The next level of the city smelled different.
Not better, exactly. Cleaner, perhaps, but that wasn't quite it either. It smelled like money that had forgotten it was money — the kind of smell that accumulated when resources had been abundant long enough to become invisible. The streets here were stone-paved, actual stone, not the packed-earth-and-rubble of the lower district, and they were wide enough for two carts to pass each other without negotiation. The buildings stood straight. The windows had glass.
He walked for a while and let the difference settle over him.
The people here moved differently. Not faster — in some ways slower, with the ease of those who had nowhere urgent to be because urgency was a thing that happened to other people. Their marks were brighter, uniformly so; here a dim blue would have been conspicuous. He saw several that burned the clear, hard white he had seen on the one man in the lower district, and he noted that nobody gave those people wider orbits because there was no need to. Everyone here was already giving everyone else roughly equal berths. The deference operated at a different frequency up here, more subtle, a whole vocabulary of slightly inclined heads and stepped-aside shoulders that took him a while to fully read.
He was reading it when someone tried to rob him.
'Bag,' a voice said.
He stopped.
Two of them, stepped out from an alley mouth, young and lean and dressed in the grey-brown of the lower district, which meant they had come up through the gate the same way he had — without the gate exactly consenting. One held a short blade, the cheap folded-iron kind that would hold an edge for about three months before it started to give. The other had nothing visible but was standing slightly wider than his friend, which meant he was the one who thought he could grab.
The one with the blade said: 'Now.'
He considered them. The blade-holder had done this before — the grip was relaxed, which was either confidence or training, and the positioning was correct, angled to cut off the obvious retreat routes. The grabber was newer to it, shoulders too high, weight too far forward.
'No,' he said.
The blade-holder blinked. This was not, apparently, the expected response.
'What?'
'No,' he said again, the same way, the same flat register.
The grabber moved. He stepped sideways — not back, sideways — and caught the man's extended arm at the wrist and used the momentum to redirect, not to throw, just to put the man between himself and the blade. The grabber stumbled and caught himself on the alley wall. The blade-holder had to check his step to avoid his partner. Two seconds had passed.
'Walk away,' he said.
They looked at each other.
They walked away.
He watched them go, not because he was concerned but because their exit route told him something about how this district was structured — which alleys connected to which, which directions were preferred by people moving quickly and quietly. He filed this too.
Then he kept walking.
✦
He spent the rest of the morning learning the mid-level district the same way he had learned the lower one — on foot, methodically, storing information with the patience of a man who knew that information was the only currency he currently held. He found the market district, the administrative quarter where men in matching coats moved between large stone buildings carrying documents, the residential streets that grew progressively quieter and better-maintained as they approached the next wall.
There was another gate. Of course there was.
He did not approach it. Not yet. He stood at a distance and watched the checkpoint process and noted that the crystals they used here were larger, and the guards were more numerous, and the marks required to pass were the white-bright ones, all of them, without exception. He noted this and moved on.
He needed three things. Food, because the cold alertness that had sustained him through the morning was starting to thin at the edges. Water, same reason. And information — specific information, the kind that gave context to what he had already observed, names for things, rules written out rather than implied.
The food he resolved by finding a back-alley stall selling something grey and hot that he chose not to inspect too closely. It cost nothing because he had nothing, which created a brief impasse that he resolved by helping the stall operator move a stack of crates from one side of the narrow space to the other. The operator, a woman of indeterminate age with a dim blue mark and the perpetually assessing eyes of someone who had learned that generosity was a transaction, watched him work for a moment, decided the rate was acceptable, and handed him a bowl without comment.
He ate standing. The grey thing was dense and not unpleasant and he ate it with the focused efficiency of someone treating eating as a task to complete rather than an experience to have.
The water he found at a public basin near the market square, stone-sided and slightly green, but running clear from a pipe that emerged from the wall above it. He drank. He noted a man watching him from across the square — middle-aged, unremarkable coat, mark that glowed a steady mid-blue, posture of someone trying to appear as though he wasn't watching.
He looked directly at the man.
The man looked away. Then, a moment later, walked away.
The information he found in the market.
✦
Markets, in his experience — and he was not sure where that experience came from, only that it was there, reliable and detailed and completely without context — markets were the most efficient places to gather intelligence about how a place worked, because a market was a place where value was constantly being negotiated aloud. You listened to the negotiations and you learned what mattered and how much.
He moved through the stalls and listened.
Rank was the word they used. Not mark, not sigil — rank. 'His rank won't get him past the second gate, he's only ever been a solid C.' 'They say she tested into B-rank last season, first in her family to manage it.' 'The Covenant auditors came through last week, pulled two F-ranks who'd been claiming D-rank work rates, you know what they do with that.' The last one delivered with a particular flatness that made the listener understand exactly what they did with that without requiring elaboration.
The ranks went by letter, F through S, ascending. F was the bottom — unranked in practical terms, the lower district, the ditch. S was a category discussed in the hushed register reserved for things that were technically real but sufficiently distant from daily life as to be effectively mythological. 'My grandfather saw an S-rank during the Ferron border campaign,' one vendor told another. 'Said the man walked through a line of artillery and the shells just — stopped. Hung in the air. Sixty of them, just hanging, and he walked through the middle like it was raining.' The other vendor made a skeptical sound. 'Your grandfather also said he saw the Axiom Sovereign before the purge.' A pause. 'He did.' The first vendor said it quietly, and the skepticism in the other man's face shifted to something more complicated.
The Axiom Sovereign.
He let that phrase sit in his mind and saw if anything attached to it. Something did — not a memory, exactly, but the ghost of one. A shape. A room with high stone walls. A sound like every bell in the world.
He set it aside.
He spent another hour in the market and left knowing the following: the city was called Veth, and it was one of seven major cities in this region of Caldera. Caldera was governed by six factions — collectively the Covenant — whose names he filed: Ferron, Meridian, Veyne, Solara, Karath, Voss. Ferron maintained the walls and the gates. The rank system was the Covenant's architecture, its foundation and its primary tool. The lower district was called the Dregs. The word was used with the casual cruelty of people who had never had to live there.
He had everything he needed for now.
He went back to the Dregs.
✦
Not because he had to. He went back because the Dregs was where he had woken, which meant it was the territory he knew best, which meant it was where he was least likely to encounter something he hadn't already assessed. He was operating with a deficit — no resources, no contacts, no context for his own history — and in a deficit you did not take on new unknowns without reason. You worked with what you had. You built from the bottom.
He found a building three streets from the ditch where he had woken. The building was abandoned — not recently, the abandonment had the settled quality of years, the kind where the absence of people had been absorbed into the structure itself, become part of its texture. The lower floor was a former storage space, high-ceilinged and without windows, a single door that still had a functional lock. The lock was the only functional thing about it. He checked the building's load-bearing elements with the methodical attention of someone who understood what he was looking for, and found them intact. The roof leaked in two places. The floor was stone.
He was in the right place.
He spent the last two hours of daylight sitting in the empty room with his back against the wall and the single slit of light from under the door gradually reddening and then going grey and then going dark. He thought about the crystal cracking. He thought about the mark that wasn't there. He thought about the word the market vendor had said in that quieter voice — Axiom Sovereign — and the shape that had risen and subsided in his mind like something briefly surfacing.
He thought: I don't know who I am.
He thought: That's fine. I know what I can see.
He closed his eyes and went to sleep on the stone floor of the empty building, and if he dreamed, he didn't remember it.
✦