The salon was a four-story building near the upper first tier boundary. Old construction, well-maintained, the kind of place that advertised nothing because it didn't need to. Its clients knew where it was.
He spent the first day on approach routes. The building had two street-facing sides and two that backed against adjacent structures. The back side abutted a narrow service corridor that the adjacent building's maintenance staff used twice daily. He timed both passes.
The second day he walked the service corridor himself, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon, both times with enough purpose in his movement that he read as someone with a reason to be there. Nobody stopped him. Nobody looked twice.
The building's rear had a single service entrance, Veilgrade locked. D-rank, one passive function, one active. The passive function would be the lock itself. The active would be an alert of some kind.
He had no cultivation to work with. He could not engage the lock on its own terms.
He thought about it that evening and the systems were quiet, which he had come to understand meant they were waiting to see what he would come up with before offering anything.
He came up with something.
The lock responded to an authorized Rimforce signature. It was a standard D-rank mechanism. Standard meant documented. Documented meant that somewhere in Ferrath's Forge Rite patent registry there was a technical specification for the exact Rimforce signature the lock accepted.
Not the specific authorization code, but the frequency and format of the signal type. Which meant that anyone with Ember Vein cultivation and access to the patent specification could produce a signal that the lock would read as structurally valid, even without the specific authorization.
It would not open the lock. But it would keep the alert function from firing while he worked on the physical mechanism, which was a separate and more manageable problem.
He needed someone with Ember Vein.
He did not have Cal here.
He thought about who he had seen in the lower second tier in the four days since he'd arrived. The contractors, the transitional workers, the people in the mid-tier boarding houses who were between assignments.
He had noticed a woman two floors below him in the boarding house who moved with the particular quality of someone with low-level cultivation. The small things. The way she carried weight, the way she stood when she was waiting for something. He had not spoken to her yet.
He went downstairs.
Her name was Lira. She was from a mid-tier world, in Velmoor on a short contractor assignment that had run over its original duration and left her in a holding pattern, waiting for paperwork that the Compact's administrative system was taking its time processing. She was not happy about this. She was direct about not being happy about it, which he found useful because direct people were easier to read than careful ones.
He sat at the same table in the boarding house's common room and let the conversation develop naturally and within twenty minutes knew three things about her. She had Ember Vein. She needed money. And she had a specific kind of practical intelligence that did not ask too many questions when the practical situation was clear.
He told her what he needed. Not all of it. The signal type, the frequency, the duration. A job. One night. Nothing that would put her name in any record if it went correctly.
She asked one question. "What happens if it goes wrong."
"Then we both leave fast and nothing connects us to the building."
She thought about it. "How much."
He told her. It was more than he had. He had a plan for that too.
She agreed.
---
The Clan Head's ninth-day session was two days out.
He spent the first day acquiring what he needed for the lock's physical mechanism, which was a simpler problem than the alert. A standard-gauge tension tool and a pick came from a hardware supply depot in the lower second tier, sold without question alongside legitimate Forge Rite maintenance equipment.
He also thought about what happened after he found the document.
Not the document itself. What he did with it.
The systems had said the Clan Representative would move faster than expected and in a wrong direction if he proceeded with the original plan. The document in the Clan Head's cabinet was what he needed before moving. But he still didn't fully understand why.
He asked.
[The document,] the Archive said, [contains the Clan Head's written account of the decision process behind your conviction. Who was approached. Who agreed. What was offered in exchange. The Clan Representative's name appears in it with specific detail.]
[If you move against the Representative before you have the document,] the Mirror continued, [the Representative finds out through the rival you intend to use. He panics. He goes to the Clan Head. The Clan Head destroys the document to protect himself. The record is gone.]
[But if you have the document first,] the Archive said, [the Representative has no idea it exists. You move against him with the document already secured. And when his house falls, the Clan Head falls with him. Both at once. From one source.]
He thought about that.
"You're telling me to change the order."
[We are telling you what happens in each order,] the Mirror said. [The choice is yours.]
He looked at the ceiling of his small room in the lower second tier of Velmoor and thought about the Clan Head. The man who had signed the paperwork in the gallery while the verdict was being read. Who had looked back at him for one fraction of a second before looking away.
He had been planning to take the Clan Head last. The biggest target. The final piece.
Maybe that needed to change.
He had two days before the ninth-day session. He had Lira and a tension tool and a specific cabinet in a specific private room. He had systems that could see fragments of what was coming and were now willing to talk about them.
He had a list that was not going to wait forever.
He got up off the floor and started planning.