*On the desk, the monitor still held that blue glow right before sleep mode kicked in. The cursor blinked in place. Blinking was the cursor’s job, and watching was not his — at least not right now, at least not while his eyes were closed.

To describe him more accurately, he wasn’t asleep. He was pretending to be asleep, and maintaining the distinction took more effort than one might think — keeping his breathing even, his shoulders heavy, not moving so much as a finger — which meant this wasn’t rest but a kind of work, and if it counted as work then nobody could complain about it. Nothing was coming through the AirPods. The music had ended a long time ago, and Jun was simply pretending not to notice.

This should have been GLO’s problem. Scheduling belonged to GLO, and tangled schedules even more so; if someone’s guiding time had been thrown off, then that was an allocation issue — meaning a problem for the department that made assignments, not for an SSB employee sitting at his desk with his eyes closed, whether assigned or not assigned. That was the most natural flow of responsibility. And the fact that footsteps had started from GLO, checked the empty office once, and eventually made their way here meant somewhere in that natural flow, something had already gone wrong.

But fixing what had gone wrong was not his responsibility either.

The footsteps stopped.

Right in front of his desk.

He kept his breathing steady. The blue light from the monitor seeped faintly through his eyelids. A dead potted plant stood dried out atop the cabinet, abandoned long ago, and the fact that nobody had thrown it away gave him something close to comfort in that moment — the idea that some things remained, that some things kept their place even after losing their function. When you thought about it, that wasn’t such a bad worldview.

And then a hand touched his shoulder.

He opened his eyes. Slowly. Too fast would reveal he’d been awake; too slow might seem rude. So somewhere in between. He took out only one AirPod. The other stayed in — the ears above his head had heard everything from the beginning anyway, so this wouldn’t interfere with the conversation. Which made it efficiency, not rudeness.

What.

He layered a little sleep into his voice. His eyes didn’t go to the person who had called him but to the monitor instead, to the blinking cursor, as though something important were happening there.

Apparently this was about a Sentinel’s schedule. Something had gotten tangled, shifted, left empty.

I followed protocol.

From his perspective, that was true.

There had never been any protocol for him to follow in the first place.

*Like every other hallway in Headquarters, this one had a wall of glass on one side. Beyond it, the city was always there and yet always somewhere unreachable. Light slid long across the polished floor, and the moment Dawa recognized the figure approaching from the far end of it, he subtly slowed his pace — enough to make the encounter seem accidental, but not enough to let it fail to happen.

It was his senior.

Even if they called him a rookie — and that distinction deserved to be made clear — the other was older than him. Being older meant titles were predetermined, and predetermined titles came attached to their own natural obligations. Things like seniors paying for coffee. He hadn’t made the rule. That was simply how the world worked, and he merely chose not to resist its grain.

Falling into step beside him, Dawa linked their arms naturally.

“Naturally” meaning he had practiced until it looked that way.

Linking arms solved two problems at once. First, it physically reduced the number of routes by which his senior might drift away midway through. Second — and this was closer to the truth — he simply liked walking like this. If one insisted on defining it, then yes, perhaps it could be called liking it. But insisting seemed unnecessary.

His tail flicked once, lightly.

Hey.

He wrapped one thin layer of sweetness around his voice. Nicely dried sweetness — too much and people started asking questions.

I heard some café on Instagram is supposed to be good. Want to go together?

He actually knew exactly which café it was.

The price of the signature dessert. The increase when accounting for one junior. The size of the mark that amount would leave in his senior’s bank account. And the calculation that the weight of the title “senior” would more than offset it — all of that had already been completed before they’d even crossed the far end of the hallway.

Calling someone a source of money sounded vulgar.

He wouldn’t use words like that.

Still, unlike all the days before, today carried the distinct feeling that something had finally been caught — that something had settled into his hand.

Somewhere inside the arm looped through his senior’s, warm and unmistakable.

Their reflections appeared in the glass.

One person was hanging off the other.

Jun’s grip tightened ever so slightly.

And that was unmistakably in the direction of the Headquarters exit.

*Three in the afternoon was when the café’s light became most honest. The sunlight pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows settled over every table with perfect fairness, but Dawa had already occupied the seat where the light fell best an hour earlier — angled toward the window, though not too obviously so, legs loosely crossed at exactly the kind of angle that would catch anyone’s eye the moment they entered.

He looked as though he were gazing outside.

In reality, it was closer to waiting to be looked at.

His name tag rested against his chest.

Magnus.

‘Magnus — the group that protects the city.’ The name itself was cool enough, but what it implied was cooler.

I belong there.

Proof of that.

And then there was the white coat he wore. As if he were too busy to have time to take it off. Or as if the coat itself had become who he was.

He didn’t think that distinction needed to be made too clear.

The Americano had gone lukewarm.

He wanted something sweet. But this café was one of those places currently blowing up on Instagram, which meant dessert was slightly beyond what a C-rank Guide ought to be spending.

Americano, however, was cheap.

And people who drank bitter things slowly looked somehow farther away, somehow deeper, than people absentmindedly chewing sweets.

Bitterness, then, was tolerable.

No — chosen suffering.

He took a sip.

His expression did not change.

The bell above the door rang.

The ears above his head turned before he permitted them to.

But he didn’t turn his head.

Turning his head would mean he had been waiting, and maintaining the posture of someone who had never waited at all was central to this entire performance.

So he continued looking out the window.

At the city passing beyond it.

As though none of it concerned him.

Without looking, he could feel someone’s gaze sweep across the seats.

And he stared even harder out the window, hoping to appear unmistakably intellectual.

Behold, civilian.

Witness the magnificent and impressive figure of this Guide of Magnus.