Seattle rain didn't always fall. Sometimes it just hung there—fine and patient—so that you walked through it and came out damp without remembering if anything had touched you. Morning mist clung to HQ's glass like breath on a mirror.
Conner stood under the awning outside Unit Nine's wing with a paper cup bleeding heat into his palm. He hadn't slept. He told himself he didn't need to. The city didn't pause; why should he? The cup trembled once against his fingers. He tightened them and watched water wick down a seam in the concrete.
"Do you want to talk or do you want to make the weather feel bad?"
Yuri's voice came from behind him. The Unit Nine Captain didn't do footsteps when he didn't have to. Conner pivoted, the movement sharper than it needed to be.
"Sir." He swallowed, then tried again. "Sir, I can't—" The sentence had too many ends. He chose one. "The official report says 'device.' We both know that's not what Galen faced."
Yuri's eyes—dark, careful—took Conner in as if he were a piece of equipment that needed calibration rather than comfort. "Walk," he said. "And drink your coffee before it forgets what it's for."
They fell into step along the covered path skirting the drill fields. Unit Five practiced breach-and-drag on a mock tenement, voices rough with effort; Unit Ten's medics loaded a gurney drill with the tender, obscene speed of people who had watched clocks run out too often. Airships loomed above like whales grazing in the high air.
Conner tried again, quieter. "He said 'dragons' before comms died." The word still felt like a dare, even out here where rain muffled sound. "You said we'd catalogue, classify, hunt. We haven't even admitted they exist."
Yuri didn't look at him. "Admitting is a public verb. I don't need public verbs to move a squad."
"Then what are we moving toward?" Conner asked. His voice was not steady, but it didn't splinter. "Because right now it feels like we're moving around something instead of into it."
They reached the edge of the field. Beyond the fence, the city rose in planes and windows and roofs that remembered different stories than the ones told about them. Yuri stopped, tipped the rest of his coffee into a planter because he never finished anything he couldn't stand.
"You want the past," he said, which was not a question.
"I want to know if this has happened before."
Yuri was silent long enough that Conner heard the breath he wasn't taking. "Twice," the captain said finally. "Once before you were born. Once when you were too young to learn it even existed."
Conner turned. "Where?"
Yuri's mouth compressed. "One was in the Pacific, off a chain no one can name without a clearance I don't have. The other—northern steppe, 'anomalous atmospheric event' that lasted eight minutes and boiled the dew off the grass for ten kilometers. Two dead. Five missing. No footage. Only the impression of eyes on men who were trained to be seen by nothing."
"And you want me to accept that without—" Conner stopped himself. He didn't want to say proof. Proof had been the thing Galen went to find and met heat instead.
"I want you to accept that we are not the first to see a door and not the first to pretend it's a wall," Yuri said.
They stood in the not-rain. Conner closed his eyes and saw the oval clean patch of concrete he'd touched with two fingers at the Needle, the place that had said something was here and then it wasn't. He opened them again.
"What do you need me to do, sir?"
"Follow the threads that don't want to be followed," Yuri said. "Nicely. If they refuse to go where we want, we pull harder. If they scream, we stop and smile and make their friends comfortable. No cowboy nonsense."
"Cowboy?" Conner said, because his mouth couldn't help itself.
Yuri's mouth almost smiled. "You know what I mean."
On the other side of HQ, Aftan wasn't supposed to be anywhere near Unit Nine. He was supposed to be running the balance board again while Wisp timed his micro-corrections and told him he was making the rest of them look bad. Forge had promised to set the board to "annoying" when Aftan showed up so that the floor would tilt unpredictably and apply shame to his feet in equal measure.
But Ahmar had dismissed him after the morning run with a look Aftan recognized as you're no good to me today if I wring you dry. Which left him with forty minutes before the midday brief and a head full of a word he could not dislodge.
He cut down a service corridor because it smelled like oil and old rain and because corridors like that were the right length for thinking. At the bend, voices bled from a half-latched door—Yuri's low evenness, Conner's careful anger. The room was a briefing annex outfitted for huddled plans: wall screens, a table littered with printouts because sometimes digital left fingerprints you didn't want to show.
Aftan didn't intend to eavesdrop. He intended to pass. Then he heard Galen's name and the word "dragons" in a tone that made it stop meaning fiction and start meaning cause of death.
He stopped breathing. Then he remembered the elevator lesson and did it anyway.
"—no footage," Conner was saying. "But we have reflections. Ren pulled a curve off a condo window. It looks like a wing."
"Looks like," Yuri repeated. "The difference between a shadow and a man is important until it isn't."
"Sir, we need a dedicated team on Needle residues. Not cross-assigned. Not 'as time allows.'" Conner's hands were on the table. They made white moons where the knuckles pressed. "I can do it. Let me do it."
"You're already doing it," Yuri said. "I'm just saving you the paperwork."
Conner huffed a laugh that wasn't one. "That's… appreciated." He paused. "I want access to Unit Three's new transfer."
Aftan's shoulder tightened against the wall of its own accord.
"Why?" Yuri asked.
"Because his name's all over things without being on anything," Conner said. "Because he was transferred in two days after the Needle and because his father's name turns up in files that shouldn't have been redacted like they were."
"Runta," Yuri said, and the name hung there like a photograph you turn over and find a note on the back that changes the front forever.
Aftan pushed the door open because it was worse not to.
The two men turned. Conner's mouth opened, closed. Yuri's didn't move at all.
"I'm Aftan," Aftan said, because sometimes the only way not to be a ghost in a room was to say your name like you were not one. "And I didn't try to overhear you. I just… didn't succeed at leaving."
Conner glanced at Yuri as if to ask permission to exist. Yuri didn't give it and didn't not give it. He simply lifted a hand toward a chair. Aftan took it.