Chapter 37: The Hounds
The Pryce search unit moved out before dawn.
Four operatives. No uniforms. No scanners. No resonance equipment.
Manual tracking only.
Soh Pryce's orders had been specific: no bloodline pings, no Veil-side probes, no digital trails. Whatever had woken up had swallowed their signal like smoke eating a candle. Using resonance to find it would be like shouting into a room that ate sound.
So they used feet.
The team leader was a woman named Dara Pryce. Not a direct heir. A cousin branch. Useful enough to trust with sensitive work, expendable enough to deny if things went wrong.
She was good at her job because she didn't need the Veil to hunt.
She needed patterns.
The four of them landed in Vanta City on a commercial flight. Civilian clothes. Civilian luggage. Civilian faces.
Dara checked into a mid-range hotel in Gleamward, two blocks from the Ward 7 border. She unpacked a single bag, laid out a paper map of Vanta City on the bed, and drew a circle around the only area that mattered.
Ward 7.
The signal had been too brief to triangulate precisely. But Soh Pryce's web had caught the direction before it went dark: west-central Vanta, low-density resonance zone, mixed civilian-contractor territory.
Ward 7 fit like a glove.
Dara studied the map.
Ward 7 was messy. A seam district where Lowring bled into Gleamward, full of clinics, outreach centers, transit hubs, and the kind of quiet alleys where people disappeared without paperwork.
Finding one person here without resonance methods was like finding a specific grain of sand on a beach.
But Dara didn't need to find the person.
She needed to find the absence.
That was the trick Soh Pryce had explained, his voice cold and precise.
"Whatever this descendant carries," he'd said, "it hides. So don't look for presence. Look for holes."
Holes.
Places where the Veil should register something but didn't. Scanner dead zones. Resonance gaps. Spots where the city's background hum went briefly, inexplicably quiet.
Dara sent her team into Ward 7 in pairs.
Two walked the Veilward Strip posing as clinic outreach volunteers. Clipboard. Lanyard. Smile.
Two worked Lowring's edges, drifting through markets and noodle carts, listening for contractor gossip.
Dara herself sat in a cafe on the Gleamward side of the border and watched foot traffic through the window.
She wasn't looking for faces.
She was looking for gaps.
By midday, the first pair reported back.
"Nothing unusual on the Strip," one said, voice low over a disposable phone. "Clinics are running normal. One medical restriction flag on a contractor named Kairo Nox. Overexertion syndrome."
Dara filed the name away. Not important yet. Just texture.
"Scanner coverage?" she asked.
"Standard civic grid. Blueglass-branded. But…"
A pause.
"There's a gap," the operative continued. "A service alley off the Strip. Yesterday's scan logs show a three-second blackout. No malfunction report. No maintenance ticket."
Dara's pen stopped.
Three seconds.
A blackout that nobody filed paperwork for.
In a city that filed paperwork for everything.
"Location," she said.
The operative gave her the coordinates.
Dara marked it on her paper map with a small x.
Then she asked, "What's near that alley."
"A noodle cart. A utility panel. And a clinic. Border-zone licensed. Operator named Varrik Sain."
Dara circled the clinic.
Two names now. Kairo Nox. Varrik Sain.
Not targets.
Anchors.
People near the hole.
By evening, the second pair reported from Lowring.
"Street talk is mostly noise," one said. "But there's a whisper about a guide who 'survived clean' from a corridor run. No name. Just a reputation."
Dara's eyes narrowed. "Connected to the clinic?"
"Maybe. The broker scene down here is tight. There's a bar that keeps coming up. No name on the surface. Locals call it 'the floor.'"
Marrow's bar.
Dara didn't know that yet. But she could feel the shape forming.
A clinic on the border.
A contractor with a medical flag.
A three-second scanner blackout.
A bar with no public name.
And somewhere in that constellation, a Pryce descendant who had woken up and immediately gone invisible.
Dara folded the map and slipped it into her jacket.
She didn't report to Soh Pryce yet. Not until she had more than shapes.
But she allowed herself one thought as she left the cafe and stepped into Gleamward's clean evening air.
Whoever this descendant was, they weren't running.
They were hiding in plain sight.
And that meant they had help.
Good help.
Dara smiled faintly.
Good help meant structure. Structure meant patterns. Patterns meant trails.
And trails, no matter how silent, always led somewhere.
She turned toward Ward 7 and began to walk.
Not fast.
Not slow.
Patient.
The way a hound walked when it knew the scent was close.