The trouble on Tier Four came faster than Joss had predicted and differently than Kael had expected.
He heard it through the usual channels — the shift in ambient conversation, the redistribution of bodies on transit platforms, the subtle acceleration of movement in corridors that were normally unhurried. The Lower Tiers had their own early warning system for this, built not from technology but from the collective nervous system of eighty thousand people who had learned to read environmental signals the way plants read light.
Something had happened at the Ostrev facility.
He found out the details from Maren, who found out details the way she found out everything — through the intake system, which saw fighters come and go and was therefore a reliable index of unusual movement.
Three of Rennick's fighters had been at the Ostrev facility two nights ago for an unofficial session — the kind that wasn't in the schedule but that fighters used the access codes for anyway, which Rennick's management tolerated because a fighter who practiced more was a fighter who won more. Two of them were Rhythmists. One was a Harmonist.
They had run into four of Verse's people.
Nobody was dead. That was the first thing Maren said, and the way she said it — first, as a clarification, before any other detail — implied that it had not been guaranteed. One of Rennick's Rhythmists had a broken arm. One of Verse's people had taken a Harmonist's chord-strike to the chest and was currently recovering from severe resonance pressure damage. The facility itself had two cracked floor panels and a baffle array that would need replacing.
"Verse's people were already there when ours arrived," Maren said. "Using the space. Which they didn't have access codes for, which means either they copied them from somewhere or they have someone on Rennick's staff." She scrolled through something on her intake screen. "It went badly quickly. These things do."
Kael thought about the access code in his message archive, the one Rennick's people had sent him the night of the arrangement signing. "Is Rennick treating it as a territorial incursion or as an infiltration?"
"Both. The incursion is the immediate problem. The infiltration is the longer-term problem that'll matter more." She looked at him. "He'll want his fighters visible in the next cycle. Shows of presence at the facilities. You should expect to be on the schedule for that."
He left Maren's window and walked toward the transit platform, thinking about it. Shows of presence. Which was to say: standing in spaces to declare that those spaces were occupied, that they had a user and that user had an affiliation, that the territorial claim was being actively maintained. It was a function as old as any conflict, the occupation of contested ground.
The problem with doing that for Rennick was that it required being at Rennick's facilities. Which were on Ondas territory. Which was contested by Verse. Which put Kael in the physical location of a territorial dispute on a schedule determined by someone else.
He thought about what Joss had said: contractually on Rennick's side of whatever this turns into.
He also thought about the training space. About Sera's three-day cipher calculation. About the secondary chip in her jacket pocket.
He went to the training space.
Sera was there, ahead of schedule, which he had come to understand was her pattern when she was working on something specific — she used the space for concentration as much as for practice. She had the chip reader out and her tessaviol set aside, several pages of notation shorthand on the floor around her.
She looked up when he came in. She read whatever she saw in his face.
"The Ostrev incident," she said.
"You know about it."
"I heard this morning." She gathered the notation pages carefully. "My family's territory includes this facility. When something happens at a facility on our territory, we hear about it."
Kael sat down against the wall. He looked at the notation pages. "Your family's response?"
"My mother is handling it. She's been handling things like this for thirty years." Sera's tone was precise — not cold, but the particular neutrality of someone who had been raised in close proximity to territorial management and had formed their own relationship with it. "She'll escalate through the standard channels first. Formal territorial claim notification to Verse through the district arbitration system. If he ignores it or responds inadequately, she'll escalate."
"To what?"
"To whatever it takes." She met his gaze. "My mother is not a violent person. She's a thorough one. Those aren't the same thing, but they can produce similar outcomes."
"And me being here—"
"You're Rennick's fighter, which puts you on the allied side of the dispute. My mother knows you use this space." She paused. "She doesn't have a problem with it. Rennick's alliance with our territory is old. It functions." A brief hesitation. "She also knows that you fought the Slot Seven bout and that your technique is unusual. She's not uninformed."
"She checks fighters?"
"She checks everyone connected to territory interests." Sera looked at the notation pages again. "The cipher calculation is further along than I expected. The directional interpretation is holding up."
He looked at the pages. Symbol clusters, frequency notation, timing ratios. It looked like musical notation crossed with mathematical work.
"What's it pointing to?" he said.
"Not what. Where." She turned one of the pages to face him. On it was a rough diagram: the Spire's cross-section, the Tier levels marked from bottom to top, and a directional line that started at Tier Three's structural column and angled upward at a specific bearing.
The line terminated at a location in the Upper Rings.
Kael looked at the diagram for a long time.
"The Upper Rings," he said.
"Tier Twenty-One. Which is the lower boundary of the Upper Rings, and also where—" She stopped.
"Where what?"
She looked at him carefully. "Where the Resonance Academy's foundation archive is located. The physical storage for pre-digital materials, research documentation, anything that predates the current data systems." A pause. "Including materials from the years immediately before and after the Resonance Event. When the whole classification framework was being set up."
Kael sat with this.
Tier Twenty-One. The Academy foundation archive. From Tier Three to Tier Twenty-One was, in the practical terms of his life, an enormous distance — not just in altitude but in access, in the systems you needed to navigate, in the identity and affiliation checks and the automated Resonance scanners and the social infrastructure of a city that organized itself by who was allowed to be where.
He was a Tier Three fighter under contract to a Tier Three-Four resource allocator. He was seventeen years old and unlicensed. The Upper Rings were on the other end of the universe from everything he knew.
"What's in the archive that he was pointing to?" Kael asked.
"I don't know," Sera said. "The cipher is a direction, not a content description." She looked at him steadily. "But whatever it is, he embedded it in a recording that was given to a six-year-old in a Lower Tier shelter, hidden at a frequency only specific equipment could detect, protected by a cipher from an Academy archive that even Academy faculty don't have full access to." She paused. "He wanted it found. He wanted it found by someone who would come from the Lower Tiers, grow up enough to understand what they were looking at, and then—" She stopped again.
"And then go up," Kael said.
She held his gaze. "And then go up," she agreed.
Outside, the Tier's machinery hummed. Somewhere on the floors above them, the Ondas territorial dispute was being processed through channels Kael wasn't part of. And somewhere far above that, eleven years of waiting sat in an archive on Tier Twenty-One, left there by a man who had vanished mid-concert and never come back.
Kael looked at the diagram.
He looked at the line pointing up.