Hector came to the training ground instead of the supply office.

That meant the conversation was not administrative.

Lysander was finishing the morning drill — the weight-shift sequence, the one that had been feeling less like thought and more like movement over the past weeks. He heard the gate and lowered the sword and turned. Hector came in and looked at him the way he sometimes looked at people he was assessing rather than greeting — the specific inventory of a man who tracked physical states the way other men tracked supply levels.

He said: "The right shoulder."

"Yes."

"It is not compensating anymore."

"Miros said the same thing last week."

"Miros noticed it before I did. That annoyed me." He said it flatly, without humor. Possibly it was humor. With Hector it was sometimes hard to tell. "Run the sequence again."

Not a request.

Lysander ran it.

Hector watched without speaking. When it was done he said: "The weight transfer at the end. You are still hesitating by half a count."

"I know."

"Stop knowing it and stop doing it. They are not the same thing."

"No."

Hector sat on the low wall. Which meant the real conversation was beginning.

"The settlement," he said.

"Yes."

"How many people."

"Antiphus’s last count — approximately four thousand. Growing by two to three hundred each month."

"Four thousand people outside the walls."

"Yes."

"None of whom are inside the walls."

"Correct."

Hector looked at the practice marks in the dirt. He had the expression he sometimes had when he was about to say something he had been thinking about for longer than the conversation suggested — the expression of a man who had already done the thinking and was now only deciding how to present the conclusion.

"Tell me what happens," he said, "if Agamemnon moves against Troy while four thousand people are living in unorganized structures outside the northern wall."

Lysander thought about it.

Not long. The picture assembled quickly and it was not a good picture.

"We cannot close the gates without abandoning them," he said. "We cannot integrate them inside the walls in the time available — four thousand people through the gates under pressure is a catastrophe of its own. We cannot defend the settlement — it has no walls, no formation, no organization for anything other than daily life. And if the settlement becomes a staging ground for the attacking force—"

"It would not even need to become a staging ground," Hector said. "It would simply need to exist. Four thousand people between our walls and an approaching army. Every decision we make becomes harder. Every response we plan becomes less reliable."

"Yes."

"This is the current situation."

"Yes."

Hector was quiet for a moment.

Outside the training ground the palace was doing its morning — the sounds of it coming through the walls, the ordinary life of a city that was not currently under attack and therefore had the luxury of being ordinary. Lysander had learned to notice that luxury. It was not permanent. Nothing was.

Four thousand people, he thought. And the number growing.

"The harbor barrier," Hector said. "The coastal watch. The patrol formation. All of it was designed for a specific kind of threat. A wave of displacement arriving in open boats. Not a coordinated military assault with a significant civilian population in the approach zone."

"The tools we have are the tools we built for the problem we saw."

"Yes. The problem has evolved."

He stood from the low wall — the specific motion of a man who had sat to think and was now standing because the thinking was complete and action was next.

He said: "I need two things from you. The first: a count. Not Antiphus’s general estimate — a specific picture. How many people, where they are located, what their current internal organization looks like, which sections have leadership structures and which do not."

"I can have that in ten days."

"Ten days."

"Yes."

"The second thing. I need a framework for organizing the settlement in a way that makes it manageable in a crisis scenario. Not moving them inside the walls — we do not have the infrastructure. Not removing them — that is not an option I am willing to consider. Something that gives them structure without the structure being obviously military."

"Because if it looks military—"

"They will understand they are being organized as a defensive asset rather than as people. And four thousand frightened people who understand they are being managed are harder to manage than four thousand frightened people who believe they are being helped."

"Yes."

"Can you build that framework."

Lysander thought about the settlement as he had walked it two days ago. The sections that had organized themselves around community structures from their original locations. The paths worn into the earth by repeated movement. The woman teaching three children with sticks in the dirt.

They already have structure, he thought. They built it themselves because structure is what people build when they stop moving.

"Not alone," he said. "I need Arsini. And Antiphus. And Miros."

"You have all three."

"Give me the ten days for the count and then four more for the framework."

"Fourteen days total."

"Yes."

Hector looked at him.

"The settlement is not the enemy," he said. Not as a reassurance — as a statement of operational fact that he wanted confirmed as shared understanding.

"No," Lysander said. "It is a city that built itself outside our walls because it had nowhere else to go. The question is whether we leave it unorganized or whether we help it organize in ways that serve both communities."

"Both."

"Yes. Both. What is good for the settlement in a crisis is good for Troy in a crisis. The interests are the same."

Hector was quiet.

Then: "Fourteen days."

He went out.

Lysander stood in the training ground alone for a moment.

The sword was still in his hand. He looked at it.

Four thousand people, he thought. Growing by two to three hundred each month. No walls. No formation. No integration plan.

He thought about what he had told Adrastos about the Carian guarantee: protection during the conflict and dependency after it.

The same structure applied here, in a different form. Leave the settlement unorganized and it was a vulnerability during a crisis and a problem after it. Help it organize and it became something else — something he did not yet have a word for but could feel the shape of.

Not a buffer.

Not a district.

Something between a city and its walls that was neither and both.

He ran the weight-shift sequence one more time.

The hesitation at the end — the half-count delay that Hector had noticed — was still there. He felt it clearly now that it had been named.

Stop knowing it and stop doing it. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

He ran it again.

He picked up his shard.

One thousand and nine words.

Keep going.