She passed the boards down the rows. When mine arrived, the etched words seemed to sit deeper than they were.
General track: city literacy, basic wards, craft.
Trade track: apprenticeships—loom, forge, ink, kitchen.
Line track: numbers, wards, pattern reading, Office prep.
It would have been easy to scratch two neat lines in the general column and take the safe path. Learn a trade, maybe, stay near Leria's shop or Daren's routes.
Instead, my hand moved on its own.
I pressed my nail into the Line track under "first choice".
"Think big, do you?" Marel said when she came past my desk.
"Thinking accurate," I said.
She didn't smile, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
"Your number allows it," she said quietly.
"You saw it?" I asked, surprised.
"Teachers see more than you think," she said. "Your Index is on our board. Doesn't say much, but it says enough to tell me you won't be happy making shoes."
"I like shoes," I protested.
"You like how ward-lines run under streets," she corrected.
She wasn't wrong.
"What if my parents say no?" I asked.
"Then you put Trade as your second choice and argue with them for the next two years," she said. "You're good at arguing."
"I'm good at being right," I said.
This time she did smile, briefly.
"Dangerous habit," she said, and moved on.
At home, I waited until after dinner to put the board on the table.
Leria wiped her hands and picked it up. Daren leaned in.
They read the marks in silence.
"You don't have to be Line," Leria said after a while. "There are other ways to be useful."
"I know," I said.
"You've seen what happens when lines fail," she said. "You've seen what happens to people with raised Indexes."
Yes. I had. I'd also seen what happened when nobody near a flare understood what it was until it was too late.
"They're going to keep using the Index whether I like it or not," I said. "And the Wardens are going to keep cutting people out of the city to 'observe' them. Someone has to know how the numbers are made."
"That doesn't have to be you," she said.
"Who else is going to say 'no' when the board wants to mark a whole block as expendable?" I blurted.
That surprised all three of us.
Daren rested both hands on the table.
"You won't be on any board for a long time," he said.
"Then I'll start getting ready now," I said.
I didn't add that Kendrick had wasted years building something that could be bought out from under him. That part was mine.
Leria looked at Daren.
He looked back. The space between them filled up with all the things they weren't saying.
"You agree with this?" she asked him.
"He's already halfway there," Daren said. "Feels the lines. Asks the right questions. If we push him toward a loom, he'll just redraw the city on the cloth."
"That's not a job," she snapped.
"It could be," he said.
She closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them again, they were wet and hard at the same time.
"Fine," she said. "Line first. Trade second. General not at all." She scratched her name at the bottom of the board in quick, firm strokes.
Then she pushed it back toward me.
"You remember this," she said. "I didn't throw you at them. I let you walk."
Walk, not be taken.
Like Tilo.
That was the line they were trying to draw.
I nodded, because anything I said would come out wrong.
That night, I couldn't sleep.
I lay on my back, staring at the faint patterns the moon made on the ceiling. The wards hummed their usual low note. Now that I knew the Office woman had considered me "higher than cohort," the hum sounded a shade more personal.
The board with my choice on it sat by the door, ready for Marel. In two years, if nothing went catastrophically wrong, I'd sit exams that would decide whether I followed Daren onto the lines, or inside the Office, or nowhere near any of it.
Somewhere in the city, Tilo was probably learning how to sit still under stronger wards. Somewhere else, a Warden woke in the middle of the night because a flare alarm had gone off and pulled on boots before thinking.
The world that had once folded me into nothing—twice, if I counted right—wasn't going to stop bending just because a seven-year-old had strong opinions.
But the boy named Glorius had done one small, boring thing no one would write a story about:
He'd scratched a mark on a board.
First choice: Line.
You can't control a system you don't understand.
You can't understand it if you're not allowed near it.
The wards thrummed.
I closed my eyes.
Sleep came in pieces, but it came.