The man at the intake desk asked which team I was carrying the kit for.
I slid my licence across the counter instead of answering. He read it twice, with a look at me in between.
“C-rank,” he said. “Sorry, mate. We get a lot of porters through on Mondays.”
“It’s fine.”
It was the third time this year, and it was only March.
My name is Nathan Vance. I’m thirty-one, and I work at the Aegis Guild, which is a sentence that used to mean something different when I said it.
I co-founded the place. There’s paperwork somewhere that says so, filed under eleven years of newer paperwork that says other things.
Most of the staff have no idea. The few old enough to know treat the fact like a smell the building has always had.
The assignments officer that morning gave me cordon duty. Crowd line at a D-rank gate in Croydon, standing where the tape was, telling people the tape was there.
“Anything for me inside?” I asked.
“Teams are already assigned.” She was reading the next duty. “Thanks, Nathan.”
She said my name without any warmth in it at all.
Croydon was four hours of standing where the tape was. The gate sat behind a row of shops, a low green shimmer between two wheelie bins, rated D and behaving like it.
The clear team came out a little after one. Their leader was a woman I’d trained on footwork drills when she was seventeen and terrified of her own sword.
She clocked me at the tape and slowed half a step. Then she nodded, the small kind you give a doorman, and kept walking.
One of her rookies looked back at me. “Who’s that?”
“Cordon duty,” she said. “Eyes front.”
I held the tape for another hour and went home.
✦ ✦ ✦
There was a new intake waiting at the kit lockers, twenty at most, killing time before his induction with a printed list of the guild’s clear records.
Old habit made me glance at the list. An older one made me look away.
“Vance,” he read, halfway down the page. He checked my badge, then my face. “That you? Wycombe, four hours fifty-one, solo.”
“That’s me.”
I gave him the rest before he could ask for it, in the flat recital I had worked out somewhere around the third time a stranger made me do this.
Youngest A-rank in the country at nineteen. Cleared Wycombe alone when eleven dead hunters said it couldn’t be done.
I had the whole speech down to nine seconds. I’d timed it once, out of curiosity.
The kid laughed, and there was no cruelty in it. He thought I was doing a bit.
“No, seriously,” he said. “You’re C-rank.”
“Seriously,” I said, and left him to his list.
The lift was closing on an executive floor call when I reached it, and I put a hand out to stop it before I had finished deciding to.
Jack stood inside, reading something on his phone, coffee going cold in his free hand.
There was a full second where I considered stepping back out and taking the stairs down eleven floors like a man with somewhere else to be.
He didn’t look up. The doors closed on him not looking up.
We built this guild out of a leaking flat above a kebab shop, two hunters and a photocopier neither of us owned yet.
These days we shared a lift maybe once a month, and he had somewhere better to look every single time.
My annual assessment was booked for that Thursday. Licence renewal, mandatory, the Association’s way of confirming on paper what anyone could see for free.
The assessor was new. She had me put both hands on the plate and watched the needle settle with a professional blankness they must teach somewhere.
The plate read one number and called it a hunter. Density, the pooled figure, the only thing the machine could resolve.
Everything a person actually was got flattened into a single line and a letter beside it.
The printout came out warm. The line read forty-one, and the letter beside it still said C, and the two of them had stopped agreeing years ago.
“Have you been ill?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Your density’s dropped again. That’s four consecutive years.” She turned the sheet toward me, as if I hadn’t read it upside down. “Ninety-one when you were certified. Forty-one now. I’ve never seen a reading go backward like this on someone still standing up.”
Density didn’t go backward. That was the first rule anyone learned about it.
It rose with work and it stalled with age and it sat where it sat, and mine had spent four years walking downhill.
“There’s a clinic in Marylebone. Core specialists.” She wrote something on a slip that had no Association letterhead on it. “I can’t refer you, this is a licensing assessment, not a medical. But if you were my brother, I’d want you to get checked.”
I took the slip she wasn’t supposed to give me.
My flat was a modest one room in Catford with a window that looked at a wall. The rent was the only part of my life that had adapted to my income.
I heated a takeaway from the place downstairs and ate about a third of it standing up.
The rest went in the fridge, where it would sit until Thursday and then go in the bin the way everything in that fridge eventually did.
Then I sat down at the personal computer that took up most of the desk. Seven years old, I built it myself, back when I could afford parts worth building with.
Tower of Genesis came up where I’d left it. Floor ninety-one.
Tower of Genesis was a crawler. Procedural floors, one life. Every floor had a rule it never stated, and the game killed you for learning it too slowly. Then you started again from nothing.
Forty thousand people were playing it that season. The name at the top of the leaderboard was VANTA. Nobody on the forums knew who that was, and I intended to keep it that way.
Floor ninety-one was a mirror room. Six doors, five of them wrong.
Mirror rooms were the ones the forums argued about. People posting breakdowns of my clears like match footage, hunting for the cheats they were sure were there.
The truth was simpler. Reflections lie in predictable ways, and I’d learned to read them.
Every mirror room had one door where the light differs. Find the wrong light, find the right door.
I watched the light for a while, how it pooled where nothing stood to cast it, and took the third door on the left.
The floor cleared. Somewhere in the world, the previous record holder dropped to second.
An hour a night, my brain still got to be the thing it used to be.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Marylebone clinic saw me on a decline ten days later.
The specialist was a small man with reading glasses he never read through. He ran the scans twice and sent me down the corridor for bloods. The call back came on a Friday afternoon.
“Your core is frozen,” he said.
He turned the monitor toward me. A scan of something that should have looked like a closed fist of light, and looked instead like frost on a window.
“These fracture lines. Here, and here.” He touched the screen twice. “A core scars the way bone does, under strain. Yours isn’t scarring. It’s crystallising. Every time you channel, it comes back a little harder and a little more brittle.”
He pulled my licence record up beside the scan. “You certified at a density of ninety-one, once. Today the plate reads forty-one, and the low side of forty-one.”
“Density doesn’t slide.”
“No. It doesn’t.” He let that stand a moment. “It stalls, it plateaus, it stops climbing when a hunter gets old and lazy. It doesn’t run backward. Not without exactly the kind of damage I’m looking at right now.”
“The plate reads density. This is the core underneath it.”
“The plate reads what your core puts out, and your core is putting out less every year because it’s turning to glass.” He tapped the frost on the screen. “The number on your licence is a symptom. This is the cause.”
“Frozen how.”
“That half is yours to tell me.” He took the glasses off. “This isn’t disease and it isn’t wear. Something put cold inside you and it never came out again. Give me the year and I’ll tell you how fast.”
I could give him the year. I could give him the hour.
Kilnsey, five years ago. An A-rank subjugation, and I was the ranking hunter on it.
It went well. That’s the part nobody believes when I tell it. Nine of us walked in and nine walked out, and the thing at the bottom went down in under four minutes.
It was already dead when it did it. Whatever the cold was, it wasn’t aimed at me. It came off the body the way heat comes off a fire that has gone out, and I was the nearest thing still standing.
I was on my feet an hour later and cleared by a field medic. I filed the report myself.
“And nobody scanned you,” the specialist said.
“I had no symptoms.”
“You had no symptoms for two years.” He wrote something down. “That is how these behave. It isn’t a wound. It’s a temperature.”
“There’s no treatment path,” he said. “And I want to be clear about what I mean by that. It isn’t that we haven’t found one yet. There is nothing on this planet that puts heat back into a core once something else has taken it out.”
“Then what does that leave?”
“Stop channelling and it stays where it is. Keep drawing on it and one day it breaks.” He said it the way he had probably said terminal a hundred times. “I’m sorry. I know what that word means in your line of work.”
I walked home from Marylebone. It took three hours and I don’t remember most of them.
What I kept coming back to wasn’t the diagnosis. It was that I had done it right.
Nine in, nine out, four minutes. It is the cleanest A-rank subjugation on my record and it is the one that killed me.
There was nobody to be angry at. That was the part that wouldn’t sit down and stay down. A gate opened, a thing lived at the bottom of it, we went in and killed the thing, and on its way out of the world it exhaled.
I would have preferred it if somebody had done this to me. At least then there would have been someone to blame.
I stood in a kitchen that didn’t have a kettle worth the name, and did the calculations anyway, because that is what I do instead of sitting down.
Five years to go from ninety-one to forty-one. Call it ten a year, and the last three had been worse than the first two.
Four years before the plate read something a licensing officer would be obliged to act on. Fewer, if I kept working.
The decline had started the year Aegis incorporated. My board seat went to a vote two years after that and lost, and Jack made a speech about how nobody had wanted to say it out loud.
He had been kind about it. He was always kind about it. That was the worst available version of it.
I stood there until the streetlights came on outside the wall my window looked at.
✦ ✦ ✦
The notice came through the following Tuesday, sent to the whole C-roster and answered by nobody.
A new gate in Epping Forest, classification undetermined, which was itself unusual. Gates read on instruments before anyone walks in. This one didn’t.
The Association was assembling a survey team and asking every major guild to contribute a body. Aegis’s slot had sat unfilled for six days.
The attachment was one photograph. A standing gate in a clearing, and around its mouth, a series of rings. Concentric and dark, turning very slowly.
The classification field said ‘UNKNOWN’. The hazard bonus had been revised upward twice, which told me how the first two rounds of offers had gone.
I read the notice for its rule, then for its trap.
A gate that didn’t read. Rings nobody could name. Somewhere in the building above me, a man who made his own stock from dubious bones was probably being photographed shaking someone’s hand.
The pay would cover Marylebone clinic and ten months of rent behind it. Nobody else had signed.
And a room with a rule it wouldn’t state was the only kind of room I had never lost.
I signed it.