Fylon had the specific quality of someone who had been waiting for permission to speak for three months.

Lysander noticed it the moment he came in — not urgency, not anxiety, the contained quality of a man who had been doing work he was not sure he was authorized to do and had kept doing it anyway because the alternative was leaving something useful undone. He had been Lysander’s eyes in the harbor for two years. He understood, without being told, that the harbor was not only the ships.

He sat and placed a tablet on the table.

Not his usual format — not the tight daily briefing summary, the one that covered arrivals and departures and notable cargo and conversations his contacts had reported. This was something he had built over time. Lysander could see it in the layering of the notation — different hands, different ink densities, assembled from multiple sources across multiple weeks into a single document.

He’s been sitting on this, Lysander thought. Waiting to see if it would hold together.

"Tell me," he said.

Fylon said: "Three months ago I started talking to people in the settlement."

"Yes."

"Not my usual contacts. Not harbor workers or sailors. People who had come from the east — specifically from the communities that were in the path of the movement before it reached the coast. People who had been moving for months before they stopped here."

"What did you want from them."

"Information. Not the information they came with — that was weeks or months old by the time they arrived. I wanted to understand what they had seen, where they had been, what the movement looked like from inside it rather than from the harbor end."

"And."

Fylon looked at the tablet.

"The harbor network is a delayed picture. A ship arrives and carries news that is three weeks old from the eastern coast. By the time the news travels through the trading channels and reaches me, it is a month old at minimum. I read it and tell you what was happening a month ago."

"Yes."

"The people in the settlement were inside the movement. Some of them left their communities six months ago. Some a year ago. They watched the displacement develop in real time from inside it — they know the communities that emptied, the routes the movement took, the pattern of which places lasted longest and which collapsed first. Their information is old but it is detailed in a way that harbor reports are not."

"A different kind of picture."

"Yes. Not current — structural. It tells me how the movement works, not just that it is happening."

Lysander looked at the tablet.

"How many sources."

"Forty-three regular contacts now. Seven I would call reliable in the specific sense — people whose accounts I have cross-referenced with other sources and found consistent. And four—" Fylon paused briefly, the pause of a man choosing his words with more care than usual "—four who have information that is not about the past."

"Tell me about the four."

The first was a former harbor master from a coastal settlement three days east — a man who had left when the settlement emptied and had been watching the coastal movement from a small vessel for four months before arriving in Troy. He knew which boat types the moving populations were using, which routes they preferred, where they stopped and why. He had been mapping it the way a harbor master mapped traffic.

"He has a picture in his head," Fylon said, "of where the largest concentrations of moving people currently are. Not precise — he has not been in the eastern waters for three weeks. But significantly more current than anything the trading network produces."

"He can tell us where the next large wave is likely to originate."

"Yes. And approximately when, based on the seasonal patterns he has observed."

The second was a woman who had been a regional administrator — the one Lysander already knew about from Antiphus, the administrator who had arrived at the second trading house with her family and her office records. She had brought those records with her. Four years of population data from her district. The contraction pattern, mapped in detail, from before it became visible anywhere else.

"Four years," Lysander said.

"Four years. She has been sitting in the settlement for two months with documentation that is more detailed than anything in the palace records about the eastern situation."

Four years of data, he thought. Sitting in the settlement. Because no one knew to ask.

He kept his expression neutral.

"The third."

"A man who spent three years as a route messenger for the eastern intermediate markets — the ones that have been contracting. He knows every active and inactive node in the inland network. He can tell you which markets are still functioning, at what capacity, and which have closed in the past six months."

"That is current intelligence about the inland routes."

"Yes. More current than Meron’s letter. He left the eastern interior eight weeks ago."

Eight weeks, Lysander thought. Meron’s letter described what was happening six months ago. This man left eight weeks ago.

"The fourth."

Fylon was quiet for a moment.

"The fourth is more difficult to describe," he said. "She is an older woman. She came with one of the first waves — the large coastal arrival, the eighty boats. She does not have specific technical knowledge like the others. What she has is—" he paused again "—she has been in enough communities in the path of the movement that she has developed an understanding of its social logic. How communities decide to leave. What the early warning signs look like from inside. The difference between a community that is preparing to move and one that has accepted it will not have to."

"She reads displacement the way Arsini reads attendance."

Fylon looked at him. "Yes. Exactly that."

Lysander sat with the four of them for a moment.

A harbor master mapping traffic from a small vessel. An administrator with four years of population data. A route messenger with eight-week-current inland intelligence. A woman who understood the social logic of displacement.

None of them were in any official record.

All of them had walked into the settlement and sat down and waited.

We built an intelligence network, he thought, and then four thousand people arrived with a better one.

He did not say this out loud. It was the kind of observation that was useful to think and counterproductive to announce.

"The four," he said. "I want to meet them. Not formally — informally. In the settlement, in their own spaces. Antiphus can arrange the introductions."

"Yes."

"And the forty-three regular contacts. Compile what they have told you about the structural pattern — not the current situation, the pattern. How the movement works. I want a document I can give Hector."

"A week."

"A week."

Fylon picked up the tablet and stood.

At the door: "The four people. They have not been asked to do anything they did not choose to do. They spoke to me because they wanted someone to understand what they had seen."

"I know," Lysander said. "Make sure they know that is still the arrangement. Information they choose to share. Nothing more."

"Yes."

He went out.

Lysander sat with the supply allocation for the organized settlement framework — the numbers that would go to Hector alongside the structural proposal. How much additional material. How many additional people from the palace administration needed to support the registration structure. The cleared spaces required maintenance — who maintained them and from which budget.

The numbers were not glamorous.

They were also what made the framework real rather than an idea.

Every good plan, he thought, eventually becomes a budget line.

He was halfway through the allocation when the door opened.

Arsini.

She came in with two tablets and the expression of someone who had been moving quickly since before the third hour and had not yet stopped.

She said: "The woman who has been teaching forty children in the settlement. I met her this morning."

"And."

"Her name is Taia. She taught in a formal school in her origin city for eleven years. She left with her students — fourteen of them — when the community emptied. Eleven of the fourteen are still with her."

He looked up from the allocation numbers.

"She left with her students."

"She said: they were my responsibility. She gathered them and their families and they moved together."

Moved her class intact, he thought. The social network is a supply chain.

"She wants to know," Arsini continued, "whether the formal recognition we are offering means she reports to me or continues independently."

"What did you tell her."

"I told her I wanted to hear her preference before I gave her an answer."

"And."

"She said: I prefer independence with access to resources. I have been independent for six months and I know how to do this work. I do not need supervision. I need clay and lamp oil and a roof that does not leak when it rains."

Lysander looked at her.

"Give her clay and lamp oil and fix the roof."

"Yes," Arsini said. She made a small note on the tablet. Then, without changing her expression by any visible degree: "She asked about you."

"What did she ask."

"She asked who decided that the settlement builder should be formally recognized for her work rather than simply used for it. I told her it was a conversation in the street."

"That is accurate."

"Yes." She looked at the note she had just made. "She said: tell him that the children remember who first treats them as worth educating. Cities are made of those children."

He said nothing for a moment.

Cities are made of those children.

He thought about Troy burning. He thought about fourteen boats of families in the harbor. He thought about forty children learning in the space between two shelters because a woman had packed her class when her city emptied and walked them to wherever she was going.

If the city burns, he thought, the children Taia taught will have learned something that the fire cannot take.

This was either a comforting thought or a deeply inconvenient one. He had not yet decided which.

"Thank you," he said. "For meeting her as a meeting."

Arsini looked at him briefly — the brief look, the one that was almost imperceptible if you were not paying attention.

"She made it easy," she said.

She went out.

He returned to the allocation numbers.

The budget line for clay and lamp oil and roof repair was small.

He added it.

He picked up his shard.

One thousand and twenty-five words.

Keep going.