The training hall on Verrick Street had been shut for two years, with no cameras on the ceiling and two exits she had checked before he arrived.
Somebody had cut the power to that building years ago, so the light came in through the high windows in bars.
A woman stood in the middle of that floor with a spear when Ossian came in through the north door.
'She picked a room with two ways out of it... and she is standing where she can watch both,' he stopped inside the doorway, 'hands where she can see them.'
"Calista," she gave him the name before he asked for it, and a person hiding from a guild does not open that way.
Ossian knew that name off an Ivory Banner prospect list from two years back, three places above the man who later signed her discharge.
She was smaller than the roster photograph had made her look, with her left arm turned in toward her body.
The spear sat wrong in her hands, and she corrected the grip twice in the time it took him to cross the floor.
"You're limping on the left," Calista offered that as a fact rather than a greeting, and she did not put the spear down for it.
'She has been watching me walk since the door opened... that is a fighter's habit rather than a pilot's,' Ossian stopped six feet short of her, 'she is measuring the leg.'
That spear was guild issue, with a squad number filed off the collar and nothing stamped over the top of it.
"You sent me a picture," he kept both hands out where she could see them while he said it.
"I sent you one frame out of nine hundred," Calista corrected, which told him how much of that footage was sitting on a drive at her flat.
'Nine hundred frames... and she picked the one that proves the least of anything,' he watched her thumb move on the shaft, 'she is not here to sell me.'
She came at him with no warning at all, and the butt of the spear went past his ear into the wall behind him.
The Jackal answered before Ossian did, and his weight had shifted onto the front foot to take her throat out.
'Stop... that was my body moving without asking me first,' he got the foot back and put both hands behind him, 'she did that deliberately.'
[Identity Fracture, nine percent]
[A creature that wants a throat is a creature, and the system only reports what it sees]
'Six to nine for a stick waved at my face... damn it, the number counts wanting,' Ossian stayed still until his shoulders came down, 'she needed to know what she is dealing with.'
"That's what I came to see," Calista observed, stepping back out of range with the spear held across her body.
She had provoked the instinct on purpose, before handing over anything that could put her in a cell.
Then she ran a basic spear form across the floor, and her channels locked on the third movement of it.
Her left arm stopped halfway through the turn and came back late, the way a limb moves when the mana inside it is not arriving on time.
'The channels are shot... and she ran that form so I would see the worst of it early,' Ossian kept his face still, 'damn it, say nothing about the arm.'
Saying anything about the arm would have been pity, which was going to end this meeting inside a minute.
"Ivory Banner discharged me eight months ago," Calista set the spear against the wall and stayed on her feet in front of it.
A discharge takes the licence away with it, which is why she had been living on drone contracts and other people's leftovers.
The medical discharge had gone through while she was still in a hospital bed, signed by a squad leader who never came to visit her.
'Eight months out... and she still checks both exits in an empty hall,' he thought, watching her stand with her weight off the left side, 'she has not stopped working.'
Ossian had spent four years learning which hunters hide an injury, and she was hiding nothing at all from him.
"I'm not going to tell anybody about you," she let that stand for a moment, "Don't turn it into a kindness."
Exposing him would burn her own footage, the only leverage she had left anywhere in this city.
'She gave me the reason so I would not owe her for it... that is the most honest thing anybody has said to me this month,' Ossian nodded at her once, 'ask the price.'
"So what do you want for it?" The question came out harder than he had meant it to.
"Work," Calista named a figure for each job and did not soften it with anything afterward, "And I'm not a rescue, so don't run this like one."
The work she wanted was route planning and a share that reflected it, with drone hours billed on top.
'She priced herself before I could offer her a thing... good, that is how I would want it done,' Ossian did the arithmetic against thirty-one credits, 'tell her the truth about the money.'
"I have thirty-one credits and seven days on my room," he said it flat, since dressing it up would have insulted both of them.
Four hundred a job was the figure, and she named it without once looking down at the floor between them.
Calista looked at him for a second longer than the sentence needed, then took a notebook out of her coat.
"Then you owe me," she decided, writing the figure down with the date beside it in small, careful handwriting.
'She is putting me on account... a woman with no income at all is giving me terms,' he watched the pen move, 'do not thank her, she will take it badly.'
Two streets away a school had let out twenty minutes earlier, and the noise of it came through the high windows.
Neither of them had a licence, a guild, or any legal standing to be inside that building at all.
The north wall of the hall cracked from the floor to the ceiling while they were still arguing about the percentage.
A micro-breach nobody had reported opened along that seam, and something came through it on four legs.
It came out low and wet, with a hide like packed grit, showing no eyes on the front of its skull.
The head went down as it worked along the floor toward the smell, ignoring both of them for a moment.
Scavenger beasts follow open wounds into buildings, which meant it had come in for the leg under his bandage.
'It came through a wall two streets from a school... and nobody logged that breach anywhere,' Ossian moved his weight off the bad leg, 'shit, report it after.'
Nothing about this breach had been on the public map when Ossian checked it that morning out of pure habit.
'Unreported means unfunded... no team is coming for this one, we are what turned up,' he put his back to the nearest pillar, 'move her off the open floor.'
Calista had her spear standing against the wall ten feet away and mana that arrived somewhere behind the moment she wanted it.
'Ten seconds to move the mask onto my hand... I do not have that long, and she is closer to it than I am,' the beast turned toward his bandage, 'straight onto the face, now.'
Ossian pulled the Carrion Jackal on in front of her, and the bone closed over his face in one movement.
His shoulders came up through the coat Bastien had lent him, and the seams went at both arms.
Calista watched the whole thing happen from eight feet away and did not step back from it once.
She picked the spear back up and put herself on his left, where the beast was going to come from.