He met Fen at the street corner he had named in the second message.
Fen looked shaken but steady. He had been approached. Not by Drev himself but by one of the women from the team, the one from the mid-tier crossing. She had found him at the market and had been very calm and very clear about the situation. She had offered him money. She had then explained, equally calmly, what association with a Grade Zero sexual assault case would do to his contractor record going forward, legal or not.
"What did you say," he said.
"I told her I didn't know what she was talking about," Fen said. "Then I left."
He looked at Fen.
"She'll try again," he said.
"I know."
"And she'll have more to offer or more to threaten next time."
"I know." Fen met his eyes. "I'm not telling you this so you'll tell me to walk away. I'm telling you so you know the timeline."
He nodded. "Tonight," he said. "We leave tonight."
Fen did not argue. He had been ready for tonight since the woman had approached him at the market. He packed what he had, which was not much, in under five minutes.
"Where are we going," Fen said.
"Off-world," he said. "The Hollow Expanse first. Then we decide."
Fen looked at him. "The Hollow Expanse."
"The transit tracking doesn't function properly there. Veil-thinning disrupts the spatial anchor signals." He paused. "Drev cannot follow us there without losing all coordinate reference for his team."
"And us," Fen said.
"And us," he agreed. "But I know what to look for in Veil-thinned space. I have read enough about it."
Fen looked at the wall for a moment. Then he picked up his bag.
He sent a final message to Sael before they left. Two sentences. Leaving tonight. The deposit reference numbers are in the journal copy I am leaving with you.
He had made a copy of the journal's key entries over the previous two days. Not everything. The names, the dates, the deposit references, the legal provision codes. Enough for Sael to continue moving the pieces he had placed if he was unable to for any reason.
He did not fully trust Sael. He also was not willing to let the work collapse if something happened to him in the next forty-eight hours.
He left the copy at the message service for Sael to collect.
There was one more thing before the dock.
He had been aware, for four days, that Selira Voss was in the city. The systems had confirmed she was running a conviction review. He had turned it over carefully and arrived at the same conclusion each time. He did not know what she wanted. The Mirror had given him a fragment of her face twice now, both times at an angle that told him nothing about the expression behind it. Both times he had filed it and moved on.
He was going to keep moving on.
Whatever Selira Voss was doing in Velmoor, and whatever her conviction review was actually for, the timing of her arrival three days after him was not something he was willing to call coincidental without more information. He did not have more information. He did not have time to get more information. What he had was a cargo vessel and a window and Fen standing by the door with a bag on his shoulder.
He would find out what she was eventually. Everything became findable eventually.
He went to find the third cargo transit.
It was running a route to a mid-tier world called Sethis, which was not where he was going, but which passed through a Hollow Expanse corridor on the way. He had found this on the transit registry two days ago and had been holding it as an option. Now it was the only option.
The dock was in the lower first tier, the kind used by small-scale cargo operators and independent traders. The transit was a four-person vessel, crew of two, carrying processed Forge Rite materials to Sethis.
He found a public terminal two streets from the dock and ran eight requests through the emergency document verification service under the Erren Cole identity in thirty minutes. The emergency service paid more per request and processed overnight. Enough.
He paid the dock supervisor a passage fee for two to Sethis, with a request to be dropped at the Hollow Expanse corridor transit point rather than the final destination. The dock supervisor looked at him and looked at Fen and looked at the money and made the same calculation every useful person in a transit dock made.
"Corridor transit," the man said. "Not the final approach. We drop you at the Expanse boundary and you figure out the rest."
"That is all I need," he said.
They boarded an hour later.
The vessel was small enough that they were in the cargo hold with the Forge Rite materials rather than any dedicated passenger space. He sat with his back against a crate and Fen sat across from him and neither of them said anything for a while as the vessel lifted and the transit corridor opened.
He felt the Hollow Expanse before he heard the vessel's systems report it. A change in the quality of the air. A thinning. Like a room with slightly less pressure than the one before it, the specific atmospheric change that meant the Veil was no longer operating at its normal density in the space around them.
He had never been in Veil-thinned space before. He had read about it extensively in Voss's notebook and in the Archive sessions since.
What he had not read was what it would do to the Nullpath seed.
He noticed it when the thinning reached a certain level. Not pain. Not the Archive's quiet reduction or the Mirror's occasional clarity-drain. Something different. The Nullpath seed in his scar tissue was responding to the thinned Veil the way a plant responds to water. Drawing in. Absorbing. The cold sensation was back but larger now, not a localized pulling at a single lock but a general quality of the air around him becoming slightly more absent.
He sat very still and paid attention to it.
[The Hollow Expanse is accelerating the Nullpath development,] the Archive said quietly. [The seed requires Veil-thinning to reach the next stage of activation. This is why the condition for awakening was listed as unknown. It was not unknown. It was specific. We chose not to tell you until you were here.]
He looked at the cargo hold wall.
"You chose not to tell me," he said.
[You would have sought the Expanse earlier than was advisable. The Velmoor sequence needed to complete first.]
He sat with that. Then he said: "What is the next stage of activation."
[The Nullpath seed will fully integrate with the scar tissue over the next eighteen to thirty-six hours in this environment. After integration, the pathway structure that was destroyed by the Voidrot will be partially replaced by Nullpath channels. Not the Rimheart channels that existed originally. Something different.] A pause. [Something the system was not built to categorize.]
He looked at his hands in the dim cargo hold.
Fen had fallen asleep against the opposite crate. He slept like someone who had made a decision and was not revisiting it.
He looked at his hands and thought about the Voidrot eating through his pathway structures eight months ago on a transport ship while he sat with his back against the wall and thought about how to start from nothing.
He thought about the physician whose practice was closed. About the Clan Head's handwriting on a document that was now in a legal deposit in Velmoor. About a young man who had moved his bunk two sections further away and then came back anyway.
He thought about Omnipotence, which was what he was building toward, which was a word that appeared once in Rivum's history before someone went through the trouble of removing it.
The Nullpath cold moved through him steadily, filling in spaces that had been empty for eight months, building something in the architecture of his destroyed channels that was not what had been there before.
He did not sleep.
He sat in the cargo hold and let it happen and thought about what came next.