The city will tell you who you are if you let it. The trick is not to ask.
— Kael Voss — personal record, year one
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Valos Prime was a city built vertically, by design and by ideology.
At its peak, the Resonance pylons — massive crystalline structures that hummed at a frequency just below human hearing — powered everything: the light arrays, the transit lines, the containment wards in the Accord's administrative districts. They also, by no accident, made the upper districts inhospitable to anyone whose Echo was not sufficiently stable. The resonant interference at height was manageable for Tier-2 and above. For unawakened civilians, prolonged exposure to the upper districts caused headaches, nausea, and in extended cases, a kind of low-grade existential despair that the Accord's medical documentation described, with some creativity, as Environmental Resonance Sensitivity.
Kael did not get headaches in the upper districts. He didn't get anything. The pylons slid off him the same way the scanner had slid off him in the Ashfields when he was nine years old.
He had spent his first year in Valos Prime using this to his advantage, which was to say: going places he was not supposed to be and learning things that were not supposed to be learnable.
He had spent his second year building a life that looked, from the outside, like a man who had given up.
✦ ✦ ✦
Gareth Wynn's fighting pit occupied the basement level of a building in the Ash Quarter — which was not, despite the name, related to the Ashfields, but was simply the oldest and least-maintained district in a city that categorized its districts by their utility to the Accord. The Ash Quarter was useful as a pressure valve. Poor, crowded, legally ambiguous, and far enough from the upper pylons that the ambient Resonance was low enough for unawakened residents to tolerate. The Accord knew that concentrations of non-Awakened people required somewhere to concentrate. The Ash Quarter was that somewhere.
The pit ran three nights a week. On the other four nights, the building's basement served as a storage facility for goods that had been acquired through supply chains that did not appear in any customs record.
Gareth Wynn was sixty-one years old. He had been Tier-4 — Chord-class — for twenty years before something had happened to his Echo that he did not discuss and that had reduced him to a functional Tier-1 with occasional flickers of his former output. He walked with a cane he didn't need for balance, only for the weight of it in his hand. He had grey eyes and white hair and a face that had been broken and reset enough times that it had developed its own asymmetrical geography.
He had given Kael a cot and a job sweeping floors eighteen months ago, on the basis of a ten-second conversation that Kael had not fully understood until much later.
The conversation had gone: Gareth looking at him across the pit's entrance, Kael standing in the rain with nothing, Gareth saying, "Null?" and Kael saying, "Yes," and Gareth saying, "Can you follow instructions?" and Kael saying, "Depends on the instruction," and Gareth saying, "Good answer," and stepping aside.
Kael had spent the subsequent eighteen months determining whether Gareth was an asset, a complication, or a threat.
After today, the category had become significantly more complex.
✦ ✦ ✦
He found Gareth in the pit's back room, reviewing fighter ledgers with the specific attention of a man who had learned to find dishonesty in columns of numbers.
"You're back early," Gareth said, without looking up. "How's Drev?"
"Reflecting on his choices."
"His knee?"
"Also reflecting."
Gareth made a sound that was not quite a laugh. He set the ledger down and looked at Kael with grey eyes that did not miss much and had, apparently, never missed much, which was something Kael was in the process of significantly revising his opinion about.
"You look like a man who found out something he didn't want to find out," Gareth said.
"I look like a man who has questions."
"You always have questions."
"These are different." Kael sat down across from him, which was something he did rarely — he preferred to remain standing, preferred to keep the geometry of an exit available at all times — and placed his hands flat on the table. It was a deliberate signal. I am not leaving. We are having this conversation. "Tell me about your work with the Accord's eastern operations. Nine years ago."
The room had a specific quality of silence for three full seconds.
Gareth's expression did not change. This told Kael a great deal.
"Who told you that?"
"Someone with fewer reasons to lie than you currently have."
Another silence. Then Gareth leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling and exhaled a long breath, the kind that carried something heavy with it.
"What's your mother's name?" he said.
The table. Kael's hands. Flat, still, controlled.
"Issel," Kael said. "Issel Voss."
Gareth closed his eyes.
"I thought so," he said. "From the day you walked in. Same bone structure. Same way of watching a room." He opened his eyes. They were the eyes of a man who had been carrying something for a long time and had learned to make the weight look like posture. "I'm going to need you to let me say some things before you respond. Can you do that?"
"That depends on what they are."
"Yes," Gareth said. "I suppose it does."
He reached into the desk drawer and produced a bottle and two cups. He poured both. He pushed one toward Kael.
Kael did not touch it.
"Nine years ago," Gareth began, "I was still Tier-4. I was doing consulting work for the Accord's eastern field division — security assessments, threat profiling, that kind of thing. Clean work. Or I told myself it was." He looked at the cup he was not drinking from. "They brought me in for a containment operation in the Ashfields. Told me it was a retrieval — former Accord researcher who had gone off-record with sensitive materials. Standard procedure. I held the perimeter. I made sure no one came in and no one went out." His jaw worked. "I didn't ask what was happening inside."
The room.
The drain.
The specific weight of what it meant when a man said I didn't ask.
"You held the perimeter," Kael said, "the night they killed my mother."
"Yes."
"You knew she was in there."
"Not at first. By the time I understood what kind of operation it was —" Gareth stopped. "There is no sentence I can finish that makes that a better answer. I held the perimeter. That's what I did."
Kael looked at him for a long time.
He was aware of several things simultaneously: the distance to the door, the weight of the blade at his ankle, the specific angle of Gareth's body and the fact that the old man's hands were visible and flat on the table, which was either a gesture of honesty or a very sophisticated manipulation. He was aware that his chest contained something that was pressurized and old and that he had been keeping at operational temperature for nine years because a fire that burned all at once was a fire that burned out.
He picked up the cup.
He didn't drink from it. He just held it.
"Who signed the order?" he said.
"I don't know," Gareth said. "I was never told. The file reference —"
"ACCORD/OPH," Kael said.
Gareth went very still. "Where did you get that?"
"My mother gave it to me. The night she died." Kael set the cup back down. "She gave me a file reference and a name I didn't understand and nine years to figure out what to do with both." He stood. "I'm going to find who signed that order. I'm going to understand everything that file contains. And then I'm going to decide what comes next." He looked at Gareth. "You are going to help me. Not because I'm asking. Because you owe it."
Gareth looked at him for a long time.
"I know," he said finally. "I've known since the day you walked in."
Kael walked to the door. Stopped with his hand on the frame.
"We finish this first," he said. "Then I decide what you are to me."
He walked out into the Ash Quarter afternoon, and the city moved around him the way it always moved — without acknowledgment, without recognition, without any indication that it was aware of him at all.
Good, he thought.
He needed more time inside its walls before it started paying attention.