RReth was in the maintenance corridor on the Threshold's lower level, replacing a Rimforce conduit that had gone faulty.
He crouched down near him and watched him work for a moment before speaking. "You're doing that wrong," he said.
Reth looked up. His expression said he was deciding whether this was worth responding to. Then he looked back at the conduit. "There are two ways to replace a faulty conduit," he said. "The right way takes an hour. The way I'm doing it takes twenty minutes."
"The way you're doing it causes a secondary fault in the adjacent conduit in about three days."
Reth looked at him again. This time the expression was different.
"How do you know that," Reth said.
He had spent several Archive sessions in the first year of his reincarnation learning the foundational principles of Forge Rite from dead engineers. The information had been filed away and not used until now. "I know a dead engineer who made the same mistake," he said. "He wrote about it."
Reth looked at the conduit. Then he sat back on his heels and looked at him with the flat assessment of someone recalibrating. "Who are you."
"Someone who needs certain things," he said. "And who has certain things to offer in exchange."
This was how he had always started these conversations. Not with names, which were changeable, but with the shape of what was available on both sides. Reth was a man with contacts and transit knowledge and a history that had taken him out of the official world through a door that hadn't been entirely his choice. He was useful. He also needed things, which was apparent in how carefully he was conserving the Threshold's limited resources and how much attention he paid to the transit schedules on the Expanse's tracking board.
They talked for an hour.
By the end of it he understood Reth well enough to know that the man's contacts were real, that his transit knowledge covered four of the twelve worlds including Ferrath and a world called Kethvara he had not previously had information on, and that what Reth needed most was documentation. Not a false identity. A genuine one. The kind that could survive a Compact records check. The kind that required access to the registry system itself.
He had that access. Specifically, he had the access code sequence for Ferrath's identity issuance terminal still memorized from the Erren Cole construction. The terminal updated its security rotation every ninety days. It had been sixty-two days. He had twenty-eight days before the code became useless.
He told Reth this without telling him how he had it.
Reth looked at him for a long moment. Then he said: "What do you actually need."
He told him. Not everything. The shape of it. Safe transit off the Expanse when the time came. Knowledge of the Kethvara administrative structure, which the systems had flagged as relevant to the Representative's secondary financial holdings. Access to the Threshold's communication relay, which the Archive had told him reached further than official Compact channels because it operated on a frequency the Compact didn't monitor because they didn't know it existed.
Reth listened to all of it.
Then he said: "The communication relay is mine. I built it."
"I know," he said.
Reth looked at him with the expression of a man deciding whether to be annoyed or impressed. He settled somewhere between the two.
"You've been here two days," Reth said.
"I've been paying attention for two days," he said. "I paid attention for months before I had the ability to do anything with it. I got better at it."
Reth looked at the faulty conduit. Then he looked back at him.
"Show me the right way to do this," he said.
He showed him. It took the hour Reth had said it would take. While they worked Reth talked, the way people talk when their hands are busy and their guard is partially down, and he listened to everything and filed it all and spoke only when a direct question required an answer.
By the time the conduit was correctly seated he had four additional pieces of information about Kethvara's administrative structure and a working arrangement with the only person in the Threshold who had a communication relay that reached the worlds he needed to reach.
He went back to the room and sat on the floor and thought.
The systems were quiet. They were doing that more often now, leaving him space to work through things before offering their contribution. He had started to think of it as a kind of respect. He was not sure if that was accurate. He filed the uncertainty and moved on.
He thought about the Representative.
The Representative had gone offensive, the Mirror had told him before Velmoor. He was pulling threads. Looking for whoever was circling him. The internal affairs official who had received the first letter was frightened. The law firm inquiry was out there, active, doing its work. But the Representative was smart enough and fast enough that the pressure he had applied through letters and unsigned inquiries was not going to be sufficient on its own.
He needed the second layer to land.
The second layer was the document in the protected deposit. The Clan Head's handwriting. The names, the dates, the sequence of decisions. He had placed it in the deposit under the protected disclosure provision. Placed it and done nothing with it. The provision allowed him to authorize partial release to specific parties without triggering the full public disclosure. He could send the relevant section, the section with the Representative's name appearing four times, directly to the Compact's internal affairs division without the document itself becoming public.
The internal affairs official who had received his first letter was frightened. A frightened official who suddenly received a protected disclosure from a separate source, corroborating the information in the letter he had been sitting on, was a different animal from a frightened official acting alone.
He pulled out the journal and started writing the partial release authorization.
He would send it through Reth's communication relay in the morning.
Fen appeared in the doorway while he was writing.
"The boy in the common room," Fen said. "He hasn't eaten today."
He kept writing. "I know."
"Are we going to do something about that."
He looked up at Fen. "Are you asking me or telling me."
Fen thought about that. "Telling you," he said.
He looked at Fen for a moment. Then he looked back at the journal.
"There is food in the supply allocation we were given when we arrived," he said. "I have not eaten most of mine. You can give him what you think is appropriate."
Fen nodded. He started to leave.
"Fen," he said.
Fen stopped.
"Find out where he came from," he said. "And why. Not aggressively. Just the way you talk to people."
Fen looked at him. "You think he's useful."
"I think he's a sixteen-year-old boy who came to the Hollow Expanse alone," he said. "I want to know what he was running from."
Fen left.
He went back to the partial release authorization. He wrote it carefully, the legal language precise, the provenance chain clear, the specific provision code cited so there was no ambiguity about the legitimacy of the release. When it was done he read it twice and folded it and put it in the journal.
In the morning he would give it to Reth.
He lay down on the cot and looked at the Expanse ceiling above him. In Veil-thinned space even the ceiling looked slightly different. A quality of reduced solidity. Not fragile. Just less committed to being matter than it would be in normal space.
He thought about the Nullpath channels in his chest. Null Ember. The lowest rank. So low it barely registered in the cultivation hierarchy that had been used to justify his conviction, his collaring, his assignment to Level Eight and the Trench and every other thing that had been done to him on the basis that he was powerless and powerlessness was permanent.
He thought about the Clan Head's face in the gallery, looking away first.
He thought about what Null Ember would become in a year.
He closed his eyes and went to sleep.