One line long, and Paloma read it out twice, the way a porter checks a strap he has already checked.
Perris would hand over the wrist-screen cache on the understanding that his name stayed out of the filing.
'He wants to hand me the evidence and keep his career... five weeks of working out how to ask,' Ossian stood at the pigeonhole wall of a depot nobody had paid for yet, 'no.'
Ossian said it before Paloma had finished the sentence, and the room went quiet around the size of it.
The shutter on the haulage depot had gone up that morning, and the four of them were standing in dust with the deposit unpaid.
Above the loading bay sits an office with a door onto the street, a wall of eighty pigeonholes, plus a stain where a desk used to stand.
'Six hundred a month for a stain and a door... and I want it more than I have wanted anything since the badge,' Ossian ran a hand along the empty holes, 'get the cache first.'
Ivory Banner can keep routing administrative penalties through his old contract until the Gate incident is settled, and that needs the original document.
Perris has that document in every version it ever had, timestamps intact, backed up on a personal drive the night of the raid.
'Damn it, he will say yes to the hard version... part of me would rather he fought about it,' Ossian read the message a third time, 'go and take the drive off him properly.'
They met him at a transit café two streets from the guild, a place a junior hunter can be seen without anybody asking why.
He had lost weight since the exhibition and he stirred a coffee he never drank once.
"I'll give you everything," Perris put the drive on the table between them, "I just need my name off the filing."
'He wants me to protect the career he bought by cutting my rope... with the drive already sitting on the table,' Ossian looked at it without reaching, 'say it plainly.'
"Your name goes on it," Ossian did not soften one syllable of that, "you cut the line, the filing says so, or we do this without you."
Perris neither argued nor left, and that is the part Ossian had not prepared himself for.
The boy signed a material witness statement in the café on a form Paloma had brought in her coat, knowing exactly how this conversation would end.
'He came here already beaten... that condition was a test of whether I would let him hide,' Ossian watched the pen move, 'I would not, and he signed anyway.'
Nobody forgave anybody at that table, and the statement is worth more for that than any apology would have been.
'Shit, he is better than I want him to be... that would be easier if he had argued,' Ossian pocketed the drive, 'do not say a kind word, he has not earned one.'
Bastien added the porter duty schedules for the six weeks before the raid, kept in a drawer for no reason beyond his habit of keeping everything.
Calista supplied the drone footage, all nine hundred frames of it, timestamped and unedited.
She had kept that drive under a floorboard for five weeks and handed it over without one word about what holding it had cost her.
Every frame on it puts an unlicensed man at the scene of a monster kill, which is the case against her as much as the case for him.
Evidence arriving from three directions builds a case, where one angry man with a grievance only files a complaint.
Paloma filed all three within the hour, under a guild name four days old, from an address that was still legally a haulage depot.
Ivory Banner sent counsel to the hearing four days later rather than sending Ruan himself.
Paloma had spent those four days inside a clause the guild wrote themselves, in a document their own lawyers drafted twelve years ago.
The porter clause exists to stop a guild being sued when support staff get hurt following orders, and it works by making the employer responsible for where it puts them.
Responsibility runs both ways in that same sentence, and nobody at Ivory Banner had needed to read it closely until now.
Where a guild directs a support asset to stand, it owns whatever happens on the spot it chose.
"Read your own clause," Paloma slid it across to their counsel, "and then tell the room who moved his safety gear six hours before the descent."
Their own counsel read it out loud at the panel's request, in the flattening voice of a man who has found the problem and cannot unfind it.
'A guild lawyer reading their own paperwork against them... and he knew before he opened his mouth,' Ossian sat still with both hands on his knees, 'do not smile in here either.'
The reassignment penalty landed at nine thousand six hundred credits, payable to the registered guild of the affected worker.
That guild has four members, one exercise book, and no office door that locks.
'They are paying a penalty into an account belonging to a company that lives in a repair shop... hell, that is going to sting somebody,' Ossian read the amount twice, 'the deposit, then.'
[A rival apex has been made to pay tribute into your den]
[This is how a territory begins, and they will remember that it began here]
'It calls a court order tribute... and it has already worked out what Ruan does about that,' Ossian shut the panel, 'hell, I would rather it had kept that to itself.'
Nine thousand six hundred is what a guild pays for moving one man's safety gear six hours before a descent, once somebody makes them read their own paperwork.
Ivory Banner paid within the hour to avoid a second panel hearing.
Paloma's gross share took nineteen hundred and twenty before the account cooled afterward.
The Consensus routing weight came off his name in the same filing, which is the thing he had actually wanted and had not asked for out loud.
On the suspended death benefit, the panel ruled Ossian's continued life made him ineligible. Four thousand eight hundred went back to Ivory Banner, while Paloma closed the claim instead of billing an appeal.
Nine thousand six hundred credits, one closed door, plus a deposit on a haulage depot with eighty pigeonholes.
He went into that hearing owing money and came out holding an address, at a price of four days plus one boy's ruined career.
Nobody at Ivory Banner looked at Perris on the way out, which is its own kind of sentence.
Perris walked out with his name in the record and a guild that knew which junior handed over the cache.
Before he reached the station, his active-roster entry had already changed to suspended duty.
'He is finished at that guild and has not said so... he signed after I refused him the one thing he wanted,' Ossian watched him go down the steps, 'not forgiveness, not nothing either.'
Bastien signed the lease that afternoon as the guarantor, since a company four days old cannot sign for itself and he did not mention that until it was done.
The deposit went down that evening, turning the depot into the first address The Unmasked had owned.
A six-thousand-credit operating bond, inspections, utilities, old salvage charges, plus the deposit left four hundred and eighty uncommitted.
Then Paloma went through the cache properly, at the depot, on a crate, with the shutter open for light.
Eighty pigeonholes, a stain, and a lease with an old porter's name on the guarantor line.
The addendum Ossian signed at eleven seconds past the hour exists in two versions on that drive.
Somebody amended the wording six minutes after his signature went on, adding the routing clause that made every wound in the vanguard his own.
Six minutes gets a man from the staging line to the forward post, and leaves no time at all to consult anybody.
'The clause I signed is not the one that killed me... somebody wrote the routing in afterward,' Ossian held the two versions up together, 'shit, that is not a contract, that is a forgery.'
That amendment carries a system timestamp beside an authorising credential, and the name on it is not Ruan's.