They came for him on a Thursday.
He'd gone to the dormitory to pick up his second notebook before the morning lecture. The hallway was empty at that hour. He heard the door at the stairwell end open behind him.
He didn't think anything of it until the second door opened, the one in front.
He stopped.
The hallway had two exits and both were now occupied. He knew this without turning to confirm the first because the sounds matched, and the timing was too precise for coincidence.
He turned around anyway.
Three people. The man at the front was perhaps mid-thirties, built without excess, he then charged foward.
"Mr. Vael," he said. "We'd like to talk to you."
"The arrangement suggests otherwise."
The man didn't react to this. "It's a precaution. We've found that when people with your background hear certain things too quickly, they run."
"My background."
"What you're becoming."
Behind Crispin, the second door had two more people in it. He checked over his shoulder briefly. Yes. Five total. The hallway was narrow enough that the mathematics didn't work in his favor.
"You've been watching me," Crispin said.
"For some time, yes."
"You're not the only ones."
Something moved across the man's expression. Small. Gone before Crispin could read it fully. "No. We're not." He stopped walking. Two meters between them now, which was deliberate. "My name is Roland Pike. We're not going to hurt you. We need approximately an hour of your time."
"And if I decline to give it?"
"Then the conversation becomes more complicated."
Crispin looked at him. He thought about running. He thought about the dormitory's ceiling height and the single window at the end of the hall, which faced a three-story drop. He thought about Aldric's words from three nights ago. The people watching you are going to have to make a decision sooner than they planned.
He looked at the door behind Pike.
"All right," he said.
The carriage was institutional, not a hired one. He could tell from the way the interior wore its use, the specific arrangement of the cushions, the scuff marks. An organization's vehicle, used often enough to have its own small history.
Pike sat across from him. A woman sat beside Crispin, close enough to intervene if needed. She hadn't introduced herself and he didn't ask.
"What am I becoming?" Crispin said.
"We'll explain when we arrive."
"You said my background. What does that mean to you?"
Pike looked at him with something that wasn't quite professional and wasn't quite personal. "It means you're three weeks past a change you haven't felt yet. Or you've felt it and understood it as something else."
Three weeks. Crispin thought about the warmth he'd noticed in his chest, filed as mild fever, that had never escalated but hadn't gone away either. He'd stopped noting it because it didn't change.
"You can detect this," he said. "Whatever it is."
"We can. Yes."
"How."
"You'll see."
The carriage moved through streets he didn't recognize well, working steadily southwest. The old quarter near the river. Buildings that had been doing something specific for a long time.
"The sentence in the library," Crispin said.
Pike looked at him sharply. "What sentence."
"Page two hundred and twelve of Aldous Crane's book on orbital fragmentation. It predicted what I would do. It was in my specific borrowed copy and not in the archive copy."
Pike was quiet for a moment. Quiet in the wrong way, the way someone goes quiet when they've received information they weren't supposed to receive.
"We didn't put that there," he said.
"I know."
He looked at the woman. She looked at Pike. Something passed between them that Crispin didn't have enough information to read.
"Who did?" Crispin asked.
Nobody answered.
The building was in the southern quarter, near the river. Ground floor presented as a records warehouse, which was either genuine or a very old cover. Inside it was neither.
They put him in a room with a table and a lamp and a window onto an interior courtyard. His coat stayed on. His notebooks were in his coat.
A woman entered after perhaps five minutes. Fifty, maybe older. She sat across from him with both hands flat on the table and looked at him for a moment before speaking, which was the behavior of someone who had learned to read people quickly and was doing it now.
"My name is Calla Ness," she said. "I'll explain the situation and then I need you to tell me honestly how much you know."
She placed a glass tube on the table. Twelve centimeters. Dark soil inside, sealed at both ends.
"Touch it."
He did.
The soil lit from the inside, a blue-green that he had no word for, and his eyes went warm in a way that had no physical explanation.
Ness was watching him. Not the tube. Him.
"Your eyes responded," she said. "Split. One red, one cyan. Do you know what that means?"
"No."
"It means you're a Centralist." She looked at him steadily. "One of three power classes. The rarest and the most difficult to explain." She leaned forward slightly. "It also means you've been activating for approximately three weeks and haven't noticed, which is unusual."
"I noticed," Crispin said. "I thought it as fever."
Something in her expression shifted. Not surprise exactly. "You felt warmth?"
"In the chest. Constant. Not escalating."
"For how long?"
"Three weeks, approximately."
She looked at the tube, still glowing faintly. "That's consistent." She looked back at him. "What I'm about to tell you is going to seem extraordinary. I need you to hear it fully before you respond."
She opened her mouth to speak.
The wall came in.
A controlled crack, three stones separating at mortar lines with the sound of careful force, and through the opening came a woman who moved with an economy of motion that Crispin had never seen in anyone, scars on both forearms, assessing the room in the time it took him to register she was there.
Ness stood.
The woman from the wall covered the distance to the nearest of Ness's people in two seconds and did something efficient and anatomically specific that Crispin watched with the attention of someone who has decided that this particular moment is one for observation rather than action.
The room became loud.
Crispin put the glass tube in his coat pocket and stayed in his chair.
Two more people came through the wall. Pike, who had been near the door, moved to intercept and found the second person from the wall already positioned to prevent it. The third of Ness's people produced something from inside his coat and pointed it at the woman from the wall.
She was already somewhere else.
She had covered ground that fast and Crispin hadn't tracked the motion. That was not normal. He could track fast things. He'd always been able to track fast things.
The item discharged into the plaster and left a mark and a smell of something chemical.
Crispin's chest was warm.
Not the usual warmth. It was larger this time and pressing outward.
He looked down at his hands. They were on the table. His left hand looked exactly as it always had.
He looked up.
The woman from the wall had someone's arm at an angle it wasn't meant to go and was looking at him across the room.
"Can you walk?" she said.
"Yes."
"Then walk."
The warmth in his chest grew by a degree.
He stood and followed her through the hole in the wall, and the room continued being loud behind him, and he was moving through a corridor that he hadn't entered through, and the warmth was growing in a way that had an edge to it now, something pressing against the inside of his ribs from the center out, and he didn't know what that meant but he knew it wasn't nothing.
Pike's voice, from the room: "The soil went black before the blue. That's not..."
Then the wall was between them and Crispin couldn't hear the end of it.
That's not what?
He kept walking. The warmth kept growing. He didn't know what was happening.
He knew it wasn't stopping.