He found the first one on the second morning.
Not by accident. He had been watching the transit routes in and out of the lower second tier since Fen's warning and had identified three positions that a small professional team would use to cover the most ground with the fewest people. A junction near the main depot. A crossing point between the lower and mid tiers. And the area around the boarding houses that catered to contractors, which was where someone looking for a fugitive would start because it was where people with no fixed address tended to end up.
The man was at the junction. He was not obviously watching anything. He had a cup of something hot and he was leaning against the wall of a building reading a thin document and he was doing it in a position that gave him a clear view of the main foot traffic in four directions.
He watched him from across the junction for twenty minutes before moving on.
He found the second one at the mid-tier crossing. A woman this time, younger, moving through the crossing slowly in the way of someone who had a destination but was in no hurry to reach it. She turned at the same corner twice in the space of fifteen minutes. Nobody turned at the same corner twice.
Two confirmed. Three to five total. Spread across the tier in a coverage pattern.
He went back to the boarding house and sat on the floor and thought about it.
The recovery team was professional. That told him something about how seriously the Clan Head was taking the missing document. A professional team cost money. It required coordination. The Clan Head had moved fast, which meant he had contacts already available, which meant this was not the first time he had used private recovery services.
He thought about the timeline. The document had been taken four nights ago. The Clan Head had noticed it missing the morning after. He had had three days to sit in quiet panic before making a move. The team had been active for at least two days based on Fen's information.
He had maybe days before they narrowed their search enough to find the boarding house.
He needed to move again. He also needed to stop moving in ways that consumed resources he didn't have.
The systems came on quietly.
[The team leader,] the Archive said, [is a man named Drev. He has done recovery work for the Kelvari Clan before. Twice in the past four years.]
"What kind of recovery."
[People. Both times. Both times the people he recovered did not appear in any public record afterward.]
He sat with that.
"He knows what the Clan Head does with what he brings back."
[Yes.]
He thought about that carefully. A recovery team leader who knew what happened to the people he returned was not a contractor with clean hands. He was a participant. That changed the shape of things slightly.
[There is something else,] the Mirror said. [Drev has a contact inside the Compact's administrative system on Velmoor. That is how the secondary notation was added to your record. Drev requested it. Not the Clan Head directly. Drev.]
"He escalated my record himself."
[Yes. It makes his targets easier to detain. Anyone carrying you in under a dangerous notation gets administrative cover for whatever methods they use.]
He looked at the wall.
So the dangerous notation was Drev's tool, not the Clan Head's direct order. That was useful. It meant the notation had a source that could be traced to a specific person through a specific administrative request. That was a thread.
He pulled out the journal and wrote two things down.
Drev. Administrative contact. Notation request.
He put the journal away and thought about Fen.
Fen was staying three streets over in a room he had paid for with the last of whatever money he had arrived in Velmoor with. He was running out. He had not said this directly but it was visible in how he had looked at the food in the boarding house common room the previous morning.
He did not want to use Fen for what he was thinking. He thought about it for a long time and kept coming back to the same place. He did not want to. He was going to anyway because Fen was the only person currently available and the window was shrinking.
He went to find him.
---
Fen was in his room. He answered the door with the look of someone who had been staring at the ceiling and was not sorry to be interrupted.
"I need you to do something uncomfortable," he said.
Fen looked at him. "How uncomfortable."
"You need to approach one of the people looking for me."
Fen was very still.
"Not to help them," he said. "To talk to them. Specifically to the woman at the mid-tier crossing. You approach her as a contractor who has heard there is money available for information on a fugitive. You tell her you have seen someone matching the description in the lower fourth tier, near the agricultural processing depot."
"The lower fourth tier," Fen said.
"Does not exist. There is no fourth tier in Velmoor's lower district. But someone who is not from Velmoor originally would not know that immediately. It would take them time to check."
Fen looked at him for a long moment. "And while they are checking."
"I move. And I find a way to deal with the team's administrative contact inside the Compact system."
"Deal with."
"Remove the notation from my record."
Fen sat down on the edge of his cot. He did not say anything for a while. Then he said: "If she realizes I'm feeding her false information."
"She won't immediately. By the time she does you are already gone from the conversation and have nothing connecting you to me."
"Except that I delivered two letters yesterday to locations that are now going to start causing problems for specific people."
He said nothing. That was true.
"I am building a list of things that connect me to you," Fen said. Not angry. Just counting. "And the list is getting long."
"Yes."
"And you are aware that the charge on your record. The sexual assault. If I am found in proximity to you it becomes the first thing anyone looks at when they look at me."
"Yes."
Fen looked at the floor. "In the block," he said, "when Harrow was making his comments. Every meal. There was a day, maybe three weeks into it, when one of the older men in the block said something to me. He said the Grade Zero was probably guilty and that anyone spending time near him should think about what that said about them." He paused. "I moved my bunk two sections further away the next day."
He said nothing.
"I am telling you this," Fen said, "because I want you to know that I know exactly what being associated with you costs and I am choosing it anyway. So that you do not think I am naive." He looked up. "I am not naive. I just think you didn't do it and I think what is being done to you is wrong and I have spent my whole life doing the practical thing and I am very tired of that."
He looked at Fen.
"The lower fourth tier," Fen said. "Near the agricultural processing depot."
"Yes."
Fen stood up and got his coat.
---
He moved while Fen was working.
A new room, further into the lower tier, smaller, with a window that looked at a wall instead of a street. He paid three days upfront with the last of what he had left from the letters job, which had been the fee he charged Sael's boarding house for information on the Compact's administrative structure, which Sael had paid without asking why he needed the money, which told him something about how much she wanted him cooperative.
He sat in the new room and thought about the administrative contact.
He needed access to the Compact's administrative system to remove the notation. He had no such access. He had no cultivation, no Forge Rite tools capable of interfacing with a secured system, and no contacts inside the administrative structure.
What he had was Sael's offer still open. Unaddressed. She had resources and she had said she wanted to move in the same direction. He did not trust her. He had said so directly and she had not argued. But distrust and usefulness were not the same thing.
He thought about it.
Then he thought about what trusting Sael would cost him versus what not trusting her would cost him and he arrived at a number that was not comfortable but was honest.
He sent a message through the boarding house's communication service to the contact address she had given him on her way out of the room. Four words.
I have a job.
She responded in two hours. An address in the mid-second tier. Tomorrow morning.
He folded the message and put it in the journal.
That evening Fen came back.
He looked pale but steady. The woman had listened. Had taken the information. Had asked two questions, both of which Fen had answered with the prepared details they had gone over. She had given him a small amount of money for the tip, which Fen held out now.
He looked at it. "Keep it."
"It's yours. I did this for you."
"You need it more than I do right now."
Fen looked at the money in his hand. Then he put it away.
"She believed me," he said. "I think. She wrote something down. She didn't seem suspicious." He paused. "She had a way of looking at you. Not at your face exactly. At everything around your face. Like she was checking something."
He filed that. Drev's team was trained. The misdirection had probably bought two days. Maybe three.
"You should stay away from the mid-tier crossing for a week," he said.
Fen nodded.
There was a sound from the corridor outside, footsteps, two sets, moving past the door without stopping. They both went still until the sound was gone.
"This is what it's going to be," Fen said quietly. Not a complaint. A statement.
"For a while," he said.
Fen looked at him. "How long is a while."
He thought about the list. The names in order. The Clan Representative letters now moving through the Compact's internal system, opening questions that would take time to become problems. The Clan Head still in his quiet panic. The document sitting in the protected deposit. The three names from Sael. His own cultivation at 0.5% and rebuilding at a rate that was almost insultingly slow.
"A while," he said again.
Fen accepted that and left.
He lay down on the floor of the new room and looked at the ceiling and the Mirror gave him a fragment before he could stop it.
Himself. A corridor. Running.
Gone before he could see where.