Nexus opened its doors the way careful hosts do—with a warning at the threshold and a chair already pulled out. The Council of Seven called for a public test before it lent its full rumor network and stores, and the amphitheater they chose was ringed by scaffolds that had recently remembered how not to fall. Three cups sat on a rail. A chalk line marked the floor: no miracles, witnesses only.
Their champion stepped down onto the sand with a polite bow and a blade that was really a ruler. He wore odds like jewelry. When he lifted the blade, light slid along its measure, and somewhere a coin landed on its edge because he had decided the show would be better that way. The crowd called him the Luck‑Cutter; he did not correct them.
"Claim?" Luna asked, setting two magnets on the stage lip.
"I trim accidents," he said. "Yours."
Selene smiled without teeth. "Trim objects."
The Cutter drew a neat arc in the air. A thread of probability peeled away from a ladder that had been thinking about dignity and snagged in his fingers like silk. He flicked it toward Cyrus. The thread became a stumble engineered to embarrass.
Cyrus didn't move. The Oath cord hummed low and shared the trip equally among a hundred ankles. The audience wobbled and laughed; laughter is a better ground than sand. "Try furniture," he advised.
The Cutter's eyes narrowed with professional interest. He cut another thread—this one darker, with hospital corners: a falling sign that meant fractured ribs and a story no one wanted to listen to twice. He sent it at Tam, because small targets make clean demonstrations.
Aragorn set the bell's rim to the curb and wrote a clause the amphitheater had always wanted underfoot without knowing it: Accidents choose empty places. The sign wavered in imagination, regretted its career path, and crashed onto an unoccupied bench. The bench took the blow gladly. It had been waiting all morning to be useful.
The Cutter adjusted. He stopped flinging accidents and began to engrave them. He traced a circle around Aragorn's boots and cut its rim with tidy patience. Each notch meant a chance would fail inside the ring; each notch tested whether boredom could hold.
"Luck is leverage," Luna murmured, sliding a magnet until it found the hinge in the circle's grammar. "Make it declare itself."
Selene drew a thin line of shadow through the ring. It did not break. It asked a question. The circle stalled, because declaring yourself is hard work when you are used to pretending you are the weather.
The Cutter flicked his blade toward a pile of loose tools; a hammer rolled where it shouldn't, begged for a toe. Tam scrawled NOT TODAY on the plank with the frantic authority of a child deputized by an aunt. The hammer rolled into the chalk and stopped, ashamed of its performance.
Artemis padded along the top rail, collar quills tasting for stolen seconds. There were none. The rhythm under the arena—hold, warn, rise—hid any tempting discontinuities inside work. The hound sneezed, offended by dust and cooperation, and watched for an honest theft instead.
"Demonstrate yours," the Cutter said, blade steady. "If you won't blink, show a trick."
"Tricks make bad law," Aragorn answered. He raised the bell for the crowd to see and not to worship. "Clause: chance must call its shot." He pressed the white stitch beneath the black brand to the curb until the stone remembered to listen. Then he added the city's favorite amendment: harm returns to the hand that writes it.
The Cutter cut again, clean as arithmetic, sending a cascade of small misfortunes in quick succession—the frayed strap at a bad second, the gust that steals a sentence, the coin a vendor has been saving rolling toward a grate. But now each carried its label. A strap snapped toward the Cutter's wrist; he caught it and laughed in spite of himself. A gust plucked at his explanation; he had to speak louder like the rest of them. The coin pinged off his boot and decided to wait for a pocket that needed it less.
Luna lifted a brass leaf, turned it in her fingers, and spoke for the Council. "Our test was whether you could make luck boring. You can. Prove you can make it kind."
The Cutter considered the blade as if wondering what else it had been made for. "Kind luck is ladders that don't kick," he said slowly. He cut the air over the high scaffolds with the subtlest possible stroke, and three intention‑snags loosened at once. Above, a worker stepped wrong, felt the mistake, and did not fall. The crowd's inhale exhaled as a lesson rather than a scream.
Cyrus nodded once. "Keep cutting only that," he said. The Oath cord hummed like approval disguised as a threat.
Selene wrapped her strip of predawn around the Cutter's wrist and then let it go, the way one tests whether a polite dog will run. "You can live in our drills if you behave," she told him. "Trim objects. Leave spines."
The Cutter bowed to the Council. He bowed to the crowd. Last, he bowed to the bench that had broken correctly. "I accept the demotion," he said, and somehow it wasn't a joke.
A Councilor with ink permanently in the web of her thumb raised two fingers. "Second trial later," she said. "For now, we lend you our rumor tree and pantry keys." She looked at Aragorn with the practiced hostility of a neighbor who is ready to become an ally if he washes up well. "You may call for a chorus, once—one day of the seven when Nexus sings your timing and your roads."
"We'll spend it on evacuation drills," Luna said, already cataloging lanes.
"And kitchens," Selene added.
"And a nap," Cyrus dared.
The amphitheater laughed again, not because the line was clever, but because permission had migrated across an invisible border.
Ethan stood near the back, hands in pockets like a man who remembers a uniform he isn't wearing. He watched the Luck‑Cutter slide his blade back into its sheath and decided to take that image to the next meeting that wanted a hero more than a schedule.
From the stair above, a slice of brighter sky appeared—the courier's corridor. This time it brought not a paper but a clock: a clear face, a single hand, and no numbers, only the word VENUE. It hung politely at the edge of the amphitheater like a guest unsure of shoes.
"Soon," the Auditor called from his roof, voice carrying without declaration. "Chairs will be arranged."
"Bring mops," Selene replied, loud enough to be rude and therefore perfect.
Aragorn set the bell on the rail. The white stitch beneath the black brand stayed cool, then warmer in a pleasant way—as if approving of a law that had chosen to be procedure. He wrote a small sentence into the sand with the tip of his finger where a hundred feet would erase it and a hundred more would remember: Accidents declare themselves.
The crowd began to leave slowly on purpose, practicing being a city that does not trip its own haste. The Cutter stayed with Luna to learn how magnets feel at hinge points. Tam started a game where every child had to escort a rumor to three neighbors before it could be believed; Wind sulked and then cooperated.
"Next?" Cyrus asked, rolling his shoulders as if the bench had insulted him and he forgave it.
"Bench trials," Luna said. "Council of Seven wants the rest in one afternoon, and Ark Three's stair is opening."
"Bring cups," Selene said, tying her lantern small.
Aragorn lifted the bell, listened for the basalt choir's distant count, and smiled. "Bring boredom."
High above, the clock ticked without numbers, as if wanting very much to be useful at the right time and only then.
— End of Episode 22 —
Key elements this episode: Nexus public test; Luck‑Cutter's probability blade redirected to trim objects not spines; clause "accidents declare themselves" + "harm returns to the hand that writes it"; Oath pain‑sharing buffers stumbles; Artemis‑hound foiled by collective rhythm; Council lends rumor network and grants one full "chorus day"; Elders' venue clock appears. Next on Episode 23: Bench Trials—seven styles in one afternoon, a chorus day scheduled for drills not glory, and the venue clock chooses its first minute.