Chương 38: Running

He was halfway up the scholars' district when Sable said, 'They're moving faster than the standard procedure allows. Two agents at the house, two more on a parallel street to the north. Someone pre-deployed before they went in.'

'They were expecting to find evidence, not an empty desk.'

'They were expecting to find you at the house,' she said.

'The quest registration told them you'd accessed the board in the last hour. They ran the address through the System, saw that the scholar's residence was the quest target, and put assets on both ends in case you were still inside.' A pause.

'You weren't. But they've been on your thread for eight minutes.'

'How far.'

'They're reading your class notation as a direction marker. Your thread is distinctive enough to trace at this density. Three blocks east and closing.' He stopped. Domrek's evening session at the arena started in forty minutes. The arena was two blocks north. He could get there before the Compact tightened the net, but Domrek would be backstage preparing, not out front where Kaito could easily reach him. The alternative was Ferrus's stall, which was the wrong direction entirely. He went north.

Fast, not running — running in a crowd meant people looked at you. He got to the arena entrance and went around the back to the fighters' entrance and found Domrek exactly where he expected, sitting on a crate with his shield on his knees and a piece of food in one hand, having the pre-match equanimity of someone who had been doing this for twenty years. Domrek looked at Kaito's face. He set the food down. He stood.

'How many,' he said.

'Four that I know of. Reading my thread.'

'Time.'

'Less than five minutes.' Domrek picked up his shield. He looked at the door they'd come from and the door that led to the pit and a third door that Kaito hadn't noticed, at the far end of the room.

'That one,' Domrek said, and went.

The roof access was a ladder built into the back of the arena building, which Kaito hadn't known existed and Domrek apparently had. They went up it and came out onto the flat stone of the roof and Domrek didn't slow.

'North,' he said.

'Then east when I say east.' Kaito followed and kept his Sight pulling forward, reading the System values of the structures ahead — which rooftops had old stone that would hold weight, which had newer additions that wouldn't. He called adjustments when he needed to. Domrek adjusted without asking why. They were three buildings north when Kaito heard the alert below — a shout, then the specific whistle that Compact agents used to signal direction of movement to each other.

'They've got us,' he said.

'How many on the roof.'

'None yet.'

'Then we have time. East.' They went east. This was where the surprise happened. Kaito had been expecting to outpace Domrek on the rooftops — longer legs, longer stride, more experience with irregular terrain from months of surviving things that wanted to kill him. He'd been wrong. Domrek moved across the roofline at a speed that didn't match his body.

Short strides, fast rotation, his center of gravity lower than a human's would have been in the same space, which meant he covered ground differently than Kaito expected. He didn't so much run across the rooftops as work them — each step a planted decision, each push off a controlled burst, covering the distance in a way that was less like sprinting and more like a machine that had been calibrated for exactly this task. He pulled ahead. Kaito ran after him. Below, the Compact agents' whistle pattern changed.

They'd identified the rooftop movement. Two of them were going up — somewhere east of the current position, Kaito read in the System, cutting an angle to get ahead. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

'They're anticipating our direction,' he said.

'I know. Change to north-east.'

'That's the cathedral district. Steeper rooflines.'

'I know,' Domrek said, and changed direction. The cathedral district rooflines were steeper and older and the stone was pre-System, which Kaito could read cleanly — which patches had been repaired in the last century and which hadn't, which seams were structural and which were cosmetic. He called what he needed to and Domrek adjusted without asking twice.

'You're fast,' Kaito said, when he caught up at a wider gap they both had to jump.

'Short legs,' Domrek said.

'Fast rotation.' He looked at the gap.

'Together or separate.'

'Together. I'll tell you where to land.' Domrek looked at him.

'All right.' And went. They cleared it.

'Fifteen years in a pit,' Domrek said, still moving.

'You find out what you have when you need it.' The Compact agents below were following the roofline. Two of them, Kaito could see in the System layer — tracking north-east, keeping pace. They were good. They were also not running in parallel with two people who had reasons to move fast and a better read on what the terrain would hold. They fell behind by the fourth building and stayed behind.

'Down,' Sable said.

'Market district. You lose them in the density.' Domrek found a fire-ladder on the south face and went down it without slowing, hand-over-hand, and landed in the service alley below with a sound that probably scared something. Kaito followed and came out of the alley into the edge of the market.

The market district in the afternoon was six hundred registered people per block and noise enough to cover a small war. Kaito folded his thread down as tight as it would go without going fully dark — he'd learned to do that without triggering the going-dark search pulse, most of the time — and they went into the crowd at an angle that wasn't quite running and wasn't quite walking and was just fast enough to keep moving. He lost them in the third block. Or he thought he did.

'They're still tracking,' Sable said.

'Not visually. They have something passive on your class notation. I don't know what yet. They're reading your direction from thirty meters in this density.'

'How do we break that.'

'Underground. The canals. The System's registration is thinner in the old water channels. The tracking loses resolution.' Domrek looked at him when he said it out loud.

'Canals,' he confirmed.

'I know an access point.' The access point was a maintenance hatch behind a fish stall that Domrek lifted like it wasn't a stone plate and dropped into without hesitation. Kaito followed. The smell hit immediately. Then the cold. The underground canals were old. Older than most of the city, built by the original Solara settlers to manage water from three separate river sources. The walls were pre-System stone, unregistered, with only the thinnest overlay of modern infrastructure tags.

The tracking resolution dropped the moment he went under.

'Still there,' Sable said, 'but they've lost the direction precision. They know you're below. They don't know which channel.' They moved. There were three canal workers at a junction gate twenty minutes in. The gate was a locked mechanism — the workers controlled which channels stayed open for passage at different hours. Domrek negotiated without Kaito having to say anything, and Kaito watched the canal workers' faces and read the negotiation. The workers knew what they were looking at. They priced accordingly.

Domrek paid. He paid with most of what they had. When the gate opened and they went through, Kaito counted what was left in the bag Domrek handed back to him. About a quarter of what they'd earned over the last week.

'Sorry,' Kaito said.

'Don't be.' Domrek moved through the low channel ahead of him, one shoulder slightly angled for the ceiling.

'Money is for spending. If we have it and we need to spend it, we spend it.' He kept moving.

'We can earn more money. We cannot un-get arrested.' He said it so simply that Kaito almost laughed. They came up through a different hatch in the lower commercial district, three streets south of where they'd gone in, and came out into the late afternoon noise of a Solara street that didn't know anything had happened. Domrek led him to a building two blocks over. Three flights up, door in the back.

A man named Arvek answered it — mid-forties, the System read him as Level thirty-two, a class Kaito didn't recognize, the sort of person who occupied a space without filling it and whose primary professional skill was probably being invisible in a crowd. Arvek looked at Domrek, looked at Kaito, opened the door wider.

'How long,' Arvek said.

'Couple of days,' Domrek said.

'Maybe three. Just until it goes quiet.'

'It's always quiet here,' Arvek said, which was clearly something he said often and meant completely. They went in. The room was small and dry and had a window that faced a wall, which meant no sightlines in or out. Kaito sat down on the only chair and Domrek leaned against the wall in the way he leaned against walls, which was with his full weight and the implication that the wall was lucky to have him.

'Tell me about the notes,' Domrek said. Kaito told him. Four hundred and thirteen. Three sites. Someone directing arrivals through Precursor infrastructure. The scholar who'd noticed and then died. Domrek listened the way he listened to everything. Then: 'This person who's been directing people here. Do they know who they're sending.'

'Probably,' Kaito said.

'Do they know who you are specifically.'

'I don't know.'

'If they do,' Domrek said, 'you're more important than four hundred and twelve other people. If they sent you specifically—' He let that sit.

'I know,' Kaito said.

'Good.' Domrek straightened off the wall.

'Rest. We'll figure out what's next in the morning.' He went to the other room. Kaito sat in the chair and looked at the wall-window and thought about being important and what that had cost Scholar Vosch and how many ways the cost could go.

'Kaito,' Sable said. She'd been quiet since they hit the canals.

'What.'

'The Compact tracked you in the market at thirty meters through the crowd density. The class-tracker we neutralized via the Ladder House wouldn't do that. That tracker logged class notations in a radius, it didn't track specific threads.' A pause.

'Something else has been attached to your thread since the arena sweep three weeks ago. Smaller than the class-tracker. Passive — it doesn't transmit until triggered. They triggered it when the quest registration flagged your file.' Another pause.

'I should have found it sooner. I didn't. I'm sorry.' He sat with that.

'Can you find it now,' he said.

'I can try,' she said.

'It's going to take time. It's woven into your class notation layer in a way that's meant to look like standard registration data.' A pause.

'Sleep first. Tomorrow.'

'Yes,' he said. He didn't sleep right away.