The System Gave Me A Dead God

Chapter 8: What the Guild Doesn't Write Down

Rourke didn't sit.

She stood in the doorway with the tablet still in her hand, weight balanced like she hadn't decided yet whether this was a room she needed to be ready to fight her way out of, and looked at Garrick the way Ezra imagined she looked at evidence that didn't fit the case file.

"You have thirty seconds," she said, "before I call this in as an unauthorized consultant tampering with an active investigation."

"Then I'll talk fast." Garrick didn't move from his chair, didn't raise his voice, which somehow made him harder to interrupt than if he'd shouted.

"Your Sublevel 4 corpse. Run its tissue signature against pre-Awakening Guild archives, not the current database. Go back three hundred years."

"That archive isn't digitized. Nobody's cross-referenced it in decades."

"I know. I did the cross-referencing myself, thirty years ago, on a different body that looked exactly like this one." Garrick's voice stayed level, but something underneath it had gone hard, the tone of a man reciting facts he'd paid for personally. "You're not looking at a rogue Awakened gone feral, Investigator. You're looking at one of the Nine."

Rourke's face didn't change, but Ezra, sitting close enough now to feel the shift in the air around her the way his new Skill kept quietly logging, felt her go very still.

"The Nine," she repeated.

"You know the name."

"I know a redacted file with that designation exists. I don't have clearance for what's in it." Her eyes cut to Ezra, sharp and fast. "You're telling me an E-Rank courier walked into an unregistered Underlevel ruin and killed something with a redacted Guild classification."

"I'm telling you he didn't kill a rogue Awakened," Garrick said. "I'm telling you he killed something that's been hiding from a war that ended before either of you were born, and that war isn't as over as the Guild's paperwork likes to pretend."

*He's giving her more than he needs to,* Vaelgrith said, low and careful in the back of Ezra's skull. *Watch what he keeps for himself.*

Ezra caught it too, now that the voice had pointed it out. Garrick had said the Nine. He hadn't said Vaelgrith. He hadn't said god, or corpse, or anything that would point directly at what was sitting in Ezra's chest right now, using his own mouth to breathe.

Rourke pulled a chair out and sat down across from both of them, tablet forgotten on the table, and for the first time since the plaza that morning her expression cracked into something less procedural. Tired. Old, in a way twenty-six shouldn't look.

"My partner," she said, quiet, like the word cost her something to spend in front of strangers.

"Three years ago. Underlevel sweep, routine clearance, and something came out of the dark that didn't match any threat profile we'd logged. Tore through four Guild responders before it left. We buried what we could find of him in a sealed casket because there wasn't enough left for an open one."

She looked at Ezra directly then, and it wasn't the suspicious stare from the plaza anymore. It was something closer to a question she didn't want to ask out loud.

"Was that one of yours too," she said. "One of the Nine."

Ezra's mouth went dry. He didn't have an answer that was both honest and safe to give in a room the Guild almost certainly had recording, and he could feel Vaelgrith's attention sharpen behind his own thoughts, waiting to see which way he'd jump.

"I don't know," Ezra said, which was at least true. "I only found out these things exist yesterday."

Rourke held his eyes a long moment, weighing that, and whatever she found in his face seemed to land somewhere she could work with, because the hard procedural edge came back into her voice when she spoke again, but softer than it had been in the plaza.

"Here's what happens," she said. "I don't have grounds to hold you, not with a redacted classification muddying the file, and Voss just handed me enough reasonable doubt to keep this off the fast track to containment. You're released. Monitored, not detained. You report any further engagement with these things to me directly, not to Guild dispatch, not to anyone else. If I find out you've been hiding kills from me, that arrangement ends and it ends badly for you."

"And if I find another one first?"

"Then you call me before you touch it." She stood, tucking the tablet under her arm, and for a moment, something almost like sympathy crossed her face before she buried it back under procedure.

"Whatever's happening to you, Kade, I've buried one partner to something that came out of the dark down there. I'd rather not bury a civilian, too, even one who apparently just discovered he isn't one anymore."

She left without waiting for a response, boots sharp against the tile, and the door clicked shut behind her with a finality that felt bigger than the room deserved.

Garrick waited a beat, listening to her footsteps fade down the corridor before he finally let something like satisfaction show on his face.

"That went better than I expected," he said.

"You didn't tell her everything."

"No. And I'd advise you do the same, going forward. The Guild protects people. It also files them, catalogs them, and hands them to committees the moment they stop being useful and start being a liability. You don't want to be in either of those columns." Garrick pushed his chair back and stood, joints creaking audibly in the quiet room.

"Come find me tomorrow. My shop's on Thornwick, corner unit, sign says Voss & Sons even though there's never been a son. Bring questions. I'll have some of my own."

"That's it? You just walk out?"

"For now." Garrick paused at the door, and when he looked back his expression had gone somewhere older and heavier than the pawnshop-owner act he'd been running for the last hour.

"You survived one of the Nine with no training and no Abilities worth mentioning, Mr. Kade. That means either you're luckier than anyone I've met in forty years of this work, or the thing riding in your chest is a great deal more invested in keeping you alive than it's telling you. I'd want to know which, if I were you. I'd want to know soon."

He left, and Ezra sat alone in Room 4 with a dead god's silence pressing against the inside of his skull, loud in a way silence had no business being.

"He's right, isn't he," Ezra said finally. "You want me alive for more than just finishing the job."

Vaelgrith didn't answer for a long moment, and when it did, the amusement had gone out of the voice entirely.

*Ask me again after the second kill,* it said. *You may not like which answer is true.*