The Unmasked has a name, four signatures, no licence, no office, plus a bill from Ivory Banner for exhibition floor damage.
Paloma read that bill out at the repair shop table while the kettle went, since her own office was being repainted and nobody else had a room to offer.
"Eleven hundred credits for a demonstration floor," she turned the page around, "they are charging you for the tiles their own prospect landed on."
'They lost in public and posted us the bill for the carpet... and there is nowhere to send it back to,' Ossian read the letterhead twice, 'we do not have an address.'
A guild existing only on a filing form cannot receive anything the city recognises.
No address means no post, no inspection, no licence application, and no place a paying client can walk into to hand somebody work.
[Your court has no den]
[A territory nobody can find is a territory nobody can defend, and what you cannot defend was never yours]
'It noticed we are homeless before the city did... and there is no cruelty in the wording, only accuracy,' Ossian shut the panel down, 'a room with our name on the door, then.'
Nobody in that room had a licence, and three of the four had been thrown out of a guild that did.
He said that out loud to the table, and none of them had heard him want anything since the licence went into a bin outside the station.
Calista looked up from the invoice when he did, then went back to it without saying a word about the change.
Paloma takes twenty per cent of every credit entering The Unmasked account, including salvage plus court awards. She named that gross basis before anybody at the table in that room agreed.
"Twenty," Ossian heard his own voice climb, "twenty per cent before expenses, for making phone calls."
She did not argue the point with him, and the thing she chose instead was considerably worse.
Paloma turned her screen around and itemised what not knowing things had already cost him, in date order, with the paperwork attached to each entry.
First came the addendum he signed in eleven seconds, then the fragment sold at a quarter, then the licence filed through a broker whose sponsor was a guild.
Underneath those sat the four hundred he had paid Calista for a rooftop on a job that earned him nothing at all.
The column came to nine thousand two hundred credits of avoidable loss in five weeks, every entry carrying his own signature on a form he never read properly.
'Nine thousand two hundred... and I signed every one of those feeling clever about it,' Ossian looked down the column, 'shit, twenty per cent is cheaper than I am.'
"Twenty," he agreed, and Bastien made a noise into his tea that was not quite a laugh.
The first operating budget went onto a single sheet of paper, since anything longer would have been a lie about how much money they actually had.
Eleven hundred credits remained after the settlement, the Mantis sale, five weeks of medical costs, plus every quarter-price job. Calista's aftercare went down as a four-hundred-a-month guild expense rather than her private debt.
The eleven lines in Calista's notebook became a founder loan in the same ledger, payable before anybody took a profit share.
Bastien put in the one number nobody else had thought to include, being what a working porter charges to load and unload a job.
"Ninety a shift, and you two stop carrying your own crates like idiots," he said it without looking up from the ledger he had started keeping in a school exercise book.
'He has done our loading free for a month... and he wrote himself into the budget rather than mention it,' Ossian watched the old man rule a line, 'pay him first, every time.'
Then Paloma found the thing she had been hunting since the exhibition, buried inside Ivory Banner's own compensation schedule.
The guild had paid the settlement and quietly withheld the death benefit, on the grounds that he stopped being dead before the payment cleared.
Four thousand eight hundred credits sit in a suspended account under the name of a man who came back at the wrong moment for their accounts department.
"They kept the money for killing you," Paloma highlighted the line, "and they still have it because you had the bad manners to come back."
'Somebody filed a payout for my own death... and the only reason it never left the building is that I lived,' Ossian read the entry twice, 'damn it, claim it.'
Claiming it needs the original contract, which is the one document Ivory Banner has never released to anybody.
Paloma went looking for it anyway, and that hunt turned up something else entirely.
She had been searching the guild's own systems for a contract and came out holding something considerably more alarming.
Ruan's Consensus network runs to this day, with Ossian's name inside it, flagged as an active support asset carrying a live routing weight.
Five weeks after they stopped calling him, that guild can push fatigue and injury into his body from any raid they choose to open.
'It is still switched on... nobody ever removed me, they simply stopped ringing,' Ossian put both hands flat on the table, 'that is not an oversight, it is a door left open.'
Nobody at that table said the obvious part out loud, that a door left open is one somebody intends to walk through.
"It stays open until the Gate incident gets a final ruling," Paloma closed the screen, "which Ivory Banner is in no hurry whatsoever to schedule."
No ruling arrives without a hearing, and nobody inside that guild has any reason to ask for a date.
Calista had been quiet through all of that, and what she said when she finally spoke was about the room rather than the network.
"Find the address first," she wrote it at the bottom of the budget sheet in her own hand, "everything else needs somewhere to arrive."
'She is right, and she is managing me... a man with a want gets less dangerous once it has a door on it,' Ossian added his name under hers, 'an address, before the ruling.'
Bastien said he knew three yards near the freight district that had stood empty since the whole area was reclassified.
One of them had been a haulage depot with an office above the loading bay, a wall of pigeonholes, and a door onto the street.
'A door onto the street... the first thing I have chased since the badge that somebody can actually hand me,' Ossian wrote the address down himself, 'go and look at it tomorrow.'
Rent on the haulage depot runs six hundred a month, half again what Calista's aftercare costs and twice what he used to pay for a room with a bad lock.
The kettle went a second time, and for about nine minutes The Unmasked was four people arguing over rent in the back office of a repair shop.
'Four of us, one exercise book, and a bill for tiles... this is what an apex court looks like from inside,' Ossian looked round the table, 'hell of a start.'
Nobody had eaten since the exhibition, and the repair shop owner brought through a plate of something without being asked for it.
He would not take money for it either, which Paloma recorded in the ledger anyway under goodwill received.
Then Paloma's screen lit with a message from a number none of them had, sent to her business address rather than to anybody's phone.
Perris has the original wrist-screen cache, holding every version of the addendum with its timestamps and amendments, backed up on the night of the raid.
'He has been sitting on it for five weeks... and he sent it to the lawyer instead of to me,' Ossian read the message over her shoulder, 'because he knows exactly what I would say.'
One condition came attached to it, and Paloma read that part out twice before anybody at the table answered her.