Chapter 8 The girl who trades in secret

He located her the following morning.

Not just because Solen said she would find him, and he wanted to be there first, but something more significant than that. He had learned in nine days of mapping the Warrens that the best people in such a district were never the ones who had the loudest voices. It was those who were never mentioned anywhere, but who were missed after they were gone. It was those who you saw three times in three different rooms across the Warrens without so much as seeing them interact with anybody in a way that would explain what they're doing there.

He had seen her the first time outside the food stall on the main road, on a crate with a tablet, and a gray band like a decision. The second time, near the transit wall, on Cael Street, walking not in that direction, but towards nothing. The third time was in the gap between two buildings, at a door, standing for about forty seconds before disappearing into what he assumed was a utility corridor.

He went to the corridor the next morning after Knox.

The end of it led into a room, not quite a shop, not quite an office, but organized as if it were someone's daily workplace. Furniture made from crates. Tablet charging against wall. Three different kinds of communication devices on a makeshift shelf, each one a different model, the collection of a man who required redundancy more than consistency. The woman who sat on the biggest crate with her legs crossed, and the tablet on her knee, looked up when he came through the door, as though she'd been waiting for him for at least 20 minutes.

She was small, sharp featured, and dark eyed. The gray band on her wrist was the same classification as his, but worn differently.

She looked at him for a moment. Then the door behind him.

She said, "You found me. I was coming to look into you today.”

“Yes,” Ethan said, "I know. It's why I came this morning,"

There was a slight change in her face, as though she had second-guessed something, the person who's read something wrong but got it right now. She pointed to the crate in front of her.

He sat.

"Mira Doss," she replied. Not offering it as an introduction per se. More like making a statement.

"Ethan Cole."

She knew that. He could see it in the lack of a reaction to the name. She had read about him before he got to Knox, and either she had a source inside the building he was staying in or inside Knox's network, or both, and she had put together what she needed to know about the gray band on Cael Street before deciding when to make contact.

She said “Knox arrived last night.”

"Yes."

"And left."

"Yes."

The kind of eyes that catalogued everything and announced nothing. She read rooms the way he did, and she was reading him.

“Has full discharge. That was what the building heard, and then nothing else, and then Knox leaving without his people picking anyone “

“That's what it was.”

She didn't say anything for a while. But out there in the corridor, it moved and it settled and it took up the building. She said "I have been living in the Warrens for four years. I have never known Knox to walk away from a confrontation without a win.”

Ethan explained “knox had gotten what he came for. It wasn't the ending that he was looking for.”

She checked her tablet. She opened it, read it for a short while, and then closed it. The attitude of a person who affirms something he or she has already known. “The Bureau assessment: Yours ran for 6 hours before Harmon stepped in.” She looked up. “I have a contact at Bureau records, not at Harmon's, but further down, in the archive division, your file has a suppression marker filed on the same day as your assessment – same hour, almost.”

Ethan said nothing. He waited.

“This is not a suppression marker that I have seen before, in my experience suppression markers are filed after secondary confirmation, after internal review and after a process which takes days at minimum.” She placed the tablet on the table. “Yours was submitted before you left the building; Harmon didn't wait.” She paused. “That basically means whatever it read the panel, he could tell what it was upon reading it. He could not be misled because he knew what it was upon reading it.”

“Which implies that he saw it already," Ethan said.

“That is, he has experienced it in the past,” she agreed. “And dealt with before, and it didn't take long enough, it was done enough that the protocol was already in place before you sat down in that corridor.”

There was a quiet in the room. Ethan glanced at the communications devices on the shelf, then considered the fourth case file that Solen had mentioned, the one with the tampered records, and thought about whether Mira Doss knew about Rael before he told her or if she had constructed her information network specifically for that purpose, and the answer was right through her door.

“Your brother,” he said.

Her face remained unchanged. That is how he knew that he was correct.

“Solen Vark, told you” she said.

“He gave me a name and he said that you existed.”

She remained silent for a while. It was long enough that the sounds of the people outside the Warrens could be heard, the normal sounds of a district in the morning. Her voice was still as flat as a professional person but there was a change in the undertone, a pitch shift too subtle to describe, but there it was.

She said "Rael was measured at 19 years old. He was flagged and suppressed just like you were flagged and suppressed, except he didn't receive a gray band and a 30 day provisional; he received a containment order filed under a medical designation and a facility in the mid district that is not on any public registry.” She paused. “He has been in that unit for eleven years and I have known where he was for fourteen months and I have not been able to get in because all the access points I have come across have been closed.”

“The suppression infrastructure," Ethan said. “Frequency dampeners that are calibrated to the talent signature”.

She gave him a penetrating glance. “You're familiar with dampeners.”

“The mechanics of how they work, not the specific facility, Solen".

“The dampeners are adjusted to a profile of emissions," she said. “There is no emission from Null Devour, only receipt.” She held his gaze. “I realized this fourteen months ago when I discovered the facility records, which have been pointing in the wrong direction for eleven years, and the facility staff do not know because they were never told what it was they were managing, a high rank force emitter.”

Ethan sat with this. A man for eleven years, sedated and suppressed by equipment not even properly directed at what it was meant to suppress, kept in ignorance by a rotation of staff whose job it was to keep no one long enough in the room to ask the right questions.

"Why have you not told anyone else about the calibration error," he said.

“It's the same as telling Harmon,” she said. “And the information is just useful if it's combined with something that can get to unit three, and until yesterday morning I didn't have that.” She fixed her gaze on him. “Not ready yet.”

"No," he said.

"But you will be."

It wasn't a question. He answered it, nevertheless.

"Yes," he said.

She took the tablet in her hands. The flat professional quality was restored, and the frequency shift returned to the depths where she had left it. “Then we have an arrangement to discuss. I give you everything I have in the Bureau, the council structure above it, the containment facility, and the rank system gaps you can use to develop faster, you give me outcomes. Specific ones when the time comes.” She paused. “And when you're ready for unit three, you go.”

Ethan said, “Yes.”

She nodded once, the finality of a deal that had been sealed as she expected. She scrolled and scrolled on the tablet and turned it toward him.

She said, "Begin with this. It's the council structure; seven S-rank Awakened working above the Tower Authority and the Bureau, the actual government of the city; the suppression order on your file was not issued by Harmon, it was issued by them.” She paused. “They made the call on Rael, too.”

Ethan studied the tablet. Seven names at the top of a structure that had determined, without ever having met either of them, that what they carried should not be a public record.

He studied the names for a while.

He then returned the tablet and said, "Tell me everything.”

She revealed to him all of this.