He dreamed of a man who was not quite a man.
Tall, the way architecture is tall — not because of height exactly but because of the impression of it, the way certain doorways make you feel small before you've measured yourself against them. The figure stood at the center of a crossroads Kai didn't recognize, four streets bleeding out from a central point like wounds. The pavement was old under the figure's feet, the cracked and pale kind that preceded the current construction by generations, and growing up through the cracks were things that shouldn't grow in cities — not weeds, not the scrub grass that colonized District Nine's vacant lots, but something with dark leaves and roots that went down visibly into the earth, spiraling into the deep like they were searching for the same river Kai had seen.
The figure's face was District Nine. That was the only way Kai's mind could frame it — not that the face resembled the district, but that looking at it produced the same feeling: the texture of known streets, the specific quality of safety that exists inside danger when you know the terrain and someone else doesn't.
"You held on," the figure said. His voice came from the walls. From the pavement. From the drain grates and the overhead lines and the burn-barrels at the alley mouths. "Most don't, the first time the blood wakes."
Kai said, "What are you?"
The figure considered the question the way people consider questions they've been asked ten thousand times and have never found a satisfying answer to.
"I was the God of Alleys," he said. "I was everything between the main roads — the shortcuts, the hiding places, the paths that only locals know. Every district in this city has a vein structure of secondary streets, passages, the nameless connective tissue of urban life. That was my domain." He looked at his hands. They were mapped with the same not-quite-light Kai had felt in his own bones the night before, but dense, layered, like a city seen from altitude. "It was a considerable domain, once."
"Was," Kai said.
"They built the Spire forty years ago. When corporations become large enough they stop needing gods — or they think they do. Worship migrated upward. The money moved to the high districts. The old street-level prayers dried up." He paused. "A god without believers doesn't die immediately. It's slower than that. Like a river being rerouted — you don't notice until one day the original channel is dry and you can't quite remember what it sounded like."
Kai looked at the four streets radiating out from the crossroads. Each one led somewhere dark.
"Why me," he said. It wasn't a question with much hope behind it. He was already predicting the shape of the answer.
"You were born in the oldest part of District Nine. You've traveled every alley in this district — professionally, for years. You know the secondary routes the way I knew them. And—" The figure paused. "Your mother used to leave offerings. She didn't call them that. She called it leaving the excess. Rice, at the mouth of Shen's Alley. A cup of whatever she was drinking at the corner of Meridian and Fourth. She did it every day for eighteen years without knowing why."
Kai felt something close over in his chest.
"She kept me coherent," the god said, and his voice had the particular flatness of someone describing a debt they know they can't repay. "When everything else was fading. She was one of the last." He looked at Kai directly. "Her blood is in your blood. My remnant found its way to you when you were dying because you were the closest viable vessel, but also — it wasn't random. You were always going to be the one."
"Viable vessel," Kai repeated.
"Don't be offended by the clinical language. I've had forty years of diminishment. My metaphors have simplified."
Kai woke up.
The machine laundry below his room ran its first cycle at four in the morning. He'd been living above it for two years and could sleep through it now, but this morning he was already awake before the first drum began its rotation, sitting on the edge of his cot with his hands in front of him, examining the faint luminescence that he could now see threading through his palms if he looked with the quality of attention the dream had given him.
Not visible to anyone else, he didn't think. It wasn't light in any conventional sense. More like the knowledge of light. Like knowing a word exists in another language for a feeling you've always had but could never name.
He flexed his fingers. Nothing dramatic happened. He felt foolish.
His phone had six new messages. Three from Yao's dispatch, phrased with escalating irritation about his delivery time the night before. Two from a number he didn't recognize. One from a contact saved as Do Not Answer, which was his name for a man named Reese who ran enforcement for the Substrate Boys and who had twice offered Kai a position on his team, which Kai had twice declined by not answering his phone.
He opened one of the unknown-number messages.
We know what happened to you last night in the Meridian Row unit. We know what you are now. You have 48 hours to present yourself at the following address before we come to District Nine to collect you instead.
Below it: an address in District Four. Mid-tier. The kind of block where the rain came down clean because they'd paid for atmospheric filtration.
The second unknown-number message was a photograph. His own face, taken from above — drone footage, processed and clean — standing at the grandmother's door on Sutter Passage, delivery box in hand. Timestamp: last night, 01:14.
Kai sat with both messages for a while.
Corporate surveillance in District Nine was automated and theoretically anonymized. To pull identified footage of a specific individual from a specific timestamp in the Dregs required either a significant legal warrant or a significant illegal budget. Neither option was available to street-level operators.
Someone with resources had been watching the old units on Meridian Row specifically. Which meant they'd known something was going to happen there. Which meant they understood what waking bloodlines meant before Kai did.
He thought about what the God of Alleys had said about corporations becoming large enough to stop needing gods. He'd been thinking of that as abandonment — the city simply forgetting. He was revising that interpretation now.
He put his phone face-down on the cot.
Then he stood up, washed his face in the cracked basin, ate the half-portion of rice he'd saved from two nights ago, and went to find the only person in District Nine he actually trusted.
Her name was Sera, and she ran a repair shop for electrical components from a stall in the Meridian covered market that was also, depending on the day and the visitor, a message drop, a safe house intake point, and the informal intelligence hub for a significant portion of the Dregs' independent operators. She was twenty-six, originally from District Seven — mid-tier, which she'd left under circumstances she'd never explained — and she had the specific competence of someone who has decided that survival is a craft worth perfecting.
Kai found her with her head inside a disassembled industrial router, her braids pinned back, her hands precise.
"You look like you got hit with something," she said, without looking up.
"Several things," Kai said. He sat on the stool beside her workbench. "I need to ask you something strange."
"You always ask strange things. You just usually pretend they're normal first." She set down her tool. "Your temple's got a bruise the shape of a fist."
"Someone's floor."
"Meridian Row, I heard. The Hollow-Substrate flare-up." She looked at him properly now, with the focused assessment she normally reserved for damaged hardware. "You got caught in it?"
"I went through a window."
"You said."
He put his hands on her workbench, palms up. He didn't know why. Some instinct, the same one that had pressed his palm to the floor in the ruined unit. "Can you see anything?"
She looked at his hands the way she looked at everything — seriously, without mockery. She reached out and turned his palm slightly toward the market's overhead lighting. The crowded noise of the morning market continued around them, uninterested.
"There's something," she said slowly. "I don't know what I'm — it's like a heat. But it's not heat."
"You can see it."
"I can feel it." She pulled her hand back. "Kai. What happened to you?"
He told her. All of it — the floor, the river under the building, the light in his bones. The dream. The messages on his phone. He watched her face as he told it, not because he was performing for her but because Sera's face was where you went to find out if you were being rational. She had the best calibrated bullshit detector of anyone he'd ever met, and the fact that she was listening with her skepticism pointed inward — questioning her own incredulity rather than his account — told him something important.
When he finished, she was quiet for longer than felt comfortable.
"The street gods are real," she said finally.
"Apparently."
"I grew up in District Seven. There's a—" She stopped. "There's a tunnel system under the mid-tier, older than the current construction by a hundred years. The maintenance workers don't like to go in the deep sections. They say there's something wrong with the acoustics." She paused. "My supervisor there, when I was doing my infrastructure rotation at sixteen — he said the city was built on top of things that were never properly accounted for." She picked up her tool again, but didn't use it. "I thought he was talking about geology."
"He probably was," Kai said. "And also not."
"The messages." She set the tool down again. "Corporate surveillance. DNA harvest — that's what they said?"
"They didn't say DNA harvest specifically."
"It's what 'collect you' means when it comes from a corporate address in District Four." Her voice was flat and specific. "There's a biotech subsidiary of Helix Corporation that operates out of mid-tier. They've been doing acquisition runs in the Dregs for three years — they call them 'community health initiatives.' People go in for screening, some of them don't come back, the ones who do come back are different." She looked at him. "There have been rumors about what they're screening for. Nothing concrete."
Kai thought about the God of Alleys. About forty years of corporations accumulating the territory where worship used to live. About a biotech subsidiary with a particular interest in certain genetic expressions.
"They're not new to this," he said.
"No," Sera said. "I don't think they are."
She was quiet again. Outside the stall the market moved and haggled and spilled produce onto the wet walkways. Someone was playing music from a phone at a volume that suggested they were either very confident or very old, a slow percussion track that bounced off the covered market's corrugated ceiling.
"Forty-eight hours," Kai said.
"You're not going to District Four."
"No."
"Then we need to figure out what you can actually do before they come to you." She looked at his hands again, then back at his face. "You said the god called you a vessel. What does that mean in practical terms?"
"I don't know yet."
"You have a god in your bloodline with forty years of knowledge about the secondary street structure of this entire city, and you don't know what you can do." She nodded slowly, the way she nodded when assessing a difficult repair job. "Okay. Then we start small. You go back to Shen's Alley — the oldest alley in District Nine, yes? It's been there since before the current build."
"Since before the build before the current build," Kai said. He'd looked it up once, for no reason except curiosity. "It's on the original survey maps under a different name."
"Go there," Sera said. "Alone. Hands on the wall. See what happens." She picked up her tool again, final this time. "And delete those messages. Not from your phone — from the network. I'll have someone ghost your device signature so they lose the location ping."
"You can do that?"
"I know someone who can." She was already back inside the router. "Come find me after. And try not to go through any more windows."
Kai stood up from the stool.
"Sera," he said.
"I know," she said, which was not a response to anything he'd said, but was somehow the correct answer anyway.
He walked out of the covered market into the orange morning rain, and turned toward the oldest part of the district, and did not look toward the Spire.
Not yet.
End of Chapter Two