The library was free. That was the first thing I established.
The municipal branch three blocks east had survived the Final War with a cracked front wall and water damage on the second floor, but the ground level was operational and the card registration required only a current address. I had one now. A tiny room counted.
I spent forty minutes filling out the form carefully, because it was the first piece of legitimate paperwork I'd held in eight months that had my name on it without also being a debt notice. Then I went to the science section and started pulling books.
Neuroscience, first. Then behavioral psychology. Then a dense academic text on attention mechanics that was clearly written for graduate students and assumed knowledge I didn't have. I read it anyway, flagging words I didn't understand and looking them up in a separate notebook. I had two notebooks now — one for operations, one for the Quirk. I kept them in separate pockets.
The working theory I'd developed over two years of using Puppeteer was simple and probably incomplete: I nudged attention. Not thoughts, not emotions, not will — just where someone's awareness was pointed at a given moment. A guard looking left instead of right. Teruo's focus drifting from price to the satisfaction of closing a deal. The soldier in the logistics building whose eyes moved past the door I was standing behind without registering it.
But the severe headaches told me I was doing something wrong, or doing something right in the most expensive way possible.
The neuroscience gave me a framework. Attention was not one system — it was several, operating in parallel, filtering an enormous amount of incoming data down to the narrow stream a person actually experienced as *noticing*. I was probably hitting the wrong layer. Brute-forcing attention at the conscious level when the real leverage was upstream, in the filtering process itself. Like pushing a boulder when you could redirect the river feeding the hill.
I wrote: *Cost = Depth of override × Resistance of subject × Duration.*
Then I sat with that for a long time.
If the formula was roughly right, I'd been overpaying on every use. Holding contact too long, pushing too hard against active awareness instead of catching people at the filtering stage — the half-second before they'd consciously registered something. That window would be cheaper. Faster. Less blowback.
Testable, I wrote. *Start testing.*
---
Toga showed up for the first formal briefing on a Wednesday.
I'd booked a table at the back of a cheap noodle place where the owner was partially deaf. She arrived seven minutes early, which I noted without commenting on.
I laid out what I had: a mid-tier hero named Aizono Kenji, operating out of a district-level agency in the northeast sector. Not famous. Functional. His sidekick — a woman in her late twenties named Fukashiro Ren — was responsible for filing and physically transporting case reports between the agency and the civil coordination office twice per week. Tuesday and Friday mornings. She took the same route each time.
"How do you know the route," Toga said.
"Watched it for four days."
She looked at the rough map I'd drawn. "You want me to be her."
"For approximately forty minutes. Long enough to enter the coordination office, access the filing room, and photograph the case index from the last six months. I have a contact who'll pay well for active hero case summaries — patterns, targets, operational methods. Information that tells you what heroes are currently watching and who they're currently ignoring."
"That's a real buyer."
"Ogata sourced him. He's been reliable."
She studied the map for a while, which I'd noticed was a habit — she processed visually before committing physically to anything. "The blood," she said.
"I need access to Fukashiro before Tuesday. That's your problem to solve. I'll give you her confirmed schedule for the next four days."
"Not a problem," she said, in the tone of someone for whom it genuinely wasn't.
I believed her. That was the useful thing about Toga — her Quirk required physical proximity and a small amount of blood, which most people would find complicated. She found it straightforward. That asymmetry was an operational advantage, as long as I kept the jobs clean enough that her particular methods didn't become liabilities.
"One condition," she said.
"Say it."
"If anything feels wrong inside the building, I walk. I don't explain. I just walk." She met my eyes directly. "The League made me wait too long in bad situations because the plan required it. I'm not doing that again."
I thought about it for exactly as long as it deserved. "Agreed. Your judgment on-site is final. We lose the fee if the job aborts, but we don't lose you."
Something crossed her face — not gratitude, not relief. More like a recalibration, like she'd been holding a weight at a slightly wrong angle and had just found the correct grip.
"Fine," she said, and ate the rest of her noodles.
---
I tested the attention-layer theory on the walk home.
A man ahead of me was about to turn left at a corner. I watched the filtering moment — the half-second where he hadn't yet consciously decided but his body was already orienting. I pushed there instead of into his active awareness, light contact, barely any pressure.
He turned right.
No headache.
I stopped walking and stood at the corner long enough that two people had to step around me. The result was so clean it took a moment to process. No blowback, no drain, no dark pulse behind my eyes. Just a man who had turned right instead of left and would never know why, probably attributing it later to some vague sense of wanting a different street.
I had been using my Quirk like a crowbar. It was apparently a scalpel.
I wrote in the Quirk notebook that night: *Pre-conscious layer. No resistance. Marginal cost. Works on low-stakes redirects. Unknown whether it holds at higher complexity — decision trees, active suspicion, trained attention. Test in escalating conditions.*
Then, underneath: *Do not use this lightly just because it doesn't hurt anymore.*
I underlined that twice. Cheap power is the most dangerous kind, because cheap things get spent without accounting.
---
Training the next morning.
Harada corrected my jab for the third time, same point of correction as before — I was telegraphing with my right shoulder before the punch came. I reset and threw it again. Still there, faint but present.
"Your body doesn't trust it yet," he said. "Takes longer than people think. The brain knows the mechanic. The muscle doesn't believe it."
I thought about the Quirk note from last night. The brain knowing something and the body believing it were two different systems on two different timelines.
"How long," I said.
"Months. Maybe a year before it's automatic."
I nodded, wrote nothing, and hit the bag again.
The math was still tight. The schedule was still brutal. But the formula had changed, and a changed formula — even with the same numbers feeding into it — eventually produces different output.
I was beginning to see what different output looked like.
It looked like Tuesday morning, a coordination office, and forty minutes with the right face.
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