The freight district at shift change puts four thousand people onto the same six streets for about twenty minutes.
Authorities were forty minutes away from the trail, and that crowd would have walked the whole thing flat by then.
'Everything it stepped on is being walked over right now... and nobody down there knows what came through,' Ossian moved along the loading rail above the crowd, 'find the line before the shift ends.'
Ossian had come down here on a hunch, an old drone, plus a woman who refused to call any of it a rescue.
He found the beast's route by injury rather than by scent, three streets before he let himself think about what that meant.
A dockhand with a strapped wrist stood out to him from sixty feet away, in a crowd, through diesel smoke.
None of that came to him as sight or as smell, and he could not have said which sense was doing the work.
An old woman with a bad hip registered next, then a man favouring a knee under the awning by the weighbridge.
'It went by the wrist, then the hip, then turned at the knee... it is reading the same map I am,' Ossian stopped on the rail, 'shit, that is not tracking, that is shopping.'
Tracking people by their injuries had not felt like a decision at any point, which is the part that stayed with him.
Calista had a rooftop, a borrowed drone, plus a laptop older than either of them by a decade.
"Two hundred metres, moving north, it's using the loading lanes," her voice came through the earpiece with keyboard noise underneath it.
The machine she was running route prediction on took nine seconds to redraw a map, and she was still ahead of the beast.
'She has it boxed with a laptop and no licence... and the guild had her signed off as unrecoverable,' Ossian went along the rail at a run, 'four steps, straight line, go.'
Grave Rush took him four body lengths above the crowd, and the landing put both feet onto a container roof.
The beast came out of the lane at the far end, longer than the scavengers in the hall, with the same larval residue crusted along its spine.
'That is the one from the wall... bigger, older, and it has been eating since it got out,' he counted the gap in steps, 'three runs, maybe four.'
Four thousand people at shift change means four thousand bodies with nowhere to run when something comes down.
A cargo net went at the crane above the weighbridge while he was still counting, and half a pallet of steel came down onto the lane.
The load caught a courier across both legs and put him under a crate in the middle of the open ground.
Ossian had four steps in him, one man under a crate, plus a beast worth two thousand credits moving away up a straight lane.
Every second Ossian gave that courier was a second the beast spent getting further north.
The want arrived without him choosing any part of it, and it was aimed at the thing that ran.
'It broke north, and everything in me wants to follow... that is the jackal in my hand, not me,' his feet had already turned on the roof, 'turn around, the man under the crate.'
The Jackal's objection came as something physical rather than as a thought in his head.
His jaw locked, the muscles across his back pulled tight, then a low sound came up his throat that he had not decided to make.
'It is arguing with my body... it cannot force me anywhere, it can only hurt me for going,' Ossian went off the container toward the weighbridge, 'damn it, lift.'
'The crate is off centre, so take the corner nearest his hip... shit, that is four hundred pounds of steel,' Ossian got both hands under the edge, 'lift with the legs.'
He got the crate up on the second try, and the courier came out with both legs broken but a pulse under the jaw.
"Ten seconds, hold on to my arm," Ossian dragged the man clear while the crane cable was still swinging over both of them.
The beast was four streets north by then and gone from every sightline he had.
'That is the pursuit lost... four streets in a district with nine exits, so that is gone,' he put the courier down against the weighbridge wall, 'stop, she is still working.'
"I still have it," her voice came into his ear with no lift in it at all, keyboard going underneath, "North lane, it'll cross at the tank yard in about twenty minutes."
Calista had never had eyes on it at all, and she drew that route from the beast's habits plus the shape of the streets.
'She predicted the whole thing from a rooftop... and I would have chased it into the wrong district,' Ossian looked north with blood on both hands, 'that is worth four hundred of anybody's money.'
Twenty minutes later the beast crossed the tank yard on the line she had drawn for it.
Nothing about the tank yard offered it cover, which is the whole reason she had picked that crossing.
Ossian took it in the open with the mask on his face, four steps into a wall of corrugated iron, then both hands into the throat.
[Carrion synchronization, one hundred percent]
[You and this face now understand each other, which is not the same as agreeing]
Mastery arrived as a figure on a panel, printed over a dead animal in a yard that smelled of diesel.
'One hundred percent... and the number came up after I refused the chase, not during it,' he sat down on the yard steps with the mask in his lap, 'that thing is grading me.'
[Identity Fracture, eleven percent]
The number had come down instead of going up, for the first time since it started posting.
'Thirteen this morning, eleven now... refusing that chase pulled it back two points,' Ossian read the panel twice to be sure of the direction, 'first good news this thing has ever handed me.'
Nobody had told him the number could fall, and the system offered no explanation for it now.
Refusing the mask costs him something on the ground every time, and this panel is the only place it pays him back.
Two points of Fracture is not much against eleven, and it was the first ground he had taken back from the thing.
The courier at the weighbridge was in an ambulance by then, with both legs in splints and a name Ossian never got.
Then a new panel opened over the yard, wider than the others, with a border on it he had not seen before.
[The Unmasking Trial is open]
[Choose the prey that escaped your territory or the weak stock you carried out of it]
'It wants me to choose... and I chose forty minutes ago in front of a weighbridge,' Ossian came up off the steps, 'it was not watching, or that does not count.'
Whoever wrote that trial had built it for something that would find the question difficult.
That trial sat open over the yard while he stood there, waiting on an answer it had not earned.
'It expects me to want the kill... this trial was built for a version of me that is already dead,' he started walking toward the yard gate, 'answer it with the courier.'
Diesel yards at that hour hold nobody at all, which is why the beast had been heading for one.
Calista came down off the roof with the laptop under one arm and the drone in three pieces in a bag.
"Whatever that panel is asking you," she began, reading his face across the yard, "answer it slowly."
'She can see the trial on my face and cannot see the panel... and she is still giving me the right advice,' Ossian let the mask come off into his hand, 'tell her.'
He told her what the trial had asked, out loud, in a diesel yard, which made it the second true thing he had given anybody since the Gate.