The System Gave Me A Dead God

Chapter 7: The Old Man in the Waiting Room

The Guild tower's lobby smelled like ozone and floor polish, the particular sterile cleanliness of a building that ran background scans on everyone who walked through its doors and wanted you to know it.

Ezra had been inside exactly twice in three years, both times to collect a courier contract from a bored clerk who hadn't bothered to look up from her terminal. This time a security escort met him at the door before he'd finished crossing the threshold, polite, thorough, and unmistakably armed.

"Investigator Rourke is finishing a briefing," the escort said. "You'll wait in Room 4."

Room 4 turned out to be a windowless box with two chairs and a table, the kind of room built for conversations the Guild didn't want overheard. Ezra sat, because standing felt like inviting a fight he didn't want yet, and counted the seconds on the clock mounted above the door instead of thinking about the body Rourke's team had pulled out of Sublevel 4.

He wasn't alone for long.

The door opened without a knock, and the man who came in didn't look like Guild at all. Older, maybe sixties, dressed like he'd wandered in from a pawnshop three blocks over, a cardigan over a shirt that had seen better decades. He carried himself with none of the urgency the building demanded, like the walls hadn't gotten the memo that this was supposed to be a stressful place.

"You're younger than I expected," the old man said, settling into the second chair without being invited. "They usually are, the first time."

"Who are you."

"Garrick Voss." He said it like it should mean something, and when Ezra's face stayed blank, something that might have been disappointment flickered across his own. "Consultant. The Guild calls me in when a case doesn't fit their usual categories. Yours doesn't fit anything."

*Careful,* Vaelgrith said, and the shift in tone was immediate, sharp enough that Ezra sat up straighter without meaning to. *I know that name.*

"You know him?"

Garrick's eyebrows went up, mild and interested, like Ezra had confirmed something rather than asked a question.

"Talking to someone already," Garrick said. "That was fast. Usually takes a week before the voice gets loud enough to answer out loud."

Ezra's blood went cold.

"How do you know about that."

"Because I've sat in this exact room, across from a much younger man than you, forty years ago, and he had the exact same look on his face you've got right now."

Garrick folded his hands on the table, unhurried, like they had all the time in the world instead of a body cooling in a Guild evidence locker two floors down.

"I hunted gods once, Mr. Kade. Or hunted the things gods leave behind, which turns out to be the more dangerous job. I know what a Classification Anomalous flag means. I know what kind of corpse produces one. And I know you didn't come out of that tunnel with an Ability. You came out of it with a passenger."

*He's not lying,* Vaelgrith said, quieter now, something in the voice that hadn't been there before. Caution. *Watch him carefully. Men who survived hunting my kind don't do it by being kind.*

"What do you want," Ezra said, echoing the same question he'd asked a corpse's voice in his own skull two nights ago, and finding it just as useless here.

"Right now? To keep you out of a Guild containment cell for the next hour, because that's the only version of this conversation where you're still useful to anyone, including yourself." Garrick leaned back.

"Rourke's finishing her report. When she comes through that door, she's going to have three choices on the table: arrest you, monitor you, or listen to me vouch for you. I can make her pick the third option. But that's not free."

"Nothing's been free today."

"Good. You're learning." Garrick almost smiled.

"Here's my price. When this is over, whatever 'over' ends up meaning for you, you come find me. Not the Guild. Me. I have information about what's inside you that nobody in this building has, and information that dangerous doesn't come cheap even from someone who wants to help."

Ezra studied the old man's face, looking for the lie, and didn't find one, which somehow felt worse than if he had.

"Why would you help me at all?"

Garrick's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes did, old and tired and carrying weight Ezra couldn't name yet.

"Because forty years ago I didn't help someone in your exact chair," he said, "and I've had a long time to decide I'm not making that mistake twice."

The door opened before Ezra could ask what that meant. Rourke stepped through, a tablet in one hand, her expression unreadable, and stopped short at the sight of Garrick already seated across from her subject.

"You," she said, and it wasn't a friendly you. "Nobody cleared a consultant for this room."

"I cleared myself twenty minutes ago," Garrick said, entirely unbothered.

"Check your authorization list, Investigator. Then sit down. What I have to say about your Sublevel 4 corpse is going to change how you write that report, and you're going to want to hear it before you file anything you can't take back."