I was halfway across the cobblestones, waving the blue folder like a flag of surrender, when a hand caught the collar of my coat.
It wasn't a rough grab. It was a precise, immovable anchor. I spun around, out of breath, my spectacles slipping down my nose. Avaris was standing there. She hadn't moved an inch from her spot, but the air around her felt different—thicker, like the atmosphere before a lightning strike.
"Ilyas," she said. Her voice was calm, but it had that "General's Quiet" that usually meant I should stop talking immediately.
"Avaris! The floors!" I wheezed, pointing toward the Academy. "I found the permits. The sparring mats aren't stone, they're sensors! They're rigged to measure—"
"I know," she said, her eyes never leaving the gate.
"You know? But... the children! If Arin steps on those with even a fraction of his real weight, the Grey Cloak will have him in a carriage to the capital by noon!"
Avaris finally looked at me. She reached out and straightened my spectacles with a tenderness that didn't match the steel in her gaze. "Ilyas, look at the window in the West Wing. The third one from the left."
I squinted. I saw the children entering the hall. Arin was walking with that exaggerated, clumsy gait, but I noticed something I hadn't seen before. He wasn't wearing his school shoes. He was wearing the old, soft-soled slippers Avaris had sewn for him last winter.
"He changed his shoes," I whispered.
"He didn't just change them," Avaris said. "He lined the soles with the compressed cork from your old sample cases. And Lysa? She's carrying a bag of lead-weighted marbles in her pocket. She'll drop them periodically to create 'noise' for the sensors."
I stood there, feeling suddenly very small and very... well, scholarly. "They knew? How could they have known about the sensors?"
"Because they are Vernes," Avaris said, a ghost of a smile touching her lips. "They listened to your Sunday lecture, Ilyas. They aren't going to 'splash' on the mats. They're going to 'percolate'."
The Test: Through the Glass
Inside the hall, the scene was a masterpiece of deception.
Principal Albrecht stood on a raised dais, his hands rubbing together in anticipation. Beside him, the Grey Cloak held a crystal device that was glowing faintly—the readout for the pressure tiles.
"Arin Verne! Cyrus of the North!" the Instructor shouted. "To the mats. First-contact sparring. Show us your... fundamentals."
Arin stepped onto the rigged floor. I held my breath. If the cork didn't work, if his control slipped—
But as Arin moved, I realized he wasn't fighting Cyrus. He was dancing. He used his "Percolation Theory" perfectly. Every time he landed a foot, he didn't "hit" the ground; he let his weight roll through the cork and dissipate. To the sensors, he weighed no more than a wet leaf.
Beside him, Cyrus was acting as the perfect "Variable." He stumbled in mathematical patterns that masked Arin's movements. Every time Arin was about to exert force, Lysa—sitting on the sidelines—would "accidentally" drop a heavy book or a marble, sending a vibration through the floor that confused the Grey Cloak's crystal.
"Look at the Courier," Avaris whispered from the street.
The man in the grey cloak was shaking his device. He looked frustrated. He was looking at the most powerful children in the district, and his sensors were telling him they were made of feathers and bad coordination.
"They're winning," I breathed, clutching my blue folder.
"They're surviving," Avaris corrected. "The sensors are reading a 'Null Value.' To the Empire, our children are so boring they don't even register as physical objects."
She finally let go of my collar and exhaled, her shoulders dropping an inch. The "Low Stance" vanished. She was just my wife again, standing in the sun.
"Let's go home, Ilyas," she said, taking my arm. "We have to prepare the garden for the autumn harvest. And I believe you have some tax ledgers that won't read themselves."
I looked back at the Academy one last time. My children were currently "tripping" over each other in a tangle of limbs, looking like the biggest disappointments in the school. I had never been prouder.
That walk home from the library was the longest of my life, even with Avaris's steady hand on my arm. My mind was a whirlwind of pressure-tiles and "Live-Load" deployments. I felt like a man who had spent his life studying the ripples on a pond, only to realize his children were swimming with sharks.
But when the front door finally creaked open late that afternoon, there was no smell of defeat. There was only the sound of Arin's boots hitting the floorboards with a very deliberate, very soft thud.
"We're home!" Arin called out.
I rushed into the hallway, my blue folder of blueprints still clutched in my hand like a shield. "Arin! Lysa! Are you... are you structurally sound? No fractures? No localized trauma?"
Arin looked at me, and for the first time, he didn't look like the clumsy boy who couldn't catch a spoon. He looked... solid. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of heavy, lead-weighted marbles, letting them clink onto the hallway table.
"The floors were loud today, Father," Lysa said, stepping past him. She began unlacing her boots, revealing the thick, compressed layers of my sample-case cork she had expertly glued to the insoles. "We had to make sure we didn't add to the noise."
"You knew," I whispered, sinking into a chair. "The sensors. The Courier. You knew the whole time."
"Cyrus figured out the resonance of the tiles in the first five minutes," Arin explained, leaning against the doorframe. He looked at Avaris, who was standing by the hearth, her eyes unreadable. "He calculated the 'blind spots' in the grid. Every time I had to put weight down, I made sure to step on the joints where the sensors overlap. It creates a 'Null Signal.'"
"And when he couldn't find a joint," Lysa added, "I dropped a marble. The vibration of the lead hitting the stone was so much sharper than Arin's feet that the crystal readout just blurred. The Grey Cloak thought the equipment was malfunctioning because of the 'ancient granite' foundations."
I looked at my children—truly looked at them. I had spent years worrying that they were too "different" to survive, that I needed to build a fortress of ledgers and dirt to hide them. But here they were, using my own "Percolation Theory" to dismantle an Imperial trap before it could even snap shut.
"I spent all morning at the Records Office trying to find a way to save you," I said, a dry laugh bubbling up in my chest. "I was going to charge into the Academy and start a lecture on floor-density just to distract them."
Arin walked over and put a hand on my shoulder. His grip was controlled—perfectly "seeped" into my muscles without a hint of the strength that could crush a mountain.
"We know, Father," he said softly. "But we didn't need a distraction. We had the 'Verne Style.' We were so boring that the Courier actually started yawning during my sparring match. He wrote 'Low Potential' in his book and walked away."
Avaris stepped forward then. She didn't say anything, but she picked up one of the lead marbles from the table. She weighed it in her hand, the General's gaze meeting her son's. A silent acknowledgement passed between them—a recognition of successful tactics on the field.
"The soup is cold," Avaris said, though her voice was warmer than I'd heard it all week. "Arin, go wash the dust off. Lysa, help me with the bread. Ilyas..."
She turned to me, and the light from the evening sun caught the white scars on her wrists.
"...put the blueprints away, dear. Our children don't need a shield. They are the shield."
I looked at the blue folder in my lap and slowly closed it. I realized then that my role in this family wasn't to be the hero or the protector. I was the teacher. I provided the "Boring Foundation" upon which they built their incredible, invisible lives.
"Well," I said, standing up and heading for my study. "In that case, I suppose I should get back to the 232 tax ledgers. If we're going to be the most uninteresting family in the Empire, we might as well do it with professional dedication."
As I walked away, I heard the sound of the Wooden Spoon clinking against a bowl in the kitchen. Arin had caught it. I didn't have to see it to know—the catch was silent, perfect, and completely undetected.