The hall on Verrick Street still had a hole in the north wall with a sheet of board screwed over it, and the two of them trained there anyway.
Nobody had come to fix the breach, and that is what happens to a building with no owner on the city map.
Ossian put the Glass Mantis on at nine in the morning to find out how long he could keep it there.
'Twenty minutes today... last week it gave out at eleven, so the number is going the right way,' he set his feet on the marked line, 'go.'
Calista came at him with the spear in both hands, and he took the shaft out of the air on the third exchange.
He won the fourth exchange, then the fifth, then every one after that without needing to work any harder for them.
The mask does not make him faster in any way a clock would show. It drops every movement that was never going to succeed out of his attention before he starts it.
'Her weight goes onto the back foot before she commits... so the opening is the half second after that,' Ossian read the tell without effort, 'again.'
By the tenth exchange she had started steadying the shaft with her left arm, a thing she does when the right one tires.
Her channels locked on the eleventh exchange and did not release again for four seconds.
Ossian watched that happen from six feet away and noted it down as a change in the tempo of the drill.
Her arm returned late, so she reset the grip, shifted her weight onto the good side, then pushed forward with the spear travelling slower than before.
He adjusted for the slower spear and took the shaft out of the air again.
'Her channels are seizing on a four second cycle... which means the openings arrive on a rhythm now,' he counted the interval out, 'take the second one.'
She overstrained on the fifteenth exchange, and the sound she made was not part of the drill.
Ossian registered the sound, priced it against the tempo, and used the opening it made for him.
Nothing anywhere in him objected to a single part of that while it was happening.
The spear came out of her hands and hit the boards, dropping Calista onto one knee with her left arm held against her ribs.
He stood over her with the mask on and waited for her to get up, since standing her up himself would have been inefficient.
Twelve seconds went past with the pair of them arranged in that shape.
"Take it off," Calista said it from the floor, with no volume behind it whatsoever.
Ossian took the mask off with both hands, and the room came back to him in pieces.
The first thing to arrive was the sound of her breathing, going on in that hall the way it had been the entire time.
'She has been down there twelve seconds... and I stood over her counting,' his hands went cold around the bone, 'oh.'
The caring came back the way a foot wakes up, all at once, bringing a full account of the last four minutes along with it.
'I watched her arm fail on the eleventh and used it... nothing in me stopped to decide that,' Ossian got down onto the floor beside her, 'shit, say something.'
"I'm sorry," he said it wrong, out of order, before he had worked out what the apology was even for.
Calista picked the spear up left-handed and set it against the wall before giving him any answer.
"You didn't do anything wrong," she got herself upright without help, "You watched me hurt myself and it cost you nothing to watch."
'That is worse than a mistake... and she has put the whole thing into one sentence,' Ossian stayed where he was on the floor, 'let her finish it.'
"Ruan could have run that session," she said it flat, with no heat anywhere in it, which is what made the line land, "He'd have called it good coaching."
Neither of them made any attempt to take that comparison back, and it sat in the hall for a while.
'She is not wrong about the shape of it... competence with nobody home behind the eyes,' he looked down at the pale thing, 'that is the man I have complained about since the Gate.'
[Your den holds, your tribute is current, and your court numbers two]
[This is the smallest territory the system has on record]
'The smallest territory on record... it has started ranking me against other monsters,' Ossian read that from the floor, 'not now.'
Another panel opened over the marked line while he was still sitting on the boards.
The system posts a figure when it wants him to see one, and it had been quiet for ten days.
[Identity Fracture, eighteen percent]
Eighteen stood four points above the last figure he had been carrying around in his head.
'Fourteen was ten days ago... and I have been quoting that number to myself ever since,' Ossian read the panel twice, 'shit, it moves whether I look at it or not.'
The Mantis had been on his face for twenty-two minutes that morning, the longest stretch he had ever managed with it.
Twenty-two minutes of not minding costs him more than any single moment of wanting ever has.
Ossian sat on the floor with that for a while and worked out what the mask had been asking him for.
'She paid for that lesson with her own arm... damn it, and I never will,' he pushed his back against the wall, 'work out what the thing actually wants.'
The trial has nothing to do with holding the face on longer, since it asks him to wear it while still minding what happens to the person in front of him.
'Perfect execution or an imperfect attachment... and it wants both held at once,' he turned the pale thing over on the boards, 'nobody has written a drill for that.'
"I don't know how to train for this," he said it out loud to a hall with nobody in it but the two of them and a sheet of board.
Calista let that stand for a moment, then told him what her treatment costs on the legal market.
She had not brought that figure up once in the whole time they had worked together, which is how he knew what saying it cost her.
Two weeks of invoices, breaches and salvage dockets had gone past without either of them mentioning the actual number.
Channel reconstruction runs to two hundred and forty thousand credits at a clinic that only takes hunters with guild backing.
'The licence would have paid a tenth of that inside a year... and I have been refused one twice,' Ossian did the sum against nothing, 'so it is the mask.'
'A quarter of a million... and we cleared eleven hundred between us last month,' Ossian did arithmetic he knew the answer to, 'The mask is the only route left.'
That figure is the reason the mask conversation happened at all, and both of them had known it before either one said a word.
The clinic wants a guild standing behind its patients, and the only one that ever had her name threw it away eight months ago.
Calista put her coat on over the bad arm, a job that takes her longer now than it used to.
Then both their phones went at once with the same district alert, and that sound never means anything small.
An automated emergency notice had gone out across the district inside the last ninety seconds.
The Kestrel Line commuter platform at Halvers Cross was hanging off its supports at the eastern end.
Somebody counted forty-three people still standing on it, with the thing that cut the supports working along the underside.
'Forty-three of them, and a precision-class flyer... I am the only Mantis in this district,' Ossian was on his feet with the mask in his hand, 'Halvers Cross is four stops north.'
Halvers Cross carries the northern line over a road junction, forty feet up on eight supports.
Calista had the laptop bag over her shoulder before he finished reading the alert out.