The depot has an address, a shutter that sticks halfway, plus eighty pigeonholes nobody has put anything into yet.
Ossian took Dreadweight to a licensed armourer on the second morning, since a working weapon needs a service record before a guild can go legal.
That armourer got as far as touching the left gauntlet with a bonding compound, at which point the plating rejected it.
Bonding compound is inert, it sits where you put it, it hardens, and nobody in the trade has ever described a batch of it as refused.
'It spat that off like a bad taste... thirty years in the trade and the man has never seen it happen,' Ossian watched the compound bead up, 'that is not equipment behaviour.'
The armourer handed both gauntlets back, declined payment, then turned his screen around. A scrap-equipment note signed by an impact assessor named Odile gave every licensed shop a reason to refuse him.
By lunchtime, the note had crossed the trade, leaving no licensed armourer in the district willing to touch Dreadweight.
What Dreadweight did want was sitting in a sample tray on the counter, a chip of contaminated shell off a scavenger the yard had brought in that week.
His left hand took it out of the tray before he had decided one thing about the matter.
'My hand moved and I did not send it... second time this month,' he closed the fingers around a fragment nobody had chosen, 'the Jackal sits on the right, so what took that.'
The shell went into the plating along the back of the left hand and stopped being a separate object.
Nothing lit up and no panel opened, since the plate closed over that chip the way skin closes over a splinter it means to keep.
Back at the depot he spent four hours finding out what two sockets actually mean.
No panel anywhere explains a loadout, and the city has never needed the word, given that no registered hunter carries two weapons which argue.
His right carries the Carrion Jackal, a known quantity by now, a hunt that locks onto damage and drags his fist toward it.
The Halvers Cross flyer sat in that left socket for a fortnight without ever taking hold. A face that nobody has mastered goes thin inside the plating and then it leaves.
No panel announced the loss or marked the moment it went, and that silence is the whole of the system's opinion on a mask he never finished.
The left carries nothing whatsoever, and a socket standing open turns out to be a different animal from a bare hand.
Unloaded, that gauntlet runs heavier, slower, far harder to break, with no imprint inside telling the plating which shape to prefer.
'A guard, then... one hand walls and one hand hunts,' Ossian put the empty fist against a loading beam to lean his weight on it, 'that is a loadout rather than an accident.'
He drilled the pairing until the nerves in his left forearm stopped reporting properly, then kept going for another hour after that.
Calista came up the depot stairs at the point where his fingers had gone the colour of old paper.
"Open the hand," she said it from the doorway with no preamble whatsoever, "all the way, and hold it there."
He could not hold it, since the fingers came halfway open and stopped, while both of them stood watching that happen.
'She has been counting my hours from the yard... came up the moment the number turned stupid,' Ossian looked at his own hand, 'do not argue, she is right.'
"You have been treating burned nerves as an acceptable cost of finding things out," Calista pulled a stool over, "and I want you to hear how that sounds from outside your own head."
She carries the Mantis, which measures cost better than any person alive, and she is the one telling him the arithmetic has gone wrong.
"Two hours a day," she wrote the number on a whiteboard Bastien had scavenged, "then you stop, whether or not you have the answer."
'That is nothing at all... I will keep every one of those hours, since she asked out loud,' Ossian flexed the hand and got four fingers back, 'agreed.'
Bastien brought a bucket of cold water up the stairs without being asked and set it beside the stool.
He went back down the stairs before anybody thanked him, in the way that man handles every version of this.
The system waited until the swelling had gone down before it said anything, a habit it has started developing.
[Your right hand hunts and your left hand holds]
[A creature that fights in one shape is a creature somebody has already solved]
'It wants me unpredictable... in the tone of a manual that has watched a great many animals die,' Ossian read it with his arm in the bucket, 'damn it, and it is right.'
[Identity Fracture, twenty-nine percent]
Four hours of pushing his own hand past the place where it wanted to stop, priced at two points.
'Twenty-nine... it charges me for hurting myself, not only for wanting things,' he read the figure twice, 'shit, that is a wider net than I thought.'
'A cap on my own training, written on a board... and she worked out I would obey it before she asked,' Ossian watched the number go up, 'she is not wrong about that either.'
The loadout held through a test job that evening, two scavengers in a drainage run beneath the fish market.
Jackal Right found the older wound on the first animal and pulled him into range before he had picked any line at all.
For the first time, he let that hand pull without fighting it halfway through.
His empty left took a full charge from the second one, braced against a wall, and the plating did not deform anywhere along it.
'The wall hand and the hunting hand... neither one doing the other's job,' Ossian came out of that run with both arms working, 'first thing I have built rather than survived.'
Four hundred credits of salvage, no injuries, plus a job that ended at the moment he chose to end it.
Every previous fight in his life stopped when something else did, and this one closed on a decision of his own.
Paloma logged it under the depot before taking her eighty-credit gross share.
Calista's four-hundred aftercare came from the four hundred and eighty already there, leaving the account at four hundred again.
'A job with an address on the docket... hell, that is a company,' Ossian read the line upside down, 'nobody in this city can say we are not somewhere.'
Rent falls due in eleven days against four hundred credits that will not cover a fifth of it.
Paloma has already said the word overdraft once, slowly enough to promise a second use.
Then a woman was waiting at the shutter when the three of them came back, sitting on an upturned crate with a case beside her.
Ninety minutes she had been there, with two offers of tea from Bastien, both declined without any explanation.
'She is not selling anything and she has not asked for anybody... she is waiting for the gauntlets to come home,' Ossian stopped at the bottom of the stairs, 'careful.'
The woman stood, looked at the left gauntlet rather than at his face, then told him the thing nobody in this city had.
"That is not equipment," she said it flatly, "and it stopped being equipment the moment the shell went into it, which I can prove to anybody willing to not publish it."
'She knows what went into the left hand this morning... and no panel showed that to a living soul except me,' Ossian felt the whole day rearrange itself, 'who talks like that.'
The name she gave meant nothing to him, though the profession attached to it had been taken off her four years ago.
Blacklisted is what this city calls it, a term the trade applies to the person rather than to the research.
Nothing she published was ever disproved, and no researcher holding a job will quote a line of it.
Then she told him she could explain why the gauntlets remember monsters, and that the explanation was going to cost him money he did not have.