The waiting room had its own calendar: a slow, repetitive turning of voices and gestures. Tyler could have guessed the rhythm before anyone spoke—the way someone would cough to claim attention, the way a woman folded a jacket like a tentative promise, the way a man rehearsed his answers aloud as if practice could bend truth.
A cluster of three near the coffee machine discussed the latest municipal announcement. Tyler only half-listened until a woman's voice rose with a particular mixture of fatigue and anger.
"They talk about reform on the television and then they take the cuts to the hospitals off-camera," she said. "It's theater. They make us sit and clap while they sign things that hurt our neighbors."
"No one cares unless it's their wallet," an older man said. He chewed the ends of his words like a piece of old bread. "Solaris went to the rallies last month—fine speeches, faces in the crowd. Then the contracts get handed out, the jobs go to someone's nephew, and we're left with slogans."
A young man at the back—probably still in his twenties—snorted. "All of them promise order. None of them promise pay. A cabinet minister can pray under the camera and then sleep with a portfolio for the lawyer who buys his dinners. It's a game."
Tyler watched the young man's hands as he made the point: quick, certain movements as if outlining strategies on an invisible board. He registered the man's jacket, the way the stitching frayed near the cuff—a small reality check that politics, whatever promises it made, happened between people who wore decent clothes and those who could not.
On the other side of the room, two students argued softly about the Veyra Reform Club's new lecture on "education as sovereignty." Their words were careful because the topic was dangerous: knowledge, in their mouths, had begun to sound like an accusation. "They want everything taught by the book," one said. "They think we'll trade our backs for their books and end up colder than before."
"Because they don't feel the cold," the other replied. "They read and they march, but they don't carry crates home at dusk. Who are they to tell us what progress looks like?"
Tyler watched, cataloguing who felt what and why. These conversations were maps. If he learned to read them, he could see where the unrest would flow. For now, he kept his mouth shut and his face neutral. Observation was safer; observation was power without cost.
A clerk behind the glass door called out the next name. Tyler felt a small lurch—not panic; this was the steady sort of hunger that had become familiar. He rose. The interview room was a narrow rectangle of bland carpet and a table that a hundred nervous hands had touched. The manager—neat hair, eyes like someone who had never known the wrong side of hunger—asked questions that pretended to be interested in character and competence.
"Where do you see yourself in five years?" the manager asked, smiling that corporate smile.
Tyler had learned to answer questions that wanted optimism. He spoke about steady contribution, about learning on the job—small, reliable things that made him seem useful without threatening anyone's comfortable assumptions. He watched the manager's face for tells: a flicker, a blink that betrayed whether some other candidate was the preferred one.
When the interview ended, Tyler did not feel triumphant or crushed. He felt, rather, as if he had placed a small stone on a map and someone else would decide whether it stayed. He walked out into the waiting room with the same careful calm he had used to enter it.
People nodded or pretended not to notice him. The woman near the coffee muttered something about "they'll call when they call," and an old man rolled his eyes the way old men in this city did—like a gesture that had been practiced for years. Tyler sat down again, folded his hands, and began to wait.
That is when the man who looked after the documents—an office attendant with a face shaped by ten thousand small humiliations—approached him. The man moved with the loose arrogance of someone who owned gossip like currency.
"Hey," the attendant said, in a voice meant to be casual. "You—Brown? Tyler Brown?" He checked a list, the paper crackling between his fingers. The way he smiled suggested he had been given a role that made him feel important for the first time that morning.
Tyler tilted his head, measured him for a moment, and nodded once. "That's me."
The man gestured to the far corner of the lobby—less watched, a place where nobody's gestures would be examined too closely—and led him there with the practiced shuffle of one who moves around rules.
"Look," the man said, lowering his voice until the words were small and urgent. "I read your CV. Pretty good. You've got a shot, kid. Better than most of the mucks who come in here." He flicked his eyes toward the manager's office as if the gesture alone could conjure trust. Tyler felt the old pattern tighten: favoritism, connections, the soft kindness that acted as a bribe.
"I don't know about that," Tyler said quietly. "I just did what I could."
"Yeah, yeah," the attendant said, hands moving with the kind of amateur charm these men practiced in back alleys and stairwells. "But you know how it goes. If you want to be seen in a good light—if you want the manager to remember your name when he's making the list—" He paused, smiled a smile that was almost friendly, "—you loosen your pocket for the office. Small donation. For the printer. For the coffee. For the office function. Ten thousand—well, five thousand if you're new."
Tyler's face didn't change. He had rehearsed indignations in his head for years—complaints he could shout into the street at injustice—but this proposition had the compressed, intimate cruelty of someone asking another to betray himself for food.
"So you want money," Tyler said. He did not raise his voice. He did not scowl. He simply stated the fact, as if the man had asked whether the sky was blue.
The attendant shrugged, a man playing games because the games fed his family. "That's how it is. If you can't—maybe next time. Maybe someone else. Or you can—" He sniffed, as if disgust would help the negotiation. "You can take your chances."
Tyler looked at him and felt a small, precise shot of humor that tasted like rust. The man was not evil—he was hungry and small and perfunctory. He was every little cog in a machine that ground people down and offered them crumbs. Tyler considered the idea of anger, the flash most people would have used to hurl insults or spat words. He considered then setting the man on fire with the kind of righteous arrogance that speeches reserve, and he folded that thought away like a useless coin.
Instead he did the thing that hurt the attendant more than a shout would. He smiled.
It was not the warm smile that calmed a kitchen or a child. It was a slightly closed smile, the kind of expression a man reserves to be polite when he is planning a slow revenge. Tyler put a hand—brief, almost complicit—on the man's shoulder. "Thanks for telling me," he said softly. "I'll keep it in mind." He tipped his head the smallest fraction, an almost-bow, and turned.
The attendant's smile faltered. For a second the man's face read something like hope, then confusion, then anger. He called after Tyler with a voice strangled by the suddenness of loss: "Hey, I was trying to help—don't walk off like that—"
Tyler did not look back. He walked out of the lobby with the same small dignity he had learned in years of being told to be practical. The attendant, realizing the refusal and the lost fee, spat a string of curses under his breath so quickly the words blurred together. Tyler heard them like a child hears thunder—loud, a little silly, and destined to disappear.
Outside, the city breathed cold into his face. The refusal remained in the corners of his mouth as a cool fact. He had not bargained; he had not paid; he had not begged. He had not yet decided whether his silence was victory or the beginning of a long war.
He tightened the strap of his satchel and let his feet carry him, not in anger but with a small, distant resolution. If the world required him to give up more than dignity to live, he would learn the ledger of its prices. But he would not, not for a clerk's small appetite, loosen the things that made him himself.
He did not yet know what he would do with that resolution. For now, it was only a thing warming inside him like a small coal in winter: useful, private, and likely to be coaxed into flame.
The cold outside felt sharper than when he had entered the building, as if the city had been waiting to greet him with teeth. Tyler exhaled, watched the fog of his breath dissolve in front of him, and kept walking—not fast, not slow, just enough to keep his mind from sitting too heavily on one thought.
He didn't feel angry. Anger would have been loud, dramatic, something a person might shout into a crowd. What he felt was simpler… an ache, the kind that hollows rather than burns. The job had never been guaranteed, but it was humiliating to watch a system pretend to be fair while asking for money under the table. He had expected it, yet expectation didn't soften the blow. It only sharpened the familiarity.
His stomach reminded him he hadn't eaten much that morning. He stepped toward a street vendor—an old man selling flatbread wraps from a stall that looked older than both of them combined. The smell of warm spices drifted through the cold air, oddly comforting.
"Two-fifty," the vendor said without looking up. His voice was rough but not unfriendly.
Tyler handed over the coins and accepted the thin paper-wrapped meal. The bread was warm; that alone felt like mercy. He walked to a small concrete ledge near the plaza fountain—dry during winter—and took a seat. Around him, the city's noise reorganized into a different kind of chaos: mid-day chaos.
People hurried past with bags of groceries, office workers clutching takeaway lunches, school students arguing about something trivial yet important to them. The plaza wasn't beautiful; the fountain tiles were chipped, graffiti stretched along the side wall, and a pigeon marched in circles as if rehearsing a speech. But it was a place where a person could pretend life paused for a moment.
Tyler took a slow bite. The food was cheap, slightly soggy, but warm. Warm was enough.
Two office workers sat on the bench to his left. Their voices carried easily in the cold air.
"You heard about the new tax revision?" one of them said. His tone had the crispness of someone whose frustration had turned into routine.
"I heard," the other replied. "They say it's to stabilize the economy, but everyone knows it's for the minister's debt restructuring."
Tyler didn't look at them—he ate, eyes forward—but he listened. Listening was easier than speaking.
"They say Ignaros groups are protesting again."
"Those kids protest everything. And now the Veyra crowd is pushing some education reform. All noise. Nothing changes."
"They're all puppets. The politicians pull one string, the temple heads pull the other."
The first man laughed, short and bitter. "And we dance. Every damn time."
They stood and left, their conversation folding into the city's larger misery. Tyler took another bite of his wrap, chewing slowly. Their words weren't new, but sometimes hearing a truth you already knew felt like being told it for the first time. It pressed a little harder.
A group of high schoolers passed next, arguing with animated gestures.
"I'm telling you," one boy said, "my brother joined the Ignaros Youth League and now he thinks he's part of some heroic movement."
Another scoffed. "Better than joining Veyra's reading clubs. They think books make you a leader."
"Leaders or puppets?"
"Same difference."
Their laughter was loud, reckless, almost hopeful in its ignorance. Tyler watched them as they disappeared around the corner. Youth had a way of shouting about things it didn't understand yet. He didn't blame them; he had been like that once.
He wiped a crumb from his hand and stared at the wrapper for a moment. There was a small smudge of grease on the corner. Someone else might have seen it and thought the meal too cheap, too humble. Tyler only thought: This is what I can afford today. And he folded the wrapper neatly, as if tidiness could give him control over a life that rarely allowed any.
When he stood, the cold bit at his ears again. His fingers stiffened slightly as he tucked the wrapper into a trash bin. He looked at the streets stretching ahead—gray buildings, dull sky, the slow churn of people moving with practiced disappointment.
There was nothing dramatic waiting for him after lunch. No revelation, no sudden meaning. Just the walk home, the long bus ride, the same streets he had walked a thousand times before.
But something inside him felt… heavier. Not like a burden placed on his back, but like water filling a glass too slowly to notice until it almost spills.
He adjusted his satchel again—a habit more than a necessity—and began walking.
He didn't know what answer he wanted from the world.He only knew he hadn't found it.
And the day wasn't nearly done with him yet.