Vael did not care what you were until you had something it wanted.
Kreil had learned that lesson before he was old enough to spell his own name, back when the underside of the Halverson Street bridge had been the closest thing he owned to an address, and the fruit-sellers on the east corridor threw him the bruised stock only after he'd proven, day after day, that he wouldn't steal from the good stock instead. He had been good at being overlooked. He was still good at it. It was, if he was honest with himself, the only thing he had ever been consistently good at.
The city didn't help. Vael sprawled out under its own rain like something that had once meant to be beautiful and had given up on the idea gradually, the way a person gives up on anything — not all at once, but in a thousand small surrenders nobody notices until the whole shape of the thing has changed. The registry halls still kept photographs from before the Prohibition Acts, before the five families had carved the streets into a five-sided pie and started charging admission to their own slices: wide avenues lit gold, women laughing under awnings, music leaking out of buildings that hadn't needed to call themselves speakeasies yet because nothing was illegal yet. That city was gone. What was left ran on three tiers, stacked like a wedding cake nobody wanted to eat. At the top, the towers caught the neon and threw it back at the clouds, and the people up there — rich in magic, rich in money, rich in whichever currency the room required — had perfected the art of not seeing the two tiers below them. In the middle, the registered and the respectable kept their heads down and their paperwork current. And at the bottom, where the rain pooled in the gutters because nobody budgeted to fix them, there was Kreil, and several thousand people exactly like him, all of them fluent in the particular skill of being furniture.
He didn't resent it, particularly. The bottom had one virtue the rest of the city had negotiated away: nobody down here pretended not to see the rot. It was refreshing, in its way.
He came up out of the registration office a few minutes past noon with the rain starting in on him before he'd even cleared the steps, and he pulled his collar up out of habit rather than hope — the coat had given up on waterproofing itself two winters ago — and let his feet carry him toward the Halverson underpass without asking his brain for permission. The underpass connected Dune Street to the Promenade, which was the fast way to the entertainment district, which was where Vey would be at this hour, leaning against tile that had been white sometime during a previous administration, eating something wrapped in paper that had probably started the day as somebody else's lunch.
He wasn't wrong.
"You're soaked," Vey said, by way of greeting, not looking up from whatever he was eating.
"It's raining."
"Is it." Vey glanced toward the mouth of the underpass with the mild interest of a man confirming a rumor. "How'd the appointment go?"
"About how you'd expect."
"That bad."
"That expected." Kreil leaned against the wall beside him. Seventeen years old, small enough that people underestimated the reach of his information, wearing the short jacket with the Ashen Court's mark stitched so far inside the cuff that you had to already know it was there to find it — Vey had explained the logic to him once, that a mark you had to go looking for told you more about a person than one they wore for effect. Kreil had learned to read those marks the way he'd learned everything else useful in his life: through repetition, and the occasional bruise that came from getting it wrong. "Fourth time. Same examiner as last visit. She read the whole file this time instead of skimming it, which I think she considered a professional courtesy."
"And?"
"And nothing's changed. She told me as much before she even ran the tests. I told her I was aware. She ran them anyway." He didn't mention the flat line on the display, because there was nothing new in a flat line. There had been three flat lines before this one.
Vey made the sound he made when he'd already decided not to push on something — not quite sympathy, not quite dismissal, a kind of neutral acknowledgment that let a subject exist without requiring either of them to do anything about it. It was, Kreil had come to understand, one of the more considerate things about him. "I heard something today," he said, which was Vey's particular way of announcing that he had information to trade and hadn't yet decided the price.
"How much is it going to cost me?"
"Nothing, this time. Consider it a gift." Vey balled up the paper his food had come in and didn't throw it anywhere, because littering in the underpass was the kind of thing that got noticed by people who ran the underpass, and Vey did not get noticed by people if he could help it — which put him, Kreil reflected, in exactly the same profession as himself, just with better contacts. "There's something moving between the factions. Nobody's saying what. But three separate people have asked me, in the last two days, whether I know a null who works the entertainment district nights. Young. Unregistered surname."
Kreil went very still, the particular stillness of someone recalculating a room they'd thought they already understood.
"That's not a coincidence-shaped description," he said.
"No," Vey agreed. "It isn't."
"Who's asking?"
"That's the part I don't love telling you. One of them was Ashen Court — my own people, which means somebody above my pay grade already knows more than I do, which is a sentence I don't enjoy saying out loud. One was a runner, which is strange, because runners don't usually care about anyone who isn't already standing in a rift when it opens. And one I couldn't place at all, which is the one that worries me, because I'm supposed to be able to place people. That's the job." He looked at Kreil sideways, the kind of look that weighed a person rather than judged them. "You want to tell me why three factions have developed an interest in a null nobody's supposed to have heard of?"
"I have no idea."
"You believe that?"
"I have to," Kreil said. "It's the only version where I get to keep sleeping."
Vey almost smiled at that, the closest he came to it most days. "Fair. Watch yourself tonight, though. Whatever this is, it's not small. I don't know what it is yet, but I know the shape of it, and the shape is — " he searched for the word with more care than he usually spent on anything, "— large."
Kreil thought about asking him to define large and decided against it. Some questions only made a thing more true by being asked.
"I appreciate the gift," he said instead.
"Don't spend it all at once." Vey pushed off the wall. "Maret's at the Halverson shelter tonight, if you're headed that way. Borrowed someone's kit again, which tells you what her own kit situation looks like."
Kreil was already moving before he'd finished the sentence.
He found her in the shelter's back room with a man whose fingers had been arranged by someone considerably less careful than she was, and she looked up when he came through the door with the particular unsurprised calm of a woman who had stopped being surprised by anything around the time she'd decided to spend her evenings stitching up strangers for free. Maret had patched him up eighteen months ago after a dock job had gone sideways in a way that still occasionally ached when the weather turned, and she had refused his money with an expression that made it clear the refusal wasn't up for negotiation. She treated whoever walked through the door — Ashen Court, Silken Nine, unaffiliated, didn't matter — which made her either the last honest person in the lower city or the most naive, and Kreil had decided a long time ago it didn't matter which, because the effect on the people she treated was identical either way.
"You look like a man who's about to ask me something inconvenient," she said, without looking up from the splint she was tying.
"I have three nights' tips and a question."
"The tips I'll take. Ask the question first, though, I like to know what I'm agreeing to before I agree to it."
"Somebody's asking about a null who works nights in the entertainment district. Young, no surname on record. Three different people, in the last two days."
Her hands didn't stop moving, but something in her shoulders changed register, the smallest possible recalibration. "That's a specific description."
"That's what I said."
"Sit down. You're making the patient nervous, hovering like that." She finished the splint, straightened, wiped her hands on a cloth that had given up on being clean sometime during the current decade. "I heard something too, if we're trading. Last night's rift, the one out at the Dock Ward — the Runners got there before the city response team did. Seven minutes before, by one account. That's not the first time this month. Might not even be the fifth."
"That's their job, isn't it? Getting there first?"
"Getting there fast, yes. Getting there before the people whose job it is to know a rift is opening — that's different. That's not speed. That's foreknowledge." She looked at him directly, the look she used when she wanted to make sure a thing landed rather than just got heard. "Three coincidences in two days, Kreil. Someone asking about a null who fits your description. Runners with information they shouldn't have. And you, standing in my back room, suddenly very interested in both of those facts at the same time."
"I'm nobody," he said. "That's the whole point of being nobody. Nobody asks nobody questions."
"They're asking now."
He didn't have an answer for that, so he didn't try to manufacture one. He paid her for supplies she tried, again, to refuse, and lost the argument again, the way she always eventually did when he was determined enough about it, and he walked back out into the rain with the particular hollow feeling of a man who has just watched a fact rearrange itself into a shape he doesn't like.
Twenty-six years old. No magic. Three jobs, none of which paid enough on their own, all of which together barely paid enough. A room on the fourth floor of a building whose elevator had died before he'd moved in and whose stairs had never once complained about the extra traffic. A registration appointment, four times attempted, that told him nothing new every single time.
And now: three factions, in two days, all suddenly, quietly, very interested in exactly the kind of person he had spent his whole life making sure nobody noticed.
He didn't believe in patterns, as a rule. Twenty-six years in the lower city had taught him that most things that looked like significance were coincidence wearing significance's clothes, and that treating every strange alignment as a message was a fast way to exhaust yourself over nothing. But there was a number past which coincidence stopped being the economical explanation, and he had the uncomfortable sense, walking home through a rain that hadn't let up once all day, that he had just crossed it.
He let himself into the narrow room on the fourth floor, locked the door out of habit rather than any real expectation that the lock meant something, and lay down without undressing, listening to the building's evening noises — a door two floors up that needed its handle lifted before it would latch, a child crying somewhere in the middle distance, the specific hush that settled over the lower city once the rain had driven even the desperate indoors.
I'm nobody, he thought, and meant it the way he'd always meant it: as a fact, not a complaint.
Then, because the day had left the thought lying around where he couldn't avoid tripping over it: So why has nobody suddenly gotten so interesting?
Outside, the rain went on falling on Vael's towers and its speakeasies and its rift-scarred docklands, on its five families watching each other over invisible lines nobody but them could see, indifferent to all of it in the specific way only weather can afford to be.
And somewhere above the clouds, in whatever place a goddess keeps herself when she isn't required anywhere in particular, something ancient and endlessly patient adjusted a single thread in a pattern only it could see, and allowed itself, very quietly, to be amused.