Page 6

From the moment I sit, the room expects orders.

“Status,” I say, and the tech nearest me answers without looking up.

“Perimeter secure, internal sweep complete. All units in position. Subject remains in vehicle.”

On the infrared monitor, the dark driveway. Only one vehicle is present: a white contractor truck, condensation beading on the windshield. The camera has auto zoomed to the cab. Inside, Samuel Richards is a dark silhouette behind the glass.

His posture is as I predicted—driver’s seat, hands flat on his thighs, head canted to the left. The folder describes his ability to sleep under pressure, but I know from the micro twitch in his jaw that he’s awake. Fear is best measured in the tiny muscles of the face.

I switch to quad-feed. The mansion is so dark it almost ceases to exist, every window blacked out from within. On thermal, though, the structure is alive. Vascular. The heat signature of the second-floor pulses faintly, drawing my eye. I flag it, but the algorithm reports “NO ANOMALY.” I trust the algorithm. It has never lied to me.

Below, the staff quarters are motionless. The last groundskeeper finished prep and has not moved since.

“Begin trial schematic load,” I say. The projection overlays on my center screen. Every control, every sensor, every tripwire is color-coded. No light can touch the inside, but every inch is illuminated in these lines. No mystery remains except what is about to happen.

The Hunt.

One of the techs hovers, waiting for attention. He is not tall, but he stands that way, spine overextended. His face is lined, a map of stress. I gesture for him to speak.

“Biometrics are live, but there’s a half-degree drift in the pressure sensors along the south corridor. Possible offset due to slab pour.”

He’s right. There’s a patch job there from water damage; the substrate never dried properly. I make a note with my stylus. “Compensate and log. Keep all error thresholds at a minimum until event initiation.”

“Yes, sir.”

I look at the digital clock on the console. 05:19:41. Still forty-one minutes until sunrise. The protocol demands everything be in place before the first natural light touches the property. Ritual is the weapon here, not merely control.

It’s predicted at sunrise, he will enter the only open door left and try to find a way out. Unfortunately for him, it will seal shut and the Hunter will be released to enact whatever fun he deems necessary for initiation.

The wall behind me is mirrored, but in this light I can see only the ghosts of the other monitors, faint and insubstantial. I close my eyes, listening for the failure, the note out of place. There is none. For two years I have run the Ministry’s quietest tests from behind bulletproof glass, but Halloween is different.

Halloween is for the Custodians.

I call up the file again. Male, twenty-nine, six years out of prison, four years clean on record. No spouse, no children, no debts. Just the job, day after day, grinding through city contracts with the precision of someone who never expects to be noticed. The mugshot is first—shaved head, broken nose, eyes that look past the camera. Then the contractor badge, taken last year. His hair’s grown in, and the jaw has a little more chiseled, but the eyes are the same: hard, suspicious. Scanning. Alert

“Subject is stable,” I say. “Full status, all logs.”

The system burps up his last seventy-two hours in neat bullet points. Arrival at site, compliance with all checkpoints, not a single deviation from protocol. He checked in at 0610, stayed in line of sight at all times, followed every instruction to the letter. Ate the boxed food, logged every meal, slept only in assigned quarters. No unauthorized movement, no skipped steps, not even a hesitation.

There’s a perfection to it. Either he’s incapable of rebellion, or he’s learned to hide it even from us.

I scroll back further. The prison file is not public; it was wiped on his release. But the Ministry’s archivists miss nothing. The old reports are a study in escalation: child of addicts, in and out of foster care, arrested at seventeen for burglary, again at nineteen for assault, and at twenty-one for manslaughter. The official story is self-defence, but the file notes “significant overkill.” When you look closely, all the violence is clustered around times of high stress or threat. Not a sociopath—an animal that learns to survive in cages. That’s what interests me.

“Are you going to assign him?” asks the head tech, voice very low. He points at the “Hunter” toggle, still grayed out.

“Not yet,” I say, though I have already decided. “Verify first. What’s the projected baseline?”

A different tech answers. “Seventy-nine percent chance of dormancy if left undisturbed. Moderate resistance to standard psychological triggers. High trauma index, but strong rebound. He’ll break, but not the usual way.”

I nod. That fits what I see. A man who expects the world to kill him but wants to prove it wrong.

On another screen, I watch as two staff in PPE suits finish prepping the main entry. They mop the threshold, then set small white markers on the tile—an old tradition, meant to keep out evil. I doubt Samuel will notice. He wasn’t raised on old stories.

I zoom the camera in on his face. His eyes are open now, and he looks up at the house, expression unreadable.

The final task is Hunter selection.

I tap the screen, pulling up the schematic overlay for tonight’s trial. Every door, every stairwell, every blind spot is mapped. The maze is not for show; it is a model for something larger. The old families believed that only pressure revealed the truth in a subject, and so the test is always to apply it with precision.