Duskfall breathed in heat and metal and breathed out steam.
Kael Veyrin moved with the steam, a small shape in a hand‑me‑down jacket the color of street dust, slipping along the spine of the market where the paved road broke into ribbed plates of alien stone. The plates were older than the city, older than the flags that hung above the stalls, older than the language barked by vendors as if volume could change hunger into money. Someone had carved lines in those plates—tight, hair‑thin grooves that caught the morning light and made the ground look like it had been threaded with silver. The elders in the block swore the lines hummed when you pressed your ear to them on cold nights. Kael had tried once. He'd heard only his own blood.
He didn't press his ear to anything today. He kept his head tilted, chin tucked, eyes soft and ash‑gray, the way you look when you don't want to attract the kind of trouble that knows its own name.
Above, the city's third ring floated in the haze like a rusted crown. Skiffs coughed along its underbelly, trailing ribbons of exhaust that turned the morning into a bruise. Closer, tangles of conduit snaked from building to building. The conduits carried power and rumor and, sometimes, rats big enough to make a man think about moving to a safer district like the grave.
"Fresh slips! Fresh slips!" a boy shouted, too bright for this early hour, waving wafers of synthetic meat steamed over a brazier. The smoke smelled like spice and optimism. Optimism cost extra.
"Codex checks at South Gate!" a woman cried, slapping a handbill against a pole until the pole learned the message by heart. "Have your registrations visible! Fines for the unmarked!"
A trio of Ashspire Guards clanked through the lane in mismatched armor with the city's sigil painted over dents and bullet pocks. Their helmets had mirrored visors that made faces into question marks. Behind them trailed a pair of awakened adolescents in fitted harnesses, harnesses that told the world: we belong to someone who pays for our Paths. The boy's lattice winked blue along his collarbone. The girl wore a looped chain at her wrist—a Martial Path toy. They didn't walk like they were guarding anyone. They walked like the lane existed to admire them.
Kael noted their gaits, the interval between their footfalls, the way the girl favored her right when the crowd thickened: small injury, recent. He noted the Guard in the center, heavier on the left leg. He noted the dying battery on the shoulder lamp of the rear guard; it flickered like a drunk eye. He put the information away. Maybe it would never be useful. Maybe it would turn survival into a neat trick later.
He wasn't out here to collect tricks. He had an errand that would turn into breakfast if he was careful and nothing had shifted overnight that would try to murder him with law.
He cut down a side passage where the city forgot to be a city and remembered it was scaffolding over bones. The wall on the left was human brick. The wall on the right was one of the Eidryn's—smooth, dark, with shapes embedded in it that looked like nerves made of glass. His fingers itched to trace them. He didn't. Touching the wrong line on an Eidryn wall could make your hand forget your arm.
At the end of the passage, a rust door pretended it had never been opened. Kael knocked once, twice, then held his knuckles against the metal for a count of five. The door breathed out. The lock wasn't mechanical; it was social. On the other side, someone wanted to believe in ritual enough to make a latch move.
"Veyrin," a voice rasped through the seam. "What gifts does the day carry?"
"The kind that fit in a pocket," Kael said.
The bolt slid with the kind of reluctance metal has when it remembers being ore. The door opened a hand's breadth. An eye peered through—a pale blue marble inside a nest of lines. "You're small," the eye said, as if thinking aloud. "But smaller things have carried worse."
Kael did not answer. He held up a plastene satchel, flat and unmarked. The smell of solvent whispered out. The eye narrowed. The door widened. He slipped in.
Inside was not a shop and not a home. It was a space that had been punished by need until it accepted any use. The ceiling was too low for an honest man's posture. Racks lined one wall, holding tools whose names changed with the customer. The opposite wall carried shelves of bottles with labels that said things like CONDENSATE and NOTHING and TEA. In the back, a table hunched under a light that had learned to flicker in rhythm with human patience.
The woman who owned the eye sat at the table. Everyone called her Auntie Rill. No one knew her family. She did favors for a price that depended on whether she liked you, and she rarely liked anyone. The eye that had appraised Kael a moment ago had settled back into her wrinkled face, where it looked like it had been practicing suspicion for decades. Her other eye was a cheap implant that glowed faintly when she counted.
"You brought it," she said.
"You said bring it in the morning," Kael said, placing the satchel on the table.
"I say many things," Auntie Rill said, as if that were a reason to be paid twice. She slid a ragged nail under the flap and sneaked the satchel's mouth open like she expected it to bite. Inside lay three small cylinders wrapped in waxed cloth. Rill took one, sniffed, and made the small contented sound of a person who liked money more than mornings. "Essence filters," she said. "From the good bins. Where'd you pluck them?"
"Trash."
Rill's implant flashed once, a skeptical blink. "Trash doesn't throw away good filters."
"It does when the man who ordered them can't pay the balance," Kael said. He didn't say he'd watched the transaction from a roof three nights ago and seen the seller shut the crate lid with angry fingers. He didn't say he'd known the seller would come back, drunk and empty, after midnight to fetch consolation from the crate and find it lighter. He didn't say anything that would turn the story into a confession. Rill liked stories until they contained verbs lawyers used.
She tapped the cylinders with the nail. "Genuine. Not cracked. You want coin or food?"
"Food, then coin," Kael said. "Boiled."
"Boiled is for babies," Rill said.
"Boiled is for the living," Kael said.
She snorted and shoved a chipped bowl across the table. The bowl's glaze had been a color once. Now it was stories about color. She ladled in stew that had met meat, long ago, societally, and picked up potatoes as political prisoners. Kael waited until she dropped two slices of grey bread on the table before he drew the bowl closer. He didn't attack it. He let the steam touch his face first. He let the smell tell him what kind of day it might be.
Rill counted out coins with the implant flickering. "You're twelve now," she said, as if he'd asked. "Law says I can send you to buy from places that don't watch kids that carefully."
"Law says many things," Kael said. "You can also send me where people don't come back."
Rill's mouth did a movement that wanted to be a grin and changed its mind. "You're a sharp one. I like sharp ones. They don't make me repeat myself."
"They also cut people who handle them wrong," Kael said, tearing the first piece of bread in a clean line.
Rill's pale eye softened. "You going to awaken, Kael?"
"Intention is a candle in the wind of availability," he said, and dipped the bread.
"Hah," Rill said. "Someone taught you to wear big words like a coat. Keep it. It hides bones."
He ate. He didn't look like a starving child. Starving children made people feel a way that complicated transactions. Kael could be hungry without performing it. The stew filled his mouth with heat and salt and a memory of fat. He ate the bread in measured bites, counting chews, counting sensations his body filed as receipts. He kept his eyes on the table and let his ears do the walking.
Two men argued quietly near the racks. Their voices carried a riverbed's stones. Miners. One said "shift" and "accident" and "compensation". The other said nothing for a long time and then said "boy" and "caught" and the kind of silence that grows teeth. Rill didn't look. Rill didn't look because looking is a contract.
Kael finished the bowl and drank what remained. He wiped his mouth with two fingers and then wiped the fingers on the underside of the table where other boys' hunger had dried before his. Rill pushed the coins to him—a small stack of metal, the color of sweat.
"You keep your head low," she said. "You run fast when Guards get curious. And if someone offers you a Path for free, spit on the ground and walk away."
"Spitting wastes water," Kael said, standing. "I'll walk without the theater."
Rill's implant blinked once. "You're twelve," she repeated. "Eligible. That's a word that makes men greedy. Be careful what you look like when they look at you."
He slid the coins into the jacket's inside pocket, where an extra seam made a lip that wouldn't open unless you knew it was there. When he'd first sewn it, his fingers bled. He'd licked the blood and kept sewing. He nodded to Rill and slipped back into the passage where the city pretended not to know him.
Outside, the market had grown teeth. It always did by this hour. The first rush had eaten, the second was hungry, the third would bring the buyers who had slept behind doors with more than one lock. Kael threaded the crowd with the kind of skill children either learned or died before they could. He avoided shoulders. He avoided hands that didn't know they were hands yet. He avoided the kind of eye contact that wrote your name down somewhere you couldn't read.
"Kael!" someone hissed. A skinny boy with a split lip and a grin that had survived it leaned from a stall stacked with scrap identical to the scrap in the next three stalls. Senn. Senn could smile at knives until they reconsidered. "Come here. I got something."
"I have enough somethings," Kael said, not stopping.
"This isn't a something," Senn said. "It's a someone."
Kael stopped. He let himself make a face like curiosity cost him less than turning. Senn hopped down, wiping oil on his shirt, which was the wrong shirt to wipe things on because it already had more stains than fabric. "There's a hunt," Senn said. "Guild‑licensed. Abyss rim. They're paying a bonus for nimble. You're nimble."
"Nimble is bait with manners," Kael said.
Senn's grin widened, then faltered when Kael didn't return it. "They've got a Codex observer," Senn said, as if that poured purity into the pitch. "No funny stuff. Just a sweep for low‑tier Catalysts. The kind that don't melt your face off, haha."
Kael said nothing. He looked past Senn into the stall, where a woman counted washers like they were beads in a prayer. He looked at Senn's pockets, which bulged in a way that said he'd been paid to bring at least one kid and a larger bonus if he brought two. He looked at the alley mouth beyond, where a man in a coat too long for the weather stood with his hands folded under the coat as if hands had nothing to do until the right moment.
"How many do they need?" Kael asked.
"Six runners," Senn said. "Two spotters. A cordon team."
"How many do they have?"
"Four runners," Senn said, and then flinched at his own speed.
Kael let the pause lengthen until Senn's grin began to look like a confession. "You said Codex observer," Kael said. "Whose?"
Senn brightened. "Crimson Charter. One of theirs. Off‑world patch. Fancy."
The long‑coat at the alley moved like a man who had learned patience in rooms without windows. Kael did not look at him directly. "Which rim?" Kael asked.
"North," Senn said. "Black Maw's lip. Just the outer teeth."
"Outer teeth still bite," Kael said. "What are they hunting?"
"Grey silhouettes," Senn said. "Eidryn phantoms. You shine light, they show. You net them, you get a chance at Flux residue. Safe as a preacher's lie."
Kael looked down at his shoes. They were not the kind of shoes that liked nets. They were the kind of shoes that liked running on roofs. He thought about the stew in his stomach, the coins in his jacket, the hum of the Eidryn wall under his palm earlier, Rill's voice saying eligible like a flavor that didn't belong in a child's mouth.
He looked up, past Senn, at the long‑coat. The man had the kind of patience that leaves impressions on the world. He could stand there all day. He would not leave with empty hands.
"Where's the meet?" Kael asked.
Senn sagged, relief and triumph tacking him together. "North Spinner. Two hours."
Kael nodded once. "I'll come. Alone."
"Bring that older girl from your block," Senn said, too fast. "The one with the braid. They'll pay for two."
Kael turned his head so Senn wouldn't need to see his eyes. "My block isn't a well," he said. "Don't drop your bucket there."
Senn put up his hands like the conversation was a flood and he owned a wall. "Okay, okay. Just thought I'd—"
"You thought you'd get your bonus," Kael said, and walked.
He didn't go toward North Spinner. He turned south and crossed the market's throat, where voices rose into a single animal sound and then split again. He drifted along a line of stalls selling charms that promised to keep essence storms out of your lungs. He passed a metalworker tapping runes into the belly of a pot and a girl singing to an old Eidryn plate until the etched lines glimmered like a smile.
He cut behind the pot stall into a lane that ended in a stack of broken crates. He climbed the crates and dropped into a second lane where the ground rose in a slow, untrustworthy slope. He walked that way until the slope tricked him into higher ground. From here he could see the North Spinner—an old fan tower that had been repurposed into a meeting post for guilds who liked pretending they weren't hiring children.
He watched the base of the tower. He watched the long‑coat arrive and stand like he hadn't moved since he'd been born. He watched Senn jog up with a group of boys and one girl whose braid could have been the braid from his block if you shut your eyes and decided not to be sure. He watched an Ashspire Guard detach from a nearby corner and pretend he wasn't looking.
He watched until he had a map. Then he went to the place the map said would matter: not the meet, but the corner three alleys over where a man would stand in an hour counting heads in a notebook that would—by coincidence—be the same notebook the Codex observer used to decide who got paid if the hunt went well and who got written into the ledger of acceptable losses if it didn't.
He got there before the man and sat on a step, mouth empty of expression. He had time to count breaths. He had time to think about the way the Eidryn had cut lines into the world and expected those lines to carry ideas like cables. He had time to decide whether to go to the rim at all.
His stomach told him not to be heroic. He listened. Heroism was a word you pinned to a corpse when you didn't want to admit you'd run out of better ones.
A shadow fell over his shoes. "Veyrin," a voice said. The man smelled like clean cloth and a little like money. "You're punctual."
Kael looked up. The man had not changed his coat. It was still too long for the weather, which meant the weather had been told not to argue with it. He had a face that had been shaved recently not because of vanity but because hair made masks fit worse. He also had a left ear that had been broken once and set badly—a small vanity punished by history.
"You're paying for runners," Kael said.
"I am," the man said. "I am also paying for someone who can count."
"I can count," Kael said. "Do you pay more for that?"
"I pay differently," the man said. "Crimson Charter likes headcounts that match outcomes. Ashspire likes outcomes that match fines. The Guild likes—what does the Guild like, Veyrin?"
"Receipts," Kael said.
The man smiled with his mouth and not with his eyes. "Walk with me."
Kael didn't. He bent and tied his shoe. It didn't need tying. It needed a second. When he stood, the man had turned with the kind of slowness people mistake for confidence. Kael followed at a distance that made it look like coincidence.
"What's your Path?" the man asked without looking back.
"None," Kael said.
"Good," the man said. "Paths make children think they're fireproof. I need a child who thinks he's kindling."
"Kindling burns first," Kael said.
"It also lights the rest," the man said.
They reached a mouth where the lane opened into a service court, the kind of place deliveries pretended they were secrets. The man stopped. Kael stopped a step behind.
"I need two numbers," the man said. "How many runners arrive at the North Spinner. How many go into the Maw. You'll add a third number after—how many come back."
Kael said nothing. The man waited in the way of someone who had learned that silence proved more expensive than speech. "Do you know why I need those numbers?" the man asked eventually.
"So you can tell the Codex where to look if someone's mother comes with a knife," Kael said.
The man chuckled in the way men do when a child says truth with a clean edge. "So I can tell my ledger whether I paid for mistakes," he said. He reached into his coat and brought out a small square of synth. Not a coin. A token. It had a slit that would drink a signature. He didn't hold it toward Kael. He held it like a question.
Kael didn't take it. "My numbers cost," he said.
"Everything costs," the man said. "What's your price?"
"Lunch now," Kael said. "Dinner later. Not in a place where the Guard eats free."
The man smiled properly this time—eyes, a little. "Names have power," he said. "Do you know mine?"
Kael did not. He did not ask. "Do you know mine?" he said instead.
"I do," the man said. "Kael Veyrin. Scar on the left wrist. Lives in Block 9B, Unit 14, sleeps against the wall not near the door. Buys boiled food when given the chance. Doesn't spit unless no one's watching. Carries a thread and a needle and once stitched a jacket pocket in the dark with his teeth."
Kael's stomach tightened in the way muscle does when it remembers it's made of meat. He kept his face obedient. "You're good at counting," he said.
"I'm good at paying attention," the man said. "Which is what I'm buying from you."
Kael took the token. It was warm, as if it had been held for a while in a palm that didn't sweat. He didn't sign it. He slid it into the lip pocket with the coins.
"You'll have numbers," he said. "If my numbers get me counted, I'll stop counting."
"Fair," the man said.
He left with the same measured gait, as if the ground liked him enough to make his feet forget the work. Kael watched him until he became part of the lane and then part of the idea of lanes in general.
He went to the North Spinner late enough to be rude but early enough to see who hated rudeness. Senn stood with a cluster of boys and the girl with the not‑quite‑his‑block braid, jittering like a wire too tight in cold. The Ashspire Guard from earlier had taken up a position near the tower. His lamp still flickered. The Crimson Charter observer wore a patch he didn't need and a face that said the patch was what you should look at when you wanted to know to whom you were speaking.
Kael counted. He didn't move his lips. He didn't point his eyes like fingers. He let his gaze pool over the group and then drain into the ground.
Nine runners. Three spotters. A cordon team of six from the Guild, harnessed up with netters and clamps and poles that hummed when they thought about work. A medic with a bag that made the word medic into a comedy. The Codex observer had a slate. He drew lines on it with a stylus. The lines became numbers. Numbers became permission.
Kael did not join the runners. He leaned against a post with flaking paint and pretended to listen to a man selling belts that would certainly not keep your guts in if an essence storm decided to take an interest in them.
The group moved in stages: talk, threaten, threaten again, laugh, move. They left in a messy file that wanted to be a parade. Kael peeled off a moment later, taking a street that shadowed the route from above. He ran the roofs until the roofs ran out, then crawled along a conduit until the conduit widened into a platform where people who used to be children hid to smoke out of the Guard's sight.
He watched the line reach the Maw's outer lip—a black bite in the earth with tooth marks left by ancient machinery and newer appetites. The edge was cordoned with posts that had once borne flags and now bore warnings in paint that flaked in the wind: DO NOT. DO NOT. DO NOT. A man made a speech because someone had to. The speech contained words like licensed and safe and compensation. The speech did not contain the word loss.
Kael counted again. People lie to numbers the way they lie to gods—politely, with conviction. Numbers lie back when they can.
Nine runners went to the rope. Nine harnesses clipped with small sounds that made mother's hearts shake in their distant chests. Kael watched the first foot disappear over the edge. He watched the hands that let it.
He ate a piece of bread saved from Rill's offering and wrote the numbers in the part of his head where numbers did not dissolve.
He did not climb. He did not want to see the Maw from inside on a day he had not chosen. He watched faces instead: the cordon team's boredom that was not boredom, the medic's mouth that had stopped being a mouth and become a line, the observer's stylus writing in a language that said he did not need to be here to be here. The Guard scratched his lamp until it stopped flickering. Kael and the lamp had that in common.
He stayed until the line on the rope jerked in a way no rope should. He stayed until someone at the edge said a word that turned air into glue. He stayed until a scream learned the twist that made it an echo. Then he left, because he had counted what he had been paid to count and staying beyond that would be donating free labor to a god who never tipped.
On the way back, the city thickened. The third rush had eaten. The fourth had begun to think about dinner. Kael moved through the crowd like a fish that had invented its own water. He took corners at fractions of angles. He avoided the hand that didn't belong to the man it wore. He heard his name once, twice, and refused to belong to it.
He cut through a courtyard where the Eidryn had built a box and then left it a thousand years ago for someone else to understand. The box was all planes and patience, with a seam along one side that made the rumor peddlers say it would open if you said the right word in the right tongue at the right time of night. Kael had said many words to many things. The box had not opened. Today, a boy younger than him pressed his face to the box and whispered "please" until the word ran out of meanings. Kael did not stop. He was not interested in discouraging prayers; he was interested in surviving long enough to understand why the prayers had learned to mimic bargains.
He reached the lane where he'd met the long‑coat. The man was not there. The absence felt like someone had pulled a nail out of a board and decided not to tell the board about gravity. Kael walked to Auntie Rill's, not for stew—twice in a day was asking the world to notice—but because sometimes information lived where the old pretended they were tired enough to misplace it.
Inside, the air was the temperature of boiled coin. Rill looked up, implant lazy in the way of predators after meals. "You went," she said, not asking.
"I counted," Kael said.
"How many does the Maw keep?" Rill asked, like you ask about the weather from behind a window.
"We'll see," Kael said.
"You always were stingy with the present," Rill said. "What do you want?"
"A name," Kael said.
"Many names," Rill said. "Which one?"
"The Crimson Charter man," Kael said. "Long coat. Left ear bent. Counts well."
Rill smirked. "Oh, him." The implant blinked slow. "Boros. Or he was, once. Names slip on men like that. But he bought tea without haggling last week. I like men who know tea from water."
"Boros," Kael said, tasting the shape. He put it away
"You dealing?" Rill asked.
"I'm watching," Kael said.
"Watching is the first half of dealing," Rill said. "Second half is not blinking."
He left. He had an appointment with dinner and with the place where dinner had promised to wear a different name. The token in his pocket warmed once as if a thumb had pressed it through the fabric from a hand that wasn't there. He didn't touch it. He let it be a signal to himself: remember to act like someone worth paying twice.
The city's light turned the color of old brass. Lanterns that had once belonged to gods sputtered and learned to belong to vendors. Kael threaded his way to a noodle stall near the West Track, a stall with two pots that never emptied and one stool that never wobbled. Boros sat on that stool with the posture of a man who had made a treaty with his own spine. He nodded to the space beside him without looking. Kael took it. The stall keeper slid a bowl down the counter with the expertise of a person who had learned to sail soup.
"Numbers?" Boros asked, eyes on his noodles.
"Eleven for the meet," Kael said, because the cordon and the medic and the observer mattered to someone's ledger.
Boros made a small noise that could have been approval. "Into the Maw?"
"Nine," Kael said.
Boros chewed, swallowed, spoke into his bowl. "Back?"
"We'll see," Kael said.
Boros smiled without smiling. "You'll do," he said.
"For what?" Kael asked.
"For counting," Boros said. "For now."
Kael ate. The noodles were thin and humble and perfect. He lifted them with chopsticks that wanted to be splinters and let them cool between bowl and mouth, long enough to let impatience ask to be invited. He chewed until flavor settled into truth. He did not thank Boros. He put the empty bowl on the counter with the kind of sound that makes shopkeepers and gods agree that you have eaten.
"Do you know what the Maw is?" Boros asked when Kael's bowl became a memory.
"A hole," Kael said.
"A mouth," Boros said. "It chews. It swallows. Sometimes it whispers."
"People hear things when they want to," Kael said.
"People hear things when they can't afford not to," Boros said. He wiped his mouth with a square of cloth as clean as his coat. "You turned twelve today," he said, and it wasn't a question.
"Everyone knows," Kael said. "The Codex put a stamp on my file when I woke up."
"The Codex loves stamps," Boros said. "It will stamp over your face if you let it."
Kael did not say that the Codex had already written his name where only people with keys could read it and that the keys belonged to men who liked long coats. He did not say that waking up and being stamped had felt like someone had put a price on his head and written "negotiable" under it.
"What do you want?" Boros asked. He asked it without the tone adults used when they expected nonsense.
"Leverage," Kael said.
Boros's left ear twitched, a ghost of pain. "Good," he said. "Not safety. Not glory. Leverage buys safety. Glory spends it."
"What do you want?" Kael asked.
"Headcounts that match outcomes," Boros said again. "And a boy who does not try to be a hero where numbers do not pay heroes."
"So you want a coward," Kael said mildly.
"I want someone who knows the difference between fear and timing," Boros said. He stood, placed coins on the counter. They were not the kind of coins a man like him carried. They were the kind a widow saved in a jar. He probably kept both.
Kael watched him go. He felt the token warm a second time. He ate the small piece of pickled radish left in the bowl like a thief finishing the last bite because no one else would appreciate it. He slid off the stool and let the night widen around him.
It was late enough that the street preachers had come out. They wore robes sewn from banners and spoke about mercy like they had seen it from far away and could describe its shape but not its smell. One shouted about the Nine Worlds, about the day the sky opened and snakes and angels fell out and all we had was our hands and a stick. Another sang a song about Solara that had once been banned and now was permitted as long as you switched two verses.
Kael drifted at the edge of one circle long enough to catch three facts and two lies. The facts were boring. The lies were better. He moved on.
In the alley behind the noodle stall, he met Senn's grin leaning against a wall.
"You didn't come," Senn said. "We could have used nimble."
"You didn't need nine," Kael said.
Senn's grin paused. "How'd you—"
"Count," Kael said.
Senn's split lip cracked when he tried to frown. "You think you're clever. You think you can stand on roofs and watch the world climb into holes and come out covered in glory and you can have the stew and the coins anyway."
"No," Kael said. "I think math is kinder than holes."
Senn spat. It landed near Kael's shoe. "The Maw whispered," he said softly, as if the whisper could hear itself reported. "We got a silhouette. The net sang when we touched it. I brought it up. I touched the Flux. I did. It was like holding a piece of cold sun."
Kael said nothing. He looked at Senn's hands. They were shaking. He looked at Senn's pupils. They were wrong. They were a little too bright in the dark.
"Show me your palm," Kael said.
Senn laughed. "What, you gonna read my lines? Tell me I'm going to be rich and marry a nice wall?"
"Show me your palm," Kael repeated.
Senn showed it, half in defiance and half because he wanted to be told something that made sense. There, at the base of his thumb, a faint gray stain bloomed like a bruise. Flux residue. Minor. You could hide it under bandage or sarcasm. You could ignore it until you couldn't.
"It doesn't hurt," Senn said too quickly.
"It will," Kael said. "Don't sleep near anyone you like."
Senn swore, a word he'd learned from a woman who hadn't known he was listening. "They said it was safe," he said.
"They said a lot," Kael said. "What did the Codex observer say when he saw your hand?"
Senn's silence burned.
Kael stepped back into the main lane and let the crowd take him. Senn called his name once and put a plea in it. Kael did not stop. He did not have a cure. He might have a plan later, when the numbers turned into shapes his hands could move. Right now, stopping would make him complicit in someone else's theater. He had eaten enough theater today.
He walked toward Block 9B, Unit 14, where the wall knew his back and the floor knew the shape of his heel. He passed a stall selling prayer knives and a woman with hair like a storm warning who carved numbers into candle wax and told people it would make their children brave. He passed an Eidryn mural that looked like a map of a place no one had ever found. He passed a child kneeling by a drain, coaxing a sprite out with sugar and spite.
The block watchman sat by the entry arch with a ledger he never filled. He wore a badge that told the Codex he was useful when the Codex's attention drifted this far south, which it seldom did. He nodded at Kael like he was acknowledging that boys exist and are sometimes not yet problems. Kael nodded back like acknowledgments paid rent.
Inside, the stairs remembered all the people who had climbed them with feet that wanted to leave and never did. Kael went up two flights, past a couple arguing low about a debt, past a room that smelled like laughter had been baked into its walls when laughter was cheaper. He reached Unit 14 and palmed the patch under the latch where a wire could be touched just so. The door clicked and sighed. He slid in and shut it behind him and leaned his head against it for the length of one breath.
The room had a bed built against the wall where the wall was strongest, a table that could decide to be a chair, a shelf that pretended to be a shrine when the block inspector came through. On the shelf sat a scrap of fabric that had once been a sleeve, and a tin with nothing in it, and a small stone that had lived in his pocket for a week because his hand liked its shape. He put the coins under the mattress where the block rats wouldn't go because rats don't like soap and he had rubbed soap along the seam yesterday like a line of chalk.
He sat on the bed. He took the token out of his pocket and set it on the table. He took his jacket off and folded it the way Auntie Rill folded stories. He put his thumb to the scar on his left wrist, pressed until the skin remembered being broken and then stopped.
Twelve. Eligible. A word like a door that had been shown a key. The key wasn't free. Nothing was free. Free was a word men put on chains when they wanted you to stop looking.
He lay back and let the ceiling tell him about the people who had stared at it before and the stains they had left and the way the plaster learned to hold its breath when men shouted. He closed his eyes and counted down from a number high enough to keep the dark honest.
He slept a little. He woke to the sound of footsteps outside stopping where footsteps didn't stop unless they wanted to test a door.
He didn't move. He slowed his breathing. He let his eyes slit just enough to make the room a softer black. The handle of the door turned as far as the wire under the latch would allow and then stopped, surprised. The person outside waited. He could hear waiting when it wore boots. Then a soft knock. Not block style. Guild style. Three, one, two.
He got up without sound. He didn't carry a weapon. He carried a habit: don't open doors unless you can close them on someone's fingers.
"Veyrin," a voice said, soft enough to not wake neighbors and hard enough to convince locks to listen. "Open."
"Why?" Kael asked.
"Because you want to eat tomorrow," the voice said.
Kael looked at the token on the table. He looked at the door. He looked at the window and the gap in the frame you could squeeze a child through if the child wasn't prone to romantic gestures like screaming. He lifted the latch.
The man wore a coat. The left ear was wrong. Boros smiled like a ledger balancing. "Back," he said.
"How many?" Kael asked.
"Enough," Boros said, and entered without being asked. He closed the door behind him with a precise click that said he had closed this door before. He stood in the small room like a piece of furniture that had forgotten where it belonged.
"Why here?" Kael asked.
"Because congratulations," Boros said. "You have a job."
"I counted," Kael said.
"You did," Boros said. "You'll count again. You'll tell me what you saw. And I'll feed you and show you a thing."
"What thing?" Kael asked.
"A stone," Boros said. "And a room. And a choice."
Kael said nothing. He put his jacket back on because it was a habit. He took the token from the table and slid it into the seam where coins lived. He blew out the small lamp that wasn't lit and followed Boros into a hall that looked like many halls in Duskfall because halls here were built by the same bad money for the same good reasons.
They walked without speaking. The block asleep around them made the kind of noises blocks make when no one has the energy to pretend. At the corner, a woman sat on the stairs with her head in her hands as if her hands had become a bowl waiting for someone to pour a different life into it. Boros did not look. Kael did not look. Looking is a contract.
They ended up not at the North Spinner, not at the Maw, not at a place Kael already knew, but at a service door behind a temple that had been repurposed as a union hall and then repurposed again as a warehouse and might be repurposed tomorrow as a church for a god no one believed in but everyone signed up for because gods hand out blankets in winter.
Boros knocked like a man who did not need to knock. The door opened like a dog making up its mind. They went in.
The room inside was round, small, and wrong. Wrong not like dangerous. Wrong like old. The air remembered other lungs. In the center sat a low table. On the table, wrapped in dusk‑colored cloth, was a shape Kael had never seen and already knew: a stone wrapped like a prayer.
Boros stood to the side like a man introducing two people who might decide to be enemies or worshipers. "Open it," he said.
Kael did not move. "What is it?"
"An Eidryn Anchor," Boros said. "Or a piece of one. Or a lie we tell ourselves to make it easier to believe we can use it."
"What for?" Kael asked.
"For telling the truth about who you are when the Codex wants to write it for you," Boros said.
Kael stepped closer. The cloth was bound with a knot he recognized from a block mother who tied bundles the same way. He undid it. Inside lay a stone the size of a fist, plain and heavy and nothing like the things preachers held up when they wanted to sell hope. It did not glow. It did not hum. It sat, the way stones sit, with patience.
"Touch it," Boros said.
Kael did not. He put his hands behind his back as if they were being used for something else. "What happens?"
"Maybe nothing," Boros said. "Maybe it drinks a little of you and shows you what you don't want to know and then leaves you alone. Maybe it breaks. Maybe you break."
"Why me?" Kael asked.
"Because you're twelve," Boros said. "Because you counted. Because you didn't go into the Maw with a net and a song about glory. Because I need someone who doesn't instinctively say yes when a room asks for something."
Kael looked at him. Boros did not flinch. "Will you pay me if I say no?" Kael asked.
"I will pay you for the numbers you gave me," Boros said. "I will pay you for the numbers you will give me tomorrow. I will not pay you for this if you say no. Some things are not markets."
"They are always markets," Kael said. "You just aren't willing to pay."
Boros laughed once. It sounded like a knife being cleaned. "Touch the stone, Kael," he said.
Kael reached out. He did not touch it. He lowered his hand until the back of his fingers felt a temperature that did not belong to the room. Cold. Not elemental. Personal. The way a room feels cold when a person you loved has left it forever.
He pressed his palm to the stone.
It did not hum. It did not glow. It did not lift him into visions of ancient halls where tall beings with long hands drew lines in light. It sat. It weighed. It weighed him, and he felt the weighing, and something in the scar around his wrist tightened and then relaxed with the slow, begrudging movement of a door that has agreed to open a finger.
A taste filled his mouth. Copper. And something else. Library dust. He thought of books he'd never held. He thought of a sky he'd never seen. He pulled his hand back because the thought was too much like wanting.
Boros watched his face the way a man watches a glass to understand whether the liquid inside is poison or wine. "Well?" he asked.
"It's a stone," Kael said.
"Good," Boros said, and sounded pleased. "Then you are not a fool."
"What now?" Kael asked.
"Now you sleep," Boros said. "Tomorrow you count. The day after, maybe you decide whether to go into holes for people who will write your name correctly in a book when you don't come out."
"And if I don't want holes?" Kael asked.
"Then you find stairs," Boros said. "And you climb them like a thief."
Kael said, "I don't break rules."
Boros tilted his head. "No?"
"I write them," Kael said quietly.
Boros's mouth made a shape that might someday be respect. "We'll see," he said.
He wrapped the stone again and tied the knot wrong. Kael's fingers twitched. He did not fix it. He let the wrong knot sit and be a promise of a later visit. He left with Boros into a night that had learned a new shade of dark since the morning.
Back in his unit, the bed knew him again. The wall accepted his back. The ceiling told him nothing; it had told him too much already. He lay, eyes open, letting the room tell him stories he could put knives into later.
Twelve. Eligible. The city would try to make that into a song. He would make it into a ledger entry. He would wear the word like a coat until it tried to become a cage. Then he would take it off without ceremony.
He slept finally. He dreamed he was standing under the North Spinner while numbers fell like rain and every drop had a face he had chosen to forget. He dreamed a stone weighed his name and found it light and then heavier and then acceptable. He dreamed he climbed stairs that had once been a balcony broken into steps by a sorcerer who thought he was being kind.
When he woke, the light had not yet decided to visit his window. He stood and placed his palm to the door and listened for footsteps. He heard none. He put the token in his pocket and the coins equidistant from the center of his mattress and a small knife in his sock he had not had yesterday.
He opened the door.
Duskfall breathed heat and metal and steam. Somewhere to the north, a mouth chewed. Somewhere to the south, a wall hummed. Somewhere very close, a boy named Senn whispered "it doesn't hurt" to a hand that would teach him the difference between lies and time.
Kael stepped into the hall and let the morning notice him just enough to take him seriously.
He had numbers to deliver.
He had a city to read.
He had rules to write.