The Grief Engine

Chapter 8: Terms

Voss came back two days later, alone this time, and waited at the fence with the same unhurried patience he'd shown the first time, as if he had all the time in the world and no particular investment in whether Wren used it or wasted it. Wren had half expected him to send a runner instead. The fact that he'd come himself, a second time, into a district his own coat marked him as an outsider in, told Wren more about how badly the man needed this than any amount of talking would have.

"You've had two days," Voss said, without preamble. "I told you to think fast. I meant it."

"I heard you the first time." Wren leaned against the gatepost, arms crossed, and studied the captain's weathered face for whatever tell might give away more than his words did. There wasn't one. Voss had the kind of face that had learned, a long time ago, not to hand out information for free. "Before I agree to anything, I want to know what it actually costs. Not the pretty version. The real one."

"Fair." Voss didn't hesitate. "It costs you working for a city that's spent two years calling you unresonant on official paper and hasn't lifted a finger for your district. It costs you being useful to me in ways I won't always be able to explain in advance, because half of what I need done can't go through proper channels or Cindergate will hear about it before I do. And it costs you the very real possibility that if this goes wrong, my office won't be able to protect you from the consequences, because officially, none of this happened." He met Wren's eyes. "That's the real version. I told you I wasn't offering out of the goodness of my heart. I'm not going to start lying to you now that you're asking harder questions."

"And what do I get."

"Information Cindergate doesn't want in city hands. A warden's coat that opens doors your face alone won't, when it matters. And the closest thing to a fair fight this city currently has against a Cartel that's been quietly disappearing your people for two years while calling it labor conscription." Voss paused. "I won't promise you justice. I've been a warden too long to promise anyone that. I'll promise you the truth, delivered as fast as I find it, and my honest effort to make Cindergate pay for what the truth turns out to be."

Sable, who'd come to stand at Wren's shoulder partway through the exchange, spoke before Wren could answer. "What's the first thing you'd want from him," she asked, "if he says yes."

Voss's gaze shifted to her, assessing again, the same quick catalogue he'd given her the first time, though something in it had shifted - less dismissal now, more the look of a man recalculating who he was actually negotiating with. "There's a facility on the eastern docks," he said. "Registered to Cindergate as a maintenance depot for war-engine components. My office has never been cleared to inspect it. Three separate informants over the last year have told me it's where the conscripted labor actually goes, and none of those informants are alive to say so twice." He looked back to Wren. "I can't send my own people in - Cindergate would know within the hour, and whatever's happening inside would be gone before I got a warrant. But an unresonant boy from the slum district, walking in through a service entrance nobody thinks twice about, looking for work like a hundred other desperate Hollows before him - that's a different problem for them entirely."

The words landed in Wren's chest with a weight he hadn't expected, the shape of two years of missing neighbors finally given an address. "You want me to walk in as bait."

"I want you to walk in as a witness," Voss corrected. "What you do once you're inside, and whether you walk back out through the front or make your own way, is entirely your business. I'm not in a position to give you orders, Master Castellan. I'm in a position to give you an address and a reason worth risking your life for. The rest is yours to decide."

He is being honest, the Ledger observed, unprompted, into the pause that followed. This is, statistically, unusual for men in his position.

Wren didn't dignify that with a response, out loud or otherwise, but he filed it away regardless, weighing it against everything else - the district's two years of silence, the crowd's new murmured awe since the square, the ruined charge-mechanism still hanging useless at Corvin Vayne's belt somewhere up the hill. He thought of Old Mercy, who had spent forty years burying people the city refused to properly count, and of the particular, unbearable kindness of a woman who'd never once asked to be thanked for it.

"I'll go," Wren said. "But my terms, not just yours."

Voss's eyebrows rose slightly. "I'm listening."

"Sable comes as backup, outside the facility, not inside - someone who can get word to you fast if it goes wrong. You get us everything you have on the building's layout, guard rotations, anything at all, before I set foot near it. And if we find people alive in there, getting them out safely comes before getting you evidence. I'm not walking anyone else's family out in a report instead of a body that's still breathing."

"Done," Voss said, without argument, which told Wren more about the man's priorities than a week of speeches could have. "I'll have what I have on the layout by tomorrow evening. It isn't much - outdated, mostly guesswork from informants who never made it back inside to confirm it - but it's more than you'd have walking in blind."

"Tomorrow evening, then."

Voss nodded once, turned to go, then paused at the gate the way he had the first time, looking back at the two of them with an expression that, for just a moment, dropped the careful neutrality he'd worn through the entire conversation. "For what it's worth," he said, "I've read every conscription report Cindergate's filed for two years, and not one of them has ever used a name. Just numbers. Labor units." His jaw tightened. "I'd like to be part of putting a stop to that before I retire, Master Castellan. I don't get many chances left to make that particular kind of difference. I intend to use this one properly."

He left before either of them could answer, unremarkable and unhurried, vanishing into the district's evening crowd within thirty seconds exactly as he had the first time.

Sable let out a slow breath once he was gone. "Labor units," she repeated, quietly, testing the ugliness of the phrase. "That's what we are to them. Numbers on a page."

"Not for much longer," Wren said, and found, saying it, that for the first time since the fence, the words felt less like a wish and more like the beginning of a plan.

End of Chapter Eight