Dust came off the landing pad in a brown wall and the crew was made to stand in it while a battered Corellian freighter finished setting down.
Three days since the cave-in.
Kael stood in the third row with his weight off the bad leg and watched the ramp come open before the engines had finished spinning down, which told him the pilot was in a hurry and the pilot owned the ship.
The woman who came down it was mid-thirties and sharp-boned, in a long coat over practical spacer’s gear, and she crossed the yard without once looking at her footing because she had already decided nothing here was going to trip her.
Reinforced pockets.
Data-slates.
Credit chits.
A compact blaster on her right hip with a custom grip worn shiny at the web of the thumb, which meant she drew it and meant she had drawn it more than once.
In her left hand she carried a cylinder of black metal about the length of a forearm, studded down its face with crystals.
The crystals were pulsing.
Slow, off-rhythm, matching no heartbeat Kael had ever counted.
He heard it before he saw it clearly.
Not with his ears.
The same place behind his sternum that had gone cold under the rock came up hard, and the pulse of that thing was in it, sliding across him.
“Muster stands,” the camp administrator called.
He was a soft man in a clean tunic who had never been below ground on this planet or any other.
“Nobody moves.
This is Sienn Vos.
She has the corporation’s authorization and mine, and she’ll be looking you over.” “Talent buyer,” Vos said.
Her voice carried without effort.
“That’s the phrase on the paperwork.
I buy strong backs and I pay above scale, and if you’re wondering whether that’s better than what you have now, it is.
Considerably.” Nobody in the rows made a sound.
“Good.
I prefer a quiet line.” She walked to the head of it.
“You’ll each stand still for about six seconds while I pass.
That’s all.
No handling, no questions, no medical.
Six seconds.” “And if the instrument likes one of us?” The bondsman with the split ear.
Third row.
Kael did not turn his head.
Vos found him without hurry.
“Then that man walks out of the worst posting on this planet and into a berth with a bunk and a door.
That’s the whole horror of it.” “With respect, ma’am, we’ve heard that one.” “You’ve heard it from recruiters.” She was already moving.
“I’m not a recruiter.
Recruiters lie because they’re paid per head.
I’m paid per find, and there’s only ever one.” She thumbed the cylinder and the crystals came alive.
The pressure arrived at the top of the line and started down it, and it wasn’t scanning the yard, it was scanning through the yard, a finger drawn along the inside of Kael’s skull from front to back.
Every man it passed went on standing there stupid and unaffected, because none of them could feel a thing.
He could feel all of it.
Six rows.
Then four.
Then two.
He couldn’t run and couldn’t hide and couldn’t dampen, because dampening was a word he didn’t have yet for a thing he had never done.
What he had was the pebble.
He had twenty seconds of holding something absolutely level while his whole body wanted to do otherwise, and he had one rule.
Want steadies it.
Fear scatters it.
He wanted to be nothing.
Not to survive, not to escape, not to be spared.
To be nothing at all, an empty coat standing in a line, a body with no one home.
He took the cold stir and instead of pushing it out he pulled it flat, down and in, pressed it against the floor of himself and lay across it and held.
It was like holding a breath in deep water.
Sustainable to a count of twenty.
Maybe thirty.
After that the body would take the decision away from him.
The relic came level with his chest.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
The crystals were half a meter from his sternum and their pulse went through his teeth and his eyes watered and he didn’t blink, and behind his ribs the thing that wanted to answer strained against the flat of him and he held it down with everything he had ever been in either life.
Vos’s boots scraped past.
Fourteen.
Fifteen.
The pressure moved on down the row.
⟦ASCENDANT⟧ ASCENT — EMBER I RESERVE — 17 / 40 DRAW — STILLNESS, HELD WHOLE GATE.
DAMPENING BY INSTINCT; NO TRAINED CLOAK WITNESS.
THE RELIC SWEPT AND FOUND NOTHING He breathed at twenty-two, and made it look like the same breath he’d been taking all along.
Then the relic stuttered.
It was five men further down the line and it hitched, one crystal flaring out of sequence, a flicker that lasted less than a second.
Vos stopped walking.
“Hm,” she said.
She backed up three paces and swept the same four men again, and the flicker didn’t repeat, and her mouth thinned by a fraction.
She pulled the first of them out of the line by the elbow and stood him aside.
“Name.” “Corrin, ma’am.” “How long here?” “Six years.” “Anything ever happen around you that nobody could account for?
Doors.
Tools.
Weather.
Anything at all.” “Ma’am?” “It’s not a trick question and there’s no wrong answer.
Money in it, if the answer’s yes.” Corrin’s eyes went to the administrator and back.
“No, ma’am.
Nothing’s ever happened around me.
That’s most of the complaint.” “Wonderful.” She let him go.
“Next.” She did that eleven times.
Each one got the same four questions in the same order and the same flat courtesy, and she never once raised her voice or laid a hand on anybody, and Kael understood exactly what he was watching.
She wasn’t cruel.
Cruelty would have been easier to read and easier to hate.
She was inspecting used parts, and the parts happened to be men, and she made it look ordinary because to her it was.
There was a market for people like him.
It had a professional class.
It had authorization on file with the corporation, and it had just landed on his dirt.
She swept a second time before the suns dropped, and Kael went flat again and held to nineteen and let out the same disguised breath, and the crystals passed him without so much as a stutter.
Two for two.
On instinct, on luck, on a trick he couldn’t describe and therefore couldn’t repeat on purpose.
Vos went to the administrator afterward, and Kael was close enough to the yard fence to hear it.
“I’ll take the guest quarters tonight.” “Of course.
Though if the instrument found nothing, I’d assumed we were done here.” “The instrument found a flicker.
Flickers aren’t nothing, they’re a weak read.
Weak read means either a very young one or a very frightened one, and either way it’s still standing in your yard.” “The corporation would prefer this concluded quickly.” “The corporation will prefer whatever I put in front of it.” Her voice never lifted.
“I’ll sweep again in the morning with the gain up.
Have them mustered before the heat.” “Some of these men are on the deep shaft rota.” “Then the ore can wait one day for a woman who’s spent four years looking for exactly one thing.” “May I ask what the buyer wants with him?
For the file.” “You may not, and there’s no file.” She was already walking.
“One more thing.
Nobody leaves the camp perimeter tonight.
Not a rota change, not a supply run, not a man going out to relieve himself past the fence.
If somebody’s missing at muster I’ll assume I know why, and I’ll charge the search to your accounts.” “That’s not the corporation’s arrangement with you.” “It became the arrangement when your instrument-worthy asset started hiding.” Kael lay on his cot that night and ran the arithmetic without any comfort in it at all.
She would sweep again with the gain up.
He had held twice, and both times the holding had been the body doing something the mind had only been permitted to watch.
A third pass was a coin thrown for his life.
Worse, a third clean pass had its own problem, because a man who reads as perfectly ordinary three times running under an instrument built to find the extraordinary begins to look extraordinary by the very flatness of him.
The gift had given him seconds of warning and a pebble and a wall he couldn’t build twice.
It hadn’t given him a way to fight a woman with a blaster and a buyer’s list, or a way to leave a planet whose only ship was hers.
Down the row, a cot creaked as somebody turned over and failed to sleep.
Kael watched the ceiling and started counting the hours to muster, and somewhere south of the camp, out past the fence and the tailings and the dead ground, something under the world pushed against his attention for the first time and did not let go.
Streets talk.
Want the next move before the cops, the heroes, or anyone else?
The Syndicate reads first.
Hustler.
$5.
Twelve chapters ahead.
Enforcer.
$9.
Nineteen chapters ahead.
Kingpin.
$15.
Twenty-six chapters ahead.
Drops are periodic.
Schedule’s on the page.
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ P.S.
— there’s a back alley where the rest of this story runs cold and free.
address: unwrittenrealm.com.
you know what to do.