A yellow eviction notice covered the lock on room 402, taped across the keypad where nobody could walk past it.
Room 402 had a door the manager could open from his office, plus a lock he could kill from the same desk.
The system opened a screen beside that paper the moment Ossian reached out to pull it down.
[Lair tribute is overdue]
[A den you cannot hold is a den you are only visiting]
'It has decided my rent is tribute... and that a rented room is a den I defend from somebody,' Ossian read the notice twice with the keypad blinking under it, 'shit, four hundred by Friday.'
Everything he owned came to a dead phone and a torn cargo harness. His leg would not take a full flight of stairs without a stop at the landing.
The raid share was gone as well, since Ivory Banner paid out against the official survivor roster, which had him listed as dead.
'Dead men do not collect... which is the one part of this the guild has got right,' he got the door open on the third try, 'sit down before the leg decides for you.'
Bastien was waiting on the step inside with a medical kit open on his knees.
The old porter had turned down the guild's mask integration contract twice, the second time in writing.
"You look like a man who read the evacuation notice and stayed anyway," Bastien observed, cutting a length of bandage without looking up.
'He knows exactly which raid that was... and he has not asked me one question about it,' Ossian lowered himself onto the chair, 'say the small version.'
"The formation broke early," Ossian put the leg straight out in front of him and let the old man look at it.
Bastien pushed the trouser leg up to the knee, then stopped talking when he saw the colour of the bruising.
"I bought this out of yesterday's shift," Bastien mentioned, working cold gel into the worst of it with two fingers.
'Tell him the truth... the guild cut my rope and there is a system living in my hands now,' Ossian watched him work, 'no, he would walk into the guild office about it.'
Ivory Banner would bury a witness long before they let a porter speak in a hearing room, and Bastien had nothing to stop them with.
'Keeping him in the dark is the only cover he has got... he would hate that if anybody told him,' the gel went cold against the bruise, 'say nothing, let him finish.'
"You still owe me for the last kit," Bastien added, which was true, and had been sitting unpaid since the winter.
"I'll clear it Friday," Ossian answered in the voice of a man who had promised the same thing on four other Fridays.
The old man had never written any of it down anywhere, which was worse than being chased for the money.
Bastien wrapped the leg, washed his hands at the sink, then left without asking a single question about the raid.
That night Ossian sat on the floor with both gauntlets in his lap and worked out what else the system would let him do with them.
[You may carry the Carrion Jackal on the weapon instead of on your face]
[The move takes ten seconds and those ten seconds belong to nobody]
'On the glove instead of on my face... so I could hit something with it and keep my own head,' he turned the right gauntlet over, 'try it here, not out there.'
The mask came off his face as black mist and ran down his right arm into the fused porter glove.
For those ten seconds the mask sat on neither his face nor the glove, and every wound he owned came back to him at once.
'Ten full seconds of being nobody... damn it, never start that with anything else in the room,' he stayed down on the floorboards until it passed, 'again, slower.'
[Jackal Right is ready on your hand]
[Your right fist now carries the hunt for you]
He tested the move four more times before the sun came up, and it took ten seconds on every single attempt.
Practice never brought the count down at all, which made it a rule of the system rather than a skill he could sharpen.
He put that fist through the plaster beside the window and took out a section of wall the size of a dinner plate.
'That went straight through the partition... and the man downstairs definitely heard it happen,' Ossian looked at the hole with the dust still coming off it, 'stop, that is a repair bill.'
Selling a monster fragment at full price needs a hunter licence, and the salvage window behind the transit station does not ask to see one.
The clerk kept one hand resting on the licence notice taped to his counter, over the part that listed the penalties.
"Two hundred," the clerk offered, pushing the fragment back across the counter with one finger to show the conversation was finished.
That fragment was worth eight hundred credits on the legal market, and Ossian took the two hundred without arguing about it.
'Eight hundred if I could sell it legally... that wants a guild badge I am never getting now,' he folded the credits into his fist, 'take it, the door is on Friday.'
Nobody hires a porter with a leg swollen up like that, whatever the date on the door frame says.
He fed the money through the payment slot on the manager's door and waited while the machine counted it twice.
"You're two hundred short," the manager stated through the intercom, without opening the door or turning the corridor light on.
The man came out afterward with a red marker and wrote the new deadline on Ossian's door frame at eye height.
'Nine days... and he put it where every neighbour on this floor reads it,' Ossian watched the marker squeak across the wood, 'nine days of work I cannot do on this leg.'
Two hundred credits came to nine days of shifts he could not stand up long enough to work.
The thirty-one credits still in his pocket were the ones he had walked in with, and payday happened to other people now.
His phone had taken four hours on a borrowed charger, and it started buzzing the moment he got the door shut.
"I saw the accident report," his mother told him, before either of them had got to saying hello.
'She has had the news on all afternoon... and she is about to ask which sector I was working,' he put his back against the door, 'warehouse, keep it boring.'
"I was running inventory in the secondary warehouse," Ossian lied to her with the fluency of a man who had rehearsed it in the shower that morning.
His mother let out a breath he could hear across the whole city, then talked about her neighbour's dog for eleven minutes.
'Eleven minutes about a dog... and I would have taken another hour of it,' he closed his eyes against the door frame, 'do not let her hear the leg.'
The call ended on a promise to ring again next week, and Ossian sat down on the floor of a room he had nine days left inside.
A single sheet of paper was lying on the table beside the empty medical kit.
It was the original equipment manifest for the morning raid, printed the night before the team went in.
Bastien had left it there with no note attached to it, having asked Ossian for nothing at all in return.
The sheet listed Ossian's safety gear reassigned to another name six hours before the descent, with Ruan's signature in the approval column.
'Six hours before we went in... shit, this was decided while I was still asleep,' Ossian read the signature line under the lamp, 'that is not carelessness.'
Reassignment forms carry two signatures at Ivory Banner, and the second line on this one had been left empty.
He folded the manifest into his shirt and started working out which clerk in the guild office would still take a call from a dead man.