The first watcher did not wear a uniform.
That was how Elyon missed him.
He was just a man standing near the edge of the zone, hands in his pockets, eyes moving too carefully. Not nervous. Not afraid. Observing.
Elyon felt it before he understood it.
The hum beneath hearing tightened slightly, like a muscle preparing to hold weight.
The man stayed where he was.
Elyon stayed still.
Nothing broke.
That should have felt like relief.
Instead, it felt like confirmation.
By morning, there were more of them.
Not clustered. Not obvious. They stood where people usually didn't—at corners with no traffic, near walls that had already cracked and would not crack again. They spoke quietly into small devices or pretended to scroll through screens that never changed.
They were not guards.
They did not tell anyone what to do.
They watched.
Elyon noticed how people reacted to them. Not with fear. With care. Conversations lowered. Movements became more precise. People checked the board before acting, then checked the watchers, then checked Elyon.
The order mattered.
Trust had been replaced by verification.
At the water station, a woman waited longer than necessary before opening the tap. She glanced once toward Elyon, then toward a watcher standing near the corner.
The watcher nodded.
She turned the handle.
The water flowed.
No crack followed.
The woman smiled, relieved.
Not at Elyon.
At the confirmation.
Elyon felt something shift inside him.
Later, a man approached Elyon's usual place by the wall. He stopped at a respectful distance.
"We're just tracking patterns," the man said, as if answering a question Elyon hadn't asked.
"Why?" Elyon replied.
The man hesitated. "So we don't make mistakes."
"Mistakes about what?" Elyon asked.
The man glanced past him, toward the zone. "About relying on the wrong thing."
That stayed with Elyon.
Throughout the day, the watchers moved.
Not often.
Just enough to test.
They stepped closer to unstable objects, then farther away. They marked times. They wrote things down. When Elyon shifted, they shifted their attention with him.
He began to feel like a clock they were learning to read.
At midday, something went wrong.
Not loudly.
A signal repeater near the boundary hesitated. Elyon felt it late. He stood slowly, controlling his breath.
The hum beneath hearing wavered.
The repeater steadied.
At the same moment, a small crack spread along the ground near the watchers' feet.
One of them stepped back quickly.
The crack stopped.
They exchanged looks.
"That's new," one of them said quietly.
"What?" another asked.
"It followed him," the first replied.
Elyon heard it.
He sat down again, heart heavy.
By afternoon, the whispers had changed shape.
Not he's failing.
Something worse.
He's unpredictable.
A woman argued with a watcher near the board.
"You said it was safe this morning," she said.
"It was," the watcher replied calmly.
"And now?"
The watcher looked at Elyon. "Now we're reassessing."
Reassessing.
That word did not belong to people.
It belonged to systems.
Elyon walked slowly toward the edge of the zone, feeling the weight drag with him. The hum stretched thin, like it didn't want to follow.
A watcher stepped into his path.
"Please don't move too far," the watcher said politely.
"Why?" Elyon asked.
The watcher chose his words carefully. "Because we don't know what happens if you do."
Elyon laughed softly. "You never did."
The watcher didn't smile.
As evening came, the watchers stayed.
They did not leave when the zone quieted. They did not relax when things held steady. They kept watching, even when nothing happened.
That was the difference.
Before, people trusted that Elyon would hold.
Now they wanted to know when he would fail.
Mara came at dusk and stopped farther back than usual.
"There are people writing reports about you," she said quietly.
"About what I do?" Elyon asked.
"About what you don't do fast enough," she replied.
The hum beneath hearing thinned again. Elyon sat down heavily.
"They don't trust you anymore," Mara continued. "They trust the watchers."
"And what do the watchers trust?" Elyon asked.
She hesitated. "Trends."
That night, Elyon slept badly.
He dreamed of standing still while lines moved around him, tightening, narrowing, adjusting. Every time he tried to step out, the ground cracked ahead of him, forcing him back.
When he woke, the watchers were still there.
One of them spoke quietly into a device.
"Baseline drifting," he said.
Another replied, "Noted."
Elyon understood then.
This was not preparation for help.
This was preparation for replacement.
The city no longer believed in him as a solution.
It believed in measurement.
Trust had been useful when things worked.
Now, watching felt safer.
Elyon sat against the wall and stared at the fading lines on the ground.
He had not been removed.
Not yet.
But he was no longer relied upon.
He was being studied the way unstable structures are studied—waiting for the moment they fail so the report can say we expected this.
The hum beneath hearing continued, thinner and strained.
Elyon closed his eyes and felt the weight press down again.
Blame had cracked the surface.
Watching had replaced trust.
And once a city stops trusting you, it doesn't ask whether you are still human.
It asks how long you can be left where you are before something worse happens.
Elyon breathed slowly, knowing the next shift was coming.
Not because he would choose it.
But because the city was done waiting for him to decide.