The train's magnetic frequency shifted before the announcement, and the cabin completed its return to vertical seating position, and the Southern Border City's platform resolved outside the window with the specific quality of a place that had been built around a serious purpose rather than a civic one.
He had been here twice before — the Oakhaven deployment and the Illinois City purge. The dust and the dry pine smell and the quality of the heat were the same as he remembered, the city's arid climate consistent with the geography that put it at the empire's frontier rather than its centre.
He took a cab to the military headquarters.
The duty guard had the specific posture of someone who had been doing this shift long enough that his posture had become the posture and did not deviate from it for events that had not previously occurred on this shift.
Markus's badge read at the scanner. The light went from red to green. The doors opened.
The guard's posture made a small adjustment.
He said nothing, which was the professional response, and watched Markus walk through the doors, which was the only available subsequent response.
The receptionist on duty was managing three screens simultaneously with the focused efficiency of someone whose job at a military installation required that kind of bandwidth.
"Quarters of Sloane and Isolde Blackwell," Markus said.
"Appointment or summons?" She did not look up.
"Personal visit," he said.
She looked up, which was the standard response to an unscheduled personal visitor at a military installation. Then she looked at him specifically, which was a different response. Then she looked at him with the expression of someone who has just made a recognition they had not anticipated making in this context on this shift.
"Eighth floor," she said. "Command room. I'll — I can notify them."
"That's all right," he said. "I'll knock."
He took the priority elevator, which his badge accessed without the standard general-floor routing, and rode it to the eighth floor in the silence of a small enclosed space that had the same slightly antiseptic quality of all institutional vertical transit.
Two knocks.
"Who's at this hour, I'm in the middle of something," Sloane said, from the other side of the door. The voice had the specific quality of someone who has been reviewing the same report for long enough that interruption requires a very good reason.
He opened the door.
"MARKUS." Not an announcement — the involuntary sound a person made when the thing they had been waiting for without quite naming it had arrived.
Sloane had cleared his desk and covered the distance in a motion that contained several steps but felt like one. Isolde was already at Markus's side, and the embrace she gave him had the quality of the ones she gave him when he had been doing something she had been managing the awareness of from a distance and was glad was done.
"Surprise," he said.
"You look like you slept on a train," Sloane said. He was still holding his shoulder.
"I did sleep on a train," Markus said.
"You look good," Isolde said, at the same time, which was the specific parallel assessment they had always run simultaneously.
"Terminal," Isolde said, and closed it without waiting for Sloane's response to the interruption. "Both of you are coming with me. The reports will be there in the morning. The morning is not now."
Sloane opened his mouth.
"Now," Isolde said.
They went.
Franklin's Barbeque occupied the corner of a block that had been selected for it by the specific logic of: the smoke needed somewhere to go, the parking needed to accommodate the kind of vehicle the Southern Command's senior staff drove, and the location needed to be far enough from the residential zones that the operation could run until the customers decided they were done rather than until the neighbours decided they were done.
The neon sign was the red-orange of something that had been there long enough to become a landmark rather than an advertisement. The smoking pits behind the building were producing the specific combination of hardwood smoke and rendered fat that Markus's Perception registered at full resolution — every compound in the smoke distinguishable, the temperature of the far-pit coals, the specific collagen breakdown stage of whatever had been in the nearest smoker for the past six hours.
He said nothing about any of this. Some information was just pleasant to have.
The manager met them in the lot with the specific speed of someone who had seen the military sedan's markings and had made accurate inferences about who it contained. He was correct about Sloane, who required a level of operational attention that the manager had clearly provided before.
The private booth was cleared by the time they were through the door — the corner position, the soundproofing that the main floor's ambient noise provided, the specific table configuration that seated three people with enough elbow room for the order that Sloane was clearly already composing.
Markus took the mask off.
The manager, who had been arranging the table settings with the focused attention of someone who had been in hospitality long enough to know when to be invisibly present, looked up at the correct moment and registered what he was looking at.
He completed the table arrangement.
"We'll need everything," Sloane said, when the man's professional composure had re-established. "Brisket — three pounds, the point cut if you have it. Spare ribs, full rack. Pulled pork. Turkey. Both sausages. A beef rib if there's one in the smoker. Potato salad. Iced tea, sweet, bottomless." He looked at Markus. "Pecan pie?"
"Yes," Markus said.
"Three pecan pies. One per person." Sloane handed the menu back without opening it. "That's all."
The manager's tablet had been recording throughout. He looked at the total, and then looked at Sloane with the expression of a professional who has received an order that he is completely capable of fulfilling and that he wants to make sure he has recorded correctly.
"We'll begin with the tea," he said.
"Good man," Sloane said.
He retreated with the specific efficiency of someone who was going to be in the kitchen in approximately four seconds.
The iced tea arrived cold and sweet and bottomless as advertised.
The three of them sat in the specific quality of a booth in a good barbecue restaurant in the early evening — the distant ambient noise of the main floor, the smoke smell present even inside, the tea glasses producing rings on the table.
"The herb specimens," Markus said, looking at Isolde. "The Iron-Root Glade. There are three varieties I think you'll want to look at. I've had them stored at your standard conditions since the facility."
Isolde's expression shifted into the specific register she used for genuine professional interest. "The Glade runs a heavy-metal substrate," she said. "Anything growing in that environment under a parasitic canopy is going to have unusual secondary metabolite profiles."
"The parasitic canopy had been monopolising the nutrient cycle for what looked like decades," he said. "The specimens I found were growing in the specific gap zones where the canopy hadn't fully closed — high mana-density soil, minimal competition."
"Bring them in the morning," she said. "Before anything else. I want to run the analysis while the mana-signature is still active."
"Morning," he agreed.
Sloane had been watching this exchange with the patient expression of a man who was waiting for the food to arrive and was comfortable with the interval.
"The tournament footage," Sloane said. "I have the archive."
"Of the Wyrm?" Markus said.
"Of everything," Sloane said. "Thirty-seven files. NOVUS labels them by dungeon and timestamp." He looked at his tea glass. "The Iron-Root Glade footage is fourteen minutes. You were on the ground for eleven of them."
"I was aware," Markus said.
"I watched it four times," Sloane said.
Isolde looked at Sloane.
"Three times," Sloane said. "I watched it three times."
The food began arriving, which saved everyone from the natural continuation of this topic. Brisket first — the point cut, pulled into slices that held their shape long enough to be worth appreciating before they didn't, the bark on the exterior the specific mahogany of twelve hours rather than eight or sixteen.
He ate with the attention it deserved.
The conversation moved through the meal in the way it moved through meals at Cedar Grove: tactical assessments and cultivation updates and the border situation's current status and Rosalind's progress and the Ghost Sense programme's faculty review, threaded through with the specific warmth of three people who had been waiting to be in the same room and were now in the same room.
The pecan pies arrived. Sloane's was gone in seven minutes.
"We're staying at the installation tonight," Isolde said, while Markus was still working through his. "Tomorrow we take the private transport to Cedar Grove. A week."
"A week," he confirmed.
"You're sleeping properly this week," she said.
"I sleep properly," he said.
She gave him the look.
"More properly," he said.
"Yes," she said. "You will."
The neon sign's light made the table warm orange through the booth's frosted glass, and the main floor's ambient noise continued its comfortable background register, and the tea was bottomless as advertised and stayed cold.
He finished the pie and sat in the specific warmth of being somewhere that did not require anything from him, with the people who had built the foundation of everything he was doing and from whom no particular performance was expected.
The evening did not require anything.
He let it be what it was.