He heard about Verse before he met him, which was the usual order of things in the Lower Tiers. Information traveled faster than people down here — not through the city's official networks, which were monitored and curated by the Tier authority's information services, but through the informal channels that Kael had been using his whole life: conversations in prep rooms, the particular quality of silence that fell when a name came up in public spaces, the way people positioned their bodies when they mentioned someone they were either afraid of or affiliated with.
Verse's name produced a specific reaction. Not the flat wariness that Rennick's name produced, the quiet acknowledgment of someone who held power through systems of debt and contract. Not the respect-tinged apprehension of a known fighter's reputation. Something more animated. People who said Verse's name either lowered their voices or lifted their chins, and the ones who lifted their chins were the ones Joss had been talking about — the Awakened on Three and Four who thought the territory model should be rebuilt from the ground up, on different principles, by different people.
Kael understood the logic. He had lived at the bottom of the city's stratification system for seventeen years. He did not need it explained to him that the architecture of Caelum Spire, with its ascending Tiers and its Upper Ring academies and its licensing systems that cost more than most Lower Tier residents earned in a year, was designed in ways that served the people who had designed it. He understood class inequality the way he understood the width of a forty-one centimeter gap: not as a concept but as a physical fact, something he navigated every day.
What he was less certain about was whether Verse's approach to that fact was sound.
He met him on a Tier Four transit platform, twelve days after the Rennick arrangement, and it was not a planned encounter.
The platform was mid-afternoon busy, the kind of traffic that moved between Three and Four in the hours between the morning maintenance shift and the evening labor rotation — workers heading to secondary employment, fighters heading to facilities, the general population of people who moved vertically through the city's lower sections because they had to and not because they'd chosen to. Kael was on his way to the Ostrev facility. He had a session booked and forty minutes to use it.
Verse was standing at the platform's east end with three other people, and the particular quality of the space around them — the way the platform's other occupants redistributed themselves without appearing to redistribute themselves, an unconscious social adjustment — was enough to identify him before Kael had seen his face.
He was twenty-four. He was tall, carrying the kind of build that suggested he'd been a physical person first and Awakened second, his body shaped by work before it was shaped by power. He had a synthesizer unit on his forearm that was custom-built rather than modified, which meant either money or connections or both, and his posture had the particular quality that Kael associated with people who had decided what they thought and were no longer in the process of deciding — settled, complete, not aggressive but finished in some fundamental way.
He looked at Kael when Kael was still twenty meters away.
The three people with him looked too. It was the synchronized attention of a group that had developed shared threat-awareness, the kind of unconscious coordination you got in people who spent a lot of time together in environments where attention mattered.
Kael kept walking at the same pace. You didn't change your pace. Changing your pace was information.
"Voss," Verse said, when Kael was close enough.
"You know me," Kael said.
"I know most people who fight regularly on Three and Four." He had a calm voice, the kind that didn't need volume to carry. "I watched your Slot Seven. You're good."
"Thanks."
"I also know you signed with Rennick." He paused. One of the three people with him shifted slightly, a half-step that put them at a different angle relative to Kael, not threatening but geometrically deliberate. Kael noted it and kept his posture neutral. "Exclusive arrangement."
"Contract details aren't public."
"No. But Rennick talks about his fighters the way other people talk about equipment." The phrasing was almost identical to what Sera Ondas had said, which meant either both of them had the same source material or it was something Rennick had actually been quoted saying at some point. "I'm not here to cause problems."
"Good."
"I'm here to say that things are changing on Four, and people who've signed arrangements are going to have to decide whether those arrangements still make sense for them when the change happens." He studied Kael with the flat assessment of a tactician. "Rennick is non-Awakened. His facilities are on Awakened territory. The current arrangement is a legacy of how things were organized before the Resonance Event — before people with power understood they had power."
"I understand the argument," Kael said.
"Do you agree with it?"
"I understand it," Kael said again.
Verse was quiet for a moment. Then something that was almost a smile. "That's a careful answer."
"It's the honest one."
"Fair." He tilted his head. "I'm not asking you to break your contract. I'm asking you to think about what comes after it." He looked at him directly. "You're from Three. You grew up at the bottom of a system that was built by people who didn't see you. You're Awakened. You have something they don't have and can't take from you." He paused. "At some point you have to decide what to do with that."
Kael said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn't be either a commitment or a dismissal, and he wasn't ready for either.
Verse nodded once, as though Kael's silence was itself an answer he'd expected. "Think about it," he said. He turned and walked toward the transit car, his three people adjusting smoothly around him. He didn't look back.
Kael stood on the platform for a moment. The platform's other occupants gradually resumed their normal distribution. The transit car came and went.
He thought about what comes after, the question Verse had left in the air, and the way it sat alongside everything else he was currently carrying — the recording chip with its four hidden beats, the training space that was on Ondas territory, the contract that put him on Rennick's side of whatever this became.
He was trying to get better at music. That was the thing. That was what this was supposed to be about.
He went to his session and spent an hour working the tempo drift that Sera had identified in his left-hand sequence, and he was better at it by the end than he had been at the beginning, which was the only metric that currently felt reliable.