Devin Rowe arrived in Bloc Seven on a Thursday with a practiced smile and a proposition that sounded, on the surface, like exactly what Sid needed.
He was twenty-four, Zone Two by accent, with the specific polish of someone who had grown up adjacent to money without quite having it himself. He said he ran a trading network across Blocs Two and Six and was looking to expand into Seven. He said the arrangement would be simple Sid's information, Rowe's connections, shared returns. He said it the way people say things when they have rehearsed them enough times that the rehearsal has disappeared.
Sid knew within ten minutes that something was wrong.
He couldn't name what. The numbers were right. The connections were real he checked two of them through Prem before the end of the first conversation and both held. The proposition was structured correctly, with the right kind of mutual exposure to keep both sides honest.
But something was wrong.
He said yes anyway.
He told himself it was because the arrangement had genuine value. He told himself it was strategic. What it actually was and he would understand this later, when the damage was done and Marta was looking at him across her table with the specific expression of someone who had expected better was that Devin Rowe had looked at him with something close to admiration, and six-year-old Sid, who had grown up being looked at with wariness and confusion and occasionally fear, had not known how to defend against admiration.
Marcus Hale had been very good at receiving admiration.
Sid Cole had not learned yet that Marcus Hale's appetites were still in him, smaller now but present, waiting for the right conditions.
The boundary dispute happened three weeks in.
Rowe had a competing arrangement with a Bloc Six operator one he had not disclosed, that predated their agreement by six months. When the two arrangements overlapped on a specific supply route through the Bloc Seven eastern lane, the Bloc Six operator sent two men to make the overlap's consequences clear.
The two men came in the evening. They didn't go to Rowe. They came to Sid.
Because Sid's name was on the arrangement. Because Rowe had made sure of that.
Prem found out first, he always found out first, and came to the building at a run and got Sid off the street before the two men arrived at Building Four. They sat on the internal staircase, second floor, listening to the men knock at the ground level door and then leave, and Prem said nothing until the sound of their footsteps was gone.
Then: "How bad."
"Bad enough," Sid said.
"Marta."
"Yes."
He went to Marta that evening. He told her everything the arrangement, the undisclosed prior agreement, the two men. He did not minimise it or reframe it. He had done something that had put Bloc Seven in the middle of someone else's dispute and Marta needed the full picture.
She listened without interrupting.
When he finished, she was quiet for long enough that the quiet had weight.
"Why did you say yes to him," she said.
He could have given her the strategic answer. He gave her the true one instead. "He looked at me like I was capable of something," he said. "I'm not used to that."
Marta looked at him steadily. "You are capable of something," she said. "That's exactly why you can't afford to let someone else decide what it is."
He sat with that.
"Fix it," she said. "However, you need to fix it. And then come back and tell me how."
He fixed it in four days. Not through confrontation through the one thing the Bloc Six operator wanted, which was the route, not the dispute. Sid gave him the route. Rowe lost the arrangement. The two men did not come back.
He went back to Marta and told her.
She nodded once. "The admiration," she said. "Learn to see it coming."
"I already have," he said.
"Good," she said. And that was the end of it.
He walked home through the lane and thought about Marcus Hale, who had spent a lifetime collecting admiration the way other people collected debts hungrily, without examining the cost. He thought I am not him. I am not going to be him. But I must know where he still lives in me.
He touched the stone.
He kept walking.