The locker room at the back of the Seventh Division barracks was the only place in the building Caleb had ever been alone in. Even there it was usually a near thing. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

He sat on the metal bench at twenty-two-hundred with the three folders from the filing cabinet open in his lap and the photograph from the desk drawer pinned flat under his thigh.

Folder one held coded shipping manifests, nineteen years old, watermarked with an unfamiliar sponsor stamp.

Folder two held a list of names, handwritten by his father, with a date next to each name. Six names carried a single mark, drawn in the same vocabulary as the kettle, the sample, the drudger, the statues. Eleven carried blank space. The marked names had dates. The blank names had absence, which was worse.

Folder three was the one he had been afraid to open.

He opened it. The folder held one piece of paper. The piece of paper held a name. *Caleb Mercer.*

Date next to it: nineteen years ago, the year his father stopped paying the taxes on a property he had built bad carpentry inside.

Mark next to the name: blank.

Caleb read his own name in his father’s handwriting for the better part of a minute.

The letters were careful enough to make his throat work.

His father wrote grocery lists like a man fighting the paper. He wrote repair notes in block marks hard enough to dent the page below. But Caleb’s name here had been written slowly. Deliberately. Like the pen had stopped after each letter and decided whether the next one should exist.

The blank mark beside it had an answer.

Caleb had known that answer since his ribs warmed at the drudger’s plate. The folders did not give him comfort. They gave him a direction: find what his father had hidden, before the people with better offices found it first.

Putting it into words would make it a thing with edges. A thing he could not pretend was only heat, only instinct, only bad luck carried forward through a dead man’s records.

He closed the folder.

He locked it in the bottom of his footlocker.

He stood up.

-----

Tali was waiting for him in the corridor.

She leaned against the wall with her arms crossed and a streak of solder paste across one cheekbone. The streak had dried there. She had missed it because Tali missed mirrors when machines were talking.

She waited while he walked to her. "You read them."

"Yeah."

"What’s in three?"

He let the question sit for a second. "Three is mine."

"Three is yours."

"You knew."

"I had a guess. You read like a man who had just confirmed something."

"Tali."

"Don’t apologize. I asked."

She uncrossed her arms and pushed a small data wafer into his hand. He recognized the form factor. Off-grid storage. Tali used wafers like this for readings she wanted outside the Seventh’s diagnostic network.

"Your bypass readings from the last six weeks. Pull them when you have privacy. Don’t open them on a Defense Force terminal. Don’t open them on any terminal that’s connected to a network. There’s a portable in the workshop. Use that one."

"What am I looking at when I look."

"You’re looking at a graph that has two lines on it that should be one line. One of them is yours. The other one is keeping pace with yours, which is the part I don’t have a word for."

"How bad."

"Bad is when a line spikes. This is polite. Polite is worse."

"Because polite means it knows the room."

"Because polite means it has been in the room long enough to learn manners."

"Tali."

"Mercer."

"How long has the second line been there."

She tapped her own ribs, low, on the left.

"Since the night you got the new spiral."

Heat gathered under his suit lining. His hand stayed at his side. Tali was watching.

"Thanks."

"Don’t thank me yet."

-----

Iris’s voice came over his comms-chip while he was still standing in the corridor.

[Iris Calder: Briefing tomorrow at oh-seven-hundred. Seventh has a guest. Get sleep and shave. Don’t be late. Don’t make me explain you in a hallway.]

He pocketed the wafer.

"Who’s the guest," he said.

Tali had been about to walk away. She stopped. The streak of solder paste on her cheekbone moved with the line of her jaw when she turned her head.

"Iris said guest?"

"Iris said guest," Tali said, which made it worse.

"On a comms-chip ping?"

Tali’s gum stopped moving hard. "On a comms-chip ping."

"Mercer."

"Yeah."

"Iris names guests on comms. If she writes guest, she means someone she refuses to name where a relay can hear it."

"That tracks," Caleb said. "I’m going to go talk to her."

"Get the name."

"I’ll get the name."

She walked away faster than she had walked into the corridor.

-----

Caleb sat back down on the bench inside the empty locker room.

He pulled the photograph out from under his thigh.

The diagram on the back held twelve points. Eleven marks. One empty slot. Three words in his father’s handwriting at the bottom of the page.

*Northwest. Beneath. Soon.*

He had been to northwest.

He had been to beneath.

The third word in his father’s hand had been the one he had avoided while standing in a vault under a city he thought he understood.

Soon.

His comms-chip ticked.

[UNKNOWN USER: Don’t sleep yet. Someone is asking Iris for your file. She has not answered yet. She will not answer until the morning. When she answers in the morning she will not have a choice about the answer. You have until oh-five-hundred to come see me before that conversation closes.]

He read the message twice.

He read it a third time.

The Hacker used verbs like locks used pins. If she wrote *asking*, she wanted him to hear the pressure behind it. The Hacker had never been asked for anything in her life. People who tried usually discovered that asking her for access was like asking a door to feel guilty.

A person who could request a Rank C operator’s file from the Seventh Division Acting Captain and expect an answer was a person whose name even the Hacker left off the comms.

He stood up.

He put the photograph in his coat. He locked the bench. He walked out of the locker room and down the corridor past the lockers and into a city he had been at the center of for forty-eight hours.

Only now did he understand the shape of it.

He was not the center.

He was the smallest piece that had started moving.