Everything Ossian has killed in two weeks went through the salvage window behind the transit station at a quarter of its value.
A hunting licence ends that arrangement, and it is the only thing he has wanted out loud since the badge stopped being possible.
'Four fragments this month, all sold at a quarter... nine hundred credits handed through a slot,' he counted it again on the walk over, 'the licence pays for itself inside a month.'
Nine hundred credits a month is a room, his mother's medicine, plus the first evening in a year he would not spend counting.
The broker who called him worked out of a legitimate yard with a licensed board and a name painted on the gate.
"One registered job with an affiliated crew," the man had the application open already, "Sponsor signs, board stamps, you're legal by Friday."
Paloma priced the offer before Ossian had finished being pleased with it, and the whole business took her eleven seconds.
"An affiliated crew means a guild signature," she did not look up from the page, "Whose guild, and what do they write on the form afterward?"
'She is right and I am going to do it anyway... legal is the difference between four hundred a month and four thousand,' Ossian read the sponsor line twice, 'take the job.'
He took the job with her sitting right there, and that is the part he expects to think about later.
'Say it out loud, since she is the one who has to watch me do it... I want the licence,' Ossian folded the sponsor page into his coat, 'shit, badly enough to sign this.'
The work was a nest clearance under the Bellow Street market, in a service void nobody had opened since the drains went in.
Bellow Street sells vegetables above ground and holds four decades of unmapped service voids below it.
Four of them went down at seven in the morning, and the crew lead put Ossian at the back where an unlicensed man belongs.
"You carry, you don't cut," she said it without any malice, which somehow made it land harder, "That's the arrangement I signed."
'She is not cruel, she is accurate... I am a liability with a name on a form,' Ossian took the light and the spare line, 'porter again, then.'
That void runs ninety feet under a market floor with three hundred people walking about on top of it.
A nest clearance is simple work until the survey turns out to have missed a second cluster behind the drain wall.
It came up through that wall behind the crew, putting itself between four hunters and the only ladder out.
'They are cut off and I am on the wrong side of it... and my contract says carry,' Ossian had the Glass Mantis in his coat pocket, 'wear it, there is nothing else down here.'
Putting an unmastered face on inside a crowded void is a thing the mask itself had warned him about.
He put it on anyway, with three hundred people walking about on the floor above him.
Eleven minutes is as long as he has held that face without it costing him something, and he was going to need more.
The Mantis found the load lines in that ceiling inside a second, and four hunters walked out of there on the strength of it.
It also found the crew lead, and it read her the way it reads everything else.
'She favours the right knee and moves slower than the other three... so the swarm reaches her first,' the calm settled over it, 'that is efficient, and it is also her.'
He got all four of them out in the correct order, which was not what any of them would have chosen.
The Mantis put the crew lead second rather than first, on the arithmetic of who could be moved fastest.
Everybody standing at the bottom of a ladder counts their place in the queue, and she counted hers on the way up.
'She knows I ranked her... she watched a man in a mask decide where she came on a list,' Ossian took it off at the top and felt the caring arrive four seconds late, 'shit.'
Nobody died down there, the nest cleared, the market above never knew a thing, and four people came up into the morning alive.
Ossian carried the last two crates out afterward, since nobody had told him the carrying part was over.
The crew lead filed a truthful report that afternoon, and the truth was the worst thing it could possibly have contained.
It recorded an unlicensed operative present, an unregistered mask worn in an enclosed civilian space, plus triage decisions taken without any authority to take them.
Every line of that was accurate, and a lie would have been a great deal easier to argue with.
'She did not even damage me on purpose... she wrote down what happened,' Ossian read the copy Paloma pulled, 'and every word of it is accurate.'
The refusal came through on Thursday, one day before the broker's Friday.
[Your tithe arrangement with the affiliated pack has been rejected]
[The other apexes do not recognise your claim to hunt inside their territory]
'It calls a licence a tithe arrangement... and reckons rival apexes are refusing me ground,' Ossian read both lines in the corridor, 'closer to right than the letter is.'
Friday came and went without anybody at the yard mentioning it to him.
The paper version said the same thing at greater length, resting on a technicality nobody was going to overturn.
An unregistered mask in a civilian space falls into a category the board holds no form for, so refusal is the default.
Nobody at that board has to justify a default, which is the whole reason defaults exist.
He read the letter three times looking for something he could argue with, and found nothing of the kind in it.
Ossian lost this one, and there is no version of that afternoon in which the licence arrives.
Paloma had said as much on the walk over, in eleven seconds, for nothing, and he had gone down the ladder anyway.
'Two weeks of being told no by paperwork... and I keep handing them the pen myself,' he folded the refusal in with the manifest, 'nine hundred a month, gone again.'
That seventy-five per cent tax on everything he kills runs for another year at the very least.
Getting a licence takes a clean report, and that needs a crew willing to leave the mask off their paperwork.
Calista had been on a rooftop across the road the whole morning, running route prediction nobody had asked her for.
She billed him four hundred for it that evening, at her standard rate, on a job that earned him nothing at all.
Then a message arrived from an office he had never contacted, timestamped four hours before the refusal reached him.
Solenne's assistant offered a meeting about licensing difficulties for unaffiliated hunters, at his convenience, with no obligation attached to it.
'That arrived four hours ahead of the letter... so she had the answer before the board sent it,' Ossian read the timestamp twice, 'damn it, who sees a refusal before the man who applied.'
Calista read the message over his shoulder and said nothing at all for a while.
"Don't answer it today," she handed the phone back to him, "People who solve your problem that fast usually picked the problem."
'She is telling me to be slow about the one thing I want most... and she is the only person here who has been sold something,' Ossian put the phone away, 'listen to her.'
He walked home past the salvage window, where a man he owed nothing was waiting to buy a fragment at a quarter of its worth.
Ossian went to the slot, took the two hundred, and put the licence refusal in the bin outside the station on his way past.