Ivory Banner held the memorial in their own forecourt, with a photograph of Ossian on a stand and an empty chair set beside it.
Perris stood at the end of the platform in dress armor, looking at neither the cameras nor that chair.
'They put a chair out for me... and the boy cannot look at either one,' Ossian waited at the back in a coat Bastien had lent him, 'stay still, let it run.'
Ninety people stood in that forecourt, and most of them had never carried anything up a slope in their lives.
He had rehearsed three separate versions of what he was going to say on the walk over from the transit station.
The calm version had lasted him about a mile before the one with the manifest in it took over for two more.
His third attempt was nothing but swearing, and he had liked that one best of the three.
'Use the calm version... no, the one with the paperwork in it,' the guild press officer was still talking about safety culture, 'wait for a gap.'
Ivory Banner had put out three separate statements in two days, and every one of them spelled his name right.
A woman from the guild office finished reading a statement about the porter's dedication to his team.
His mother would see a clip of this on the evening news, and she still believed he worked in a warehouse.
Ossian walked out of the crowd and stopped in front of the platform without saying one word to anybody.
The silence in that forecourt did more work in four seconds than all three of his rehearsed speeches would have.
Perris made a sound like a man stepping into cold water and put one hand flat on the rail.
'He thought I was dead... whatever else the boy is, he believed it,' the rail creaked under that hand, 'let him stand there.'
Ruan took four seconds to recover, and he spent every one of them walking to the front with his hands open.
"Our porter survived," Ruan announced, turning a man they had left underground into a story about how well the guild trains people.
Two reporters started writing before Ruan finished the sentence, since a resurrection sells better than a funeral ever has.
'He is going to keep the whole thing... filed as a guild success before the cameras are packed,' Ossian stood there with nothing in his hands, 'damn it, you cannot prove a word of this.'
The manifest folded inside his shirt proved a reassignment, which on its own proves paperwork rather than murder.
'Show it here and it becomes a grudge... they would have a statement out before I reached the gate,' the press officer was watching him now, 'keep your face flat.'
His face did none of what the inside of his head was doing, which is a skill a man learns carrying crates for people like Ruan.
A guild clerk came out through the side door then, holding a printed sheet with a case number written across the top of it.
Bastien had filed the manifest through the office instead of handing it to Ossian, so nobody in the forecourt could call it revenge.
'That is Bastien's handwriting on the corner... he walked it into that office himself, at his age,' Ossian watched the clerk hand it up, 'he never said a word about doing it.'
The press officer read the equipment reassignment out loud in the voice of somebody hoping it would sound small.
"A clerical matter, corrected at the time," Ruan offered the room, admitting the whole thing and burying it inside one sentence.
'Clerical... my safety gear went to another man six hours before the descent,' the cameras switched off along the row, 'shit, and that is the word they get to keep.'
One reporter asked who had signed the reassignment, and the press officer moved her on to questions about the guild safety record.
Cameras came off the platform inside a minute, since a clerical error is not a story anybody can sell.
Ossian got as far as the gate before Perris caught up with him on the forecourt steps.
"I need to say something to you," Perris had his helmet under one arm and no idea at all what to do with his face.
'He wants forgiving in a car park... and I get to decide whether he sleeps tonight,' the boy was standing too close, 'walk.'
"Then say it," Ossian went past him without stopping, which left Perris saying the rest of it to the back of a borrowed coat.
Walking away from that boy felt better than anything else that had happened to him all week.
'That was petty... and I would do it again tomorrow, twice before lunch,' he got out onto the street with his ears hot, 'registration office, two streets down.'
Perris did not follow him past the second step, and that was the most sensible thing the boy had managed all week.
Ossian got two streets away before the shaking in his hands started, since that part never makes the news.
The Capability registration office took walk-ins until four in the afternoon and had eleven people ahead of him in the queue.
He filled out a re-registration form standing up, since his leg had started swelling again inside the bandage.
Every person in that queue was holding a form about work they could not get without a guild name attached to it.
The clerk typed Classless into the status field out of pure habit before she looked at the rest of the page.
"Sorry, that's the default for a porter," she corrected it to pending assessment and stamped the sheet without meeting his eyes.
'Pending assessment... that field has said one word about me for four years,' Ossian took the copy she pushed across, 'still not a badge, but it is not nothing.'
Two years of wanting that badge had survived everything, including the evidence that it would never come.
A booking for the assessment itself cost forty credits and the waiting list ran to three weeks.
He had thirty-one credits in his pocket and a landlord who had written a date on his door frame in red marker.
A system screen opened over the counter while he was still doing that arithmetic.
[Your den has seven days of tribute left on it]
[This is the system counting, rather than the system reminding you]
'Seven days now... the thing has started running a clock down at me,' Ossian folded the form into his coat, 'hell, nine was better.'
He ate at a stall outside the office and worked out that a pending assessment was worth nothing whatsoever in credits.
Nobody hires a porter with a swollen leg, and an unassessed man with no guild name behind him is worth less again.
Bastien had walked into a guild office alone at sixty-one years of age, carrying a sheet of paper that could have cost him every shift he had left.
His phone buzzed against his ribs with a message from a number that had no name attached to it.
The file came through as one frame of drone footage, damaged down the left side, timestamped inside the Gate.
It showed a pale human hand coming out of a monster's jaw with the bone mask still half across the face.
'That is the lower basin... and somebody kept a copy after the wipe order went out,' Ossian turned the screen away from the street, 'she was driving that lens by hand.'
A second message arrived underneath the picture, six words long, with no name signed at the end of it.
The message read, "I saw you take the mask off," with nothing that looked like a demand under it.
'She held onto that frame, and now she wants me knowing it... that is not how blackmail opens,' he read the line four times at the stall, 'a threat comes with a number attached.'
Ossian wrote a message asking where to meet her, deleted that, then sent three words about her price instead.