A wall leaned toward the service court, and the responders had already marked the obvious collapse zone. Two of them were moving a folded stretcher along an alternate route beside the adjoining wall. That section looked upright from the street. A supervisor pointed them toward it to keep them out from under the leaning masonry.
Eli called for them to wait while the crew assessed the structure. An arriving engine drowned his voice. He could see the obvious crack, but nothing on the intact-looking wall explained why their route might be unsafe.
Eli raised his good hand and shouted. One responder looked toward him, then returned to the stretcher when the other pulled on its handle. They were trying to move it before the wall fell, using the marked route they believed was clear.
The offer remained at the edge of Eli’s vision.
[Inheritance available: Weak-Point Sight.]
[Accept / Decline]
Tessa had reached the clinic entrance. She turned when she saw him stop.
“What is it?” she asked.
“That wall. They need to check the route beside it.”
“I’ll tell the supervisor.”
She crossed toward the woman in the helmet. Eli could follow, shout louder, do what any person might do. He had done it once already, and the responders had not heard.
He thought about Darius on the landing and the promise that had brought him upstairs. The notice had appeared only after Tessa was safe and knew what had happened. Darius had not asked Eli to take a talent. He had not agreed to have his death turn into an opportunity for a stranger.
Eli could not ask him now.
The visible wall shifted. The two responders looked up, but their marked route remained outside the obvious danger zone. They bent to lift the stretcher faster and continued toward the adjoining section.
Eli chose the offer.
[Weak-Point Sight inherited.]
For a heartbeat nothing happened. Then the street sharpened around him. Not in the ordinary way of better vision; the outlines of the wall remained exactly where they were. Lines appeared across the masonry, faint and pale, crossing one another around the window and running down toward the corner.
The brightest line did not follow the visible crack. It began inside the apparently intact adjoining section and ran toward a concealed joint above the alternate route. Another line crossed it behind the wall, beyond anything Eli could see with ordinary sight.
Eli blinked. The lines stayed.
He had watched other hunters use talents like this. Some described weak points as colors, others as pressure or sound. Their abilities differed. He knew nothing about this one except its name and the marks in front of him.
Was the bright line a fracture? A path through which force traveled? A warning that the wall might fail, or merely an indication that one part was weaker than another?
He could not answer. But he could see that the line ran over the people carrying the stretcher.
“Move!” he shouted.
The nearest responder looked up. Eli pointed past the visible crack. “The joint above your alternate route. Move out into the open street.”
The man froze, holding one end of the stretcher. His colleague looked where Eli pointed and started to argue.
The supervisor saw Eli’s gesture and came around the barrier. “Leave the equipment. Both of you, now.”
They released the stretcher and ran. The supervisor kept them moving until they reached the open street. She did not go beneath the wall herself. From a safer angle she studied the crack and called to the team assessing the building.
“Did you see it move?” she asked Eli.
“I saw a line inside the adjoining section, where it joins the wall. I think it could come down across the route you marked safe.”
“You saw a line?”
“I’ve just awakened a sight talent. I don’t know its limits yet.”
That earned him a sharp look. She did not dismiss him or accept his interpretation without question. She directed an engineer to look from the opposite side and ordered the service court cleared while they checked.
Tessa came back from the clinic entrance. “What happened?”
“He says the adjoining joint may fail over the alternate route,” the supervisor told her. “We’re checking it.”
Tessa looked at the responders now standing in the street. “Was anyone under it?”
“They’re clear.”
A low crack rolled through the building. The engineer raised a hand, signaling everyone back. The apparently sound adjoining section tore away along the hidden joint, bringing the upper corner across the marked alternate route. Eli saw the pale line flare and vanish beneath falling stone.
The section hit the service court with a crash. The folded stretcher disappeared under the debris precisely where the responders had been carrying it. Dust billowed around the van and spread toward the barrier. The responders covered their faces and retreated another few steps.
No one shouted for a medic. No one had been under the wall when it fell.
Eli lowered his hand. His heart was beating too fast. He had expected relief to feel clean. Instead he kept seeing the line before the collapse and wondering whether he would have understood it if the responders had been standing somewhere else.
The supervisor waited for the dust to thin, then looked at him. “You were right.”
“I warned you about the line. I don’t know if I understood all of it.”
“You gave us time to move them. That’s what matters right now.” She turned to the engineer. “Keep the court closed. Assess the adjoining wall from outside.”
Tessa watched the dust settle over the van. “You awakened another talent?”
Eli looked at her. The question was reasonable. She had seen him fight with an ordinary metal bar inside the building. He had not shown any ability to see fractures then.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
She waited for more. He could tell her that Darius’s wish had been fulfilled, that the system had offered an inheritance, and that he had accepted. He could also tell her that he did not know whether accepting had affected her father. The words crowded together before he had decided where to begin.
A responder approached with a list. “Tessa? The clinic asked if you can confirm whether Ben had any medication before he came out.”
“No medication that I gave him. He had pressure dressings only.”
The responder wrote it down. “Thank you.”
Tessa looked back at Eli. “We can talk at the clinic.”
He nodded. The pale lines still lay over the remaining wall, dimmer now. He tried to look away from them. The sight followed his attention to the pavement, where fine marks appeared around a broken curb, then to the frame of the barrier at his side.
He closed his eyes. The lines vanished with the street. When he opened them, they returned.
“How do I turn it off?” he muttered.
There was no spoken answer. A small icon appeared beside the inherited talent notice. Eli focused on it and felt the same faint pressure he had felt when activating Gravekeeper at the assessment hall. The lines receded.
The ordinary street looked strangely flat. He could still see the original crack in the leaning wall, but the line through the apparently intact adjoining section was no longer visible. The sight had warned him of that hidden weakness; it had not told him precisely how the structure would fail.
Either way, the responders had moved.
Tessa started toward the clinic again. Eli followed her past the ambulance. Ben was being transferred to a smaller vehicle with Mara beside him. Paul stood near the door, giving a medic the names of the people who had shared the landing. He saw Tessa and raised a hand.
“Ben’s awake,” he said. “They’re taking him for a proper examination.”
Tessa leaned into the vehicle. “How’s your hand?”
Ben lifted his fingers. “Still there.”
“Good. Tell the medic if it feels different.”
“I will.” He looked past her at Eli. “Did you stop the thing?”
“We closed the door on it,” Eli said. “The responders are keeping people away from the building.”
Ben considered that. “You said you didn’t know how long you could stop it.”
“I didn’t.”
“You stopped it long enough.”
Mara thanked them both, then climbed into the vehicle when the medic called. Eli stepped back as the door closed. He watched it drive toward the clinic at the end of the street.
Tessa adjusted the strap of her bag. “I should return this to the supply station. Most of what I used came from them.”
“Owen went back for it.”
“I know.” She looked toward the barrier, where Owen sat while someone bandaged his wrist. “I need to thank him.”
“Later, if you want. He’s getting his cut checked.”
Tessa glanced at him. “You keep finding people to take tasks away from me.”
“You can do them. I thought you might want a minute.”
“Maybe I do.” She held the bag against her side. “I don’t know what to do with one.”
Eli did not have an answer for that either. He had spent ten years filling every quiet interval with the next assignment, the next training session, the next gate. When there was nothing left to do, the memories came anyway.
They crossed toward the supply station. A volunteer took the bag and asked Tessa whether any medicines inside had been opened. She answered carefully, listing what she had used. When she reached the bandages, she stopped and stared at her hands.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t remember how many.”
“We’ll count them,” the volunteer replied. “You don’t have to.”
Tessa let go of the strap. Eli stayed beside her while the volunteer carried the bag away. The clinic entrance was a canvas doorway set up beneath the awning of a closed pharmacy. Inside, medics had made two treatment rows with folding screens between them. People waited on chairs and on the pavement, each holding a numbered slip.
A volunteer offered Tessa a chair. She accepted it, then leaned forward with her elbows on her knees.
Eli stood nearby. He could still bring up the inheritance notice if he focused on it. He tried, hoping for more information about what he had accepted.
[Weak-Point Sight: Active slot available.]
A second line identified Darius as the source. There was no explanation of the word source. No indication of what the system had copied, or whether it had copied anything at all.
Eli tried to inspect the talent again. The lines returned, faintly, across the legs of a folding chair. He focused on the cracked wood beneath the seat. A pale mark ran along the grain.
The chair was empty. He reached toward it and pressed lightly on the back. It wobbled. That did not prove the mark had identified a dangerous fracture; the chair had been placed on uneven pavement. He moved it aside and switched the sight off.
A smell of wet grass rose around him.
It did not belong to the street. The air here held dust, exhaust, and disinfectant. For an instant he thought someone had opened a packet of soil or brought in a plant. Then the pavement beneath his feet seemed to give way to a narrow path, and he was standing in sunlight.
A small girl sat on a bicycle that was much too large for her. The front wheel wobbled against the edge of the path. A man’s hand rested on the back of the seat.
“Look ahead, Sparrow,” he said. “Not at your feet.”
The girl looked over her shoulder. “You’ll let go.”
“Not until you’re ready.”
“You said that last time.”
“And you made it all the way to the tree.”
“You let go before the tree.”
The man laughed. Eli felt the warmth of it in his chest: affection, pride, the ache of trying not to show how frightened he was that she would fall. The feeling arrived so completely that he almost answered the girl himself.
The scene broke.
Eli was back beside the clinic chair. His knees had bent as though he were about to catch someone. The smell of grass was gone. Tessa was watching him.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I—”
He could still see the bicycle wheel. He knew the shape of the man’s hand on the seat and the sound of his voice. The affection had not been Eli’s. Neither had the fear. He had experienced them anyway, with a vividness that made the distinction hard to hold.
A memory. Darius’s memory.
Or something the talent had made from it. Eli could not know whether the moment had happened exactly as he had seen it. He could not ask Darius to confirm it.
“Are you hurt?” Tessa asked.
“No.”
“You went pale.”
“I’m all right.”
He was not. Tessa’s father had died less than an hour ago, and Eli had just watched a private moment from a childhood he had no right to enter. The ability had not warned him. The notice had offered no choice about the memory separately from the talent.
Tessa rose from the chair. “You should let a medic look at you.”
“I will. I just need a moment.”
She took a step toward the clinic entrance. Someone came through the canvas doorway carrying a box of water bottles. Tessa shifted aside to let the volunteer pass. Her foot caught the uneven edge of a mat, and she stumbled.
Eli reached for her elbow. “Easy, Sparrow.”
She pulled away before he touched her.
The word hung between them. Eli heard the man’s voice again, gentle and amused, telling a child to look ahead. He had not meant to repeat it. He had not chosen the name; it had come with the feeling that Tessa was someone he needed to keep from falling.
Her expression changed from surprise to something harder.
“Who told you that?”
Eli lowered his hand. “Tessa—”
“Who told you?”
He could say he had heard it in the building. He could suggest that someone in the family had used it. Both would be lies, and neither would explain the bicycle or the affection he could still feel like an echo beneath his own thoughts.
“Your father used it,” he said.
“He didn’t call me that when you were there.”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
The clinic volunteer stood a few feet away, holding the box of water bottles. Tessa glanced at the volunteer, then back at Eli.
“Come with me,” she said.
“I can explain.”
“Then explain where people aren’t trying to get through.”
She held the canvas flap aside and waited. Eli went in ahead of her. The air smelled of antiseptic and damp coats. A medic directed them toward an empty section near the rear, where a folding screen provided a little privacy without shutting them away from the rest of the clinic.
Tessa followed him behind it. She kept one hand in her jacket pocket, around her father’s badge.
“You told me you awakened a talent just now,” she said. “Tell me what it has to do with my father.”
Eli looked at the screen, the chair, and the people moving on the other side. The borrowed sight had saved two responders from a falling wall. The memory had given him something no stranger should have possessed.
He could not keep the first and pretend the second had not happened.
“I accepted something the system offered after I brought you out,” he said. “It was connected to him.”
Tessa’s hand tightened in her pocket. “What did you accept?”