Chapter 159: Home
Leo was waiting.
The moment Kai opened the door, Leo was already in motion, pointing, the energy of someone who had been sitting with information for an unacceptable amount of time and needed to deliver it immediately.
"You have a chance to control the entire city," Leo said.
Kai looked at him. "Apparently."
Leo’s eyes went wide. "So." A pause that was clearly designed for maximum effect. "Are you going to become the ruler of the city?"
Kai thought about the Archive. The Candidate. The notebooks and the faded photograph and the word caretakers.
"It would be pretty cool," he said.
Leo gasped. The full version, both hands, genuine shock. "I KNEW IT."
Mina appeared from the kitchen. "He admitted it far too quickly," she said.
"He finally showed his true nature," Leo said.
"I don’t think that’s what happened," Kai said.
"Authority," Leo said the word with the weight of someone who had been saying it to himself for the last hour and had developed opinions about it. "You could change things. Important things."
"Yes," Kai said.
"Homework," Leo said.
Kai looked at him.
"Could you make it illegal?" Leo said.
"No."
Leo moved on immediately. "Vegetables."
"No."
"What if it was just broccoli specifically?"
"Still no."
"Pizza," Leo said. "Free pizza. For everyone. Every day."
"That’s not what Authority is for," Kai said.
Leo looked at him with the expression of someone genuinely reconsidering a position. "Then what’s even the point?" he said.
Mina said, from the kitchen doorway, "I’m suddenly hoping you lose."
"You can’t say that," Leo said.
"I just said it."
"You’re his sister."
"I’m aware."
"You’re supposed to support him."
"I support him," Mina said. "I don’t support free pizza as city policy."
"It would help a lot of people," Leo said.
"It would help you," Mina said.
"Those can both be true," Leo said.
Kai sat down. The apartment had the comfortable energy it had in the evenings when nothing was wrong, and Leo was at his natural operational level, which was approximately twice the noise of any given situation’s requirements.
Leo continued for another fifteen minutes along similar lines. The range of things he believed Authority should be used for was broad and personal and showed no particular awareness of the mechanisms involved. Kai answered no to most of them. Leo accepted these rejections with the flexibility of someone who had several more waiting.
Then Leo’s phone buzzed. He looked at it. Then at Kai. Then back at the phone.
"I have to go," he said, with the specific reluctance of someone whose friends had created an obligation that was competing with an extremely entertaining conversation.
He pointed at Kai on the way out. "Don’t make any city decisions without consulting me."
"I won’t," Kai said.
"Good." The door closed.
The apartment became quiet.
Mina came and sat across from him. The kitchen sounds stopped. The shift was small and visible. She had been doing the thing she did when she was waiting for the right moment, and the right moment had been Leo leaving.
"The age requirement," she said.
Kai nodded.
She did not elaborate. She did not need to. He had been thinking about the eligibility number since it appeared in the system projection. She had been thinking about it since then, too, and about the specific person in this apartment who was not currently old enough to clear the requirement and who would absolutely test any change to it.
"Do you think any of them would lower it?" she said.
He thought about Lily. About Mira. About Raze and Elden and Sera. He thought about what he actually knew about each of them and what they were oriented toward.
"No," he said. "I don’t."
Mina waited.
"But I still need to be the one holding it," he said.
Not because he did not trust them. Because the Candidate had sat in a room for centuries and said do not win and had still meant it as a warning rather than a certainty. Because the authority to lower an age requirement was real, whether or not anyone intended to use it, and the only version of this outcome he could fully account for was his own.
Mina studied him.
"You’re taking this unusually well," she said.
He looked at her.
"Everyone else found out today," she said. "You look like you found out a week ago." A pause. "Which means you did."
He smiled. Small. "I really can’t hide much from you."
"No," she said.
He told her.
Not the full reconstruction of every chamber, projection, and deteriorated record. The shape of it. A passage under the city was discovered through the artifact recovered from the territory. An archive built by a civilization that had known something was coming. The man at the bottom of it, who had been there for longer than was possible to calculate from the outside. The warning that the man had delivered, which was not about Authority being bad, but about what it cost the person who held it.
He told her about caretakers.
He told her not to win.
Mina listened without interrupting. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.
Then: "Of course," she said.
He looked at her.
She rubbed her forehead. "There’s always something," she said. Then a short sound that was almost a laugh.
He felt the pressure he had not fully realized he was carrying shift slightly.
"We’ll worry about the civilization after you actually have Authority," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"One thing at a time."
"Yes."
She looked at him. "So what’s the plan?"
"I challenge them," he said.
She blinked. "All of them."
"One at a time. A direct challenge. The loser gives up their candidacy."
"You think they’ll agree to that."
He thought about it. "They’ll have to," he said. "If I don’t establish the terms first, someone else will. And if no one does, then things will gradually shift to even worse actions."
She was quiet.
"Delaying doesn’t help," he said. "It never has. Every gate event, every threat the city has faced, waiting would have made the situation harder. We saw the result of that in the other cities... This is the same thing."
Mina looked at him. "You think if you set the terms early, everyone else follows them."
"If the right person agrees first, yes."
"Who’s first?" she said.
"Mira," he said.
Mina was quiet for a moment. Not Raze. Not Sera. Not Lily, who was arguably the most analytically comparable to Kai’s own approach to problems.
"Why Mira," she said.
He had thought about this since the system announcement faded.
"Because she connects people," he said. "She showed up during the Mythical phase and asked what was needed. She organized the day off because she noticed the top hunters did not actually know each other. She thinks about the people around her before she thinks about herself." He looked at the window. "If public confidence matters to how Authority functions, which I think it probably does, she understands it better than any of us."
Mina was listening.
"And if she agrees to a clean duel and accepts the result, the others will take the terms seriously," he said. "Everyone respects her. If she honors the outcome, the precedent is set."
Mina looked at him for a moment.
"You’re not challenging her because she’s the easiest," she said.
"No."
"You’re challenging her first because she’s the most important to get right."
"Yes."
Mina nodded slowly. The nod of someone who had followed the reasoning and found it held.
"Okay," she said. "Try not to make me worry too much."
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