# Chapter 5: The Street King

The morning started wrong.

Not wrong the way a case goes wrong — evidence misread, a thread that leads to dead air. Wrong the way a room goes wrong when you've moved a piece of furniture two inches to the left and the whole space feels off but nobody can point to why.

Mere was at the kitchen table, hair up, herbalism notes spread in a semicircle around her tea. She was working on something that required the kind of focused silence I'd learned to navigate around. I was making tea. I was also, apparently, standing differently.

"You pulled back last night," she said.

I hadn't expected the observation, which meant I should have. Mere noticed behavioral shifts the way other people noticed weather — factually, without drama.

"I was processing the case," I said.

"You were processing the case before I said anything about Leon. You kept processing the case after. The shift happened during." She looked up from her notes. Not angry. Not hurt. Baffled — the expression of a woman encountering data that contradicted her model. "You adjusted your posture. You adjusted your plan for Leon. You adjusted the amount of information you were sharing with me about the crystal." She paused. "Why?"

(*Because you said 'careful' isn't in his vocabulary and I heard 'you should have known that' and 'you trusted competence over judgment' and 'you let Leon run unsupervised because it was easier than doing the work yourself' — a reasonable interpretation of a sentence that, I was beginning to suspect, contained none of those things —*)

"I thought you were criticising my decision to let Leon handle Galden alone."

"I said to tell him to be strategic. Because he's not strategic when he's guilty."

"I know."

"That's what I meant. I said what I meant." The bafflement was genuine. "Why would I criticise you for delegating? You don't have time to run every thread yourself. That's not criticism. That's arithmetic."

(*File this. The noise reads subtext because subtext is how most people communicate — the gap between what they say and what they mean is where the real information lives. Mere doesn't have a gap. The signal is the signal. Stop reading between lines that don't exist.*)

"I heard something you didn't say," I said. The admission cost something, though I couldn't have told you what currency.

"I know," she said. "I noticed." She picked up her tea. "This will happen again. You'll hear things I didn't say, and you'll adjust for conversations I'm not having. I'll notice because the adjustment won't match the input." A sip. "When it happens, ask."

"I don't ask."

"I've noticed that too."

The bracelet on my wrist pulsed a warm amber that had nothing to do with magical calibration and everything to do with proximity to someone whose operating system I was still learning to read without translating. Different system. Same house. The pattern held.

Sniff emerged from under the table, having determined through whatever canine probability calculus governed his mornings that this pause in conversation increased the likelihood of dropped food. He was wrong, but his methodology was sound.

* * *

The guild hall at mid-morning had the quality of a building that was always working regardless of how quiet it looked. The receptionist — whose name I still didn't know — nodded me through without the usual eight-week-waiting-list performance. I was past the filter now. Whether that was progress or a symptom depended on your perspective.

Ledger's office. Third door on the right. The annotated map had new pins — four more since yesterday, two yellow, two red. The red ones had migrated further northeast.

"Sit," Ledger said.

I sat. Ledger opened the case folder — the thicker one, the active case, not the worn one with Kae's name and the dead woman. He added a sheet to the stack.

"Your three-site analysis was thorough," he said.

"Thank you."

"Your identification of the pre-Compact architecture was particularly precise. The irregular node spacing, the biological routing methodology, the extraction pathway orientation." He said these things the way someone reads back a report — except he was reading back my work with a level of technical specificity that went beyond management oversight. "How did you determine the architecture was pre-Compact? Specifically."

(*Too specific. The question isn't 'tell me what you found' — it's 'tell me how you found it.' That's not a debrief question. That's a methodology question. He wants to know the mechanism, not the result.*)

"Comparison to documented standards," I said. Which was true. Also incomplete. The actual answer involved Flaw Sight showing me the structural age of the working the way tree rings show age — visible, intuitive, and impossible to explain without explaining everything. "Current Compact framework uses geometric node grids. What I saw at the sites used irregular placement. Historical references confirm that predates standardisation."

"And the biological routing? That's a fairly specialised identification."

"Leon identified the routing methodology. Mallory crystals route through biological channels rather than geometric ones — it's the primary identifier for their construction. He recognised it from recovery work."

Ledger made a note. The pen moved once, precisely. He'd gotten what he wanted — the attribution to Leon — and the question he'd actually been asking sat underneath the one I'd answered, noted but not pushed.

"The name Kae. I've had my people narrow the territory," Ledger said. 

He pulled a second sheet — not from the case folder, from a separate pile on his desk. A hand-drawn section of Drenwick's warrens, annotated with the same meticulous care as his office map. Specific streets marked, two intersections circled, a perimeter sketched in pencil.

"He's been seen in this zone over the last month. Multiple sightings, different times. Not a fixed address — he moves — but the pattern clusters here." He tapped the marked area. "Southwest warrens, between Brewer's Alley and the old tannery district. If his contacts are protecting him, they're doing it within this territory."

The zone was tight — six blocks, maybe eight. Residential, mixed commercial. Working poor, some craftspeople. Not the deepest part of the warrens but far enough from the canal to be ignored by anyone with authority. A place where people mind their own business because minding other people's business gets your teeth knocked out.

"How confident?"

"Three independent sources. The territory is solid. The specific location within it is not — he doesn't sleep in the same place twice, from what I can tell."

"Your sources" — I said it flat, not a question, not quite a statement. The space between the two where Ledger would decide how much to share.

"Guild contacts," he said. Which told me nothing except that his network reached into the southwest warrens with a granularity that a desk analyst shouldn't have. I filed it next to the worn folder and the personal investment and the pointed technical questions, and the weight of what I didn't understand about Ledger got a little heavier.

"One more thing," Ledger said. "The woman I mentioned yesterday — the one connected to Kae. My sources confirm she was involved in Compact-adjacent work before she died. The details are still incomplete, but the connection between her death and Kae's current state may be significant." A pause that was a decision. "I'd prefer you focus on finding Kae. The woman's history is a thread I'm still pulling."

Translation: he was holding back. Still. The dead woman mattered to him in a way he wasn't sharing, and his instructions to focus on Kae were simultaneously useful direction and deliberate misdirection — pointing me at the urgent problem while he kept whatever sat underneath it out of my reach.

I didn't push. Not today. Today I needed the territory map, and he'd given me that.

"I'll be in the warrens this afternoon," I said.

"Be careful. His contacts aren't criminals — they're sympathisers. They'll protect him because they think they're helping him."

"I know."

"That makes them harder to navigate than hostiles." He straightened the folder. "People who are lying can be caught. People who are loyal can't."

I took the territory map and left.

* * *

The warrens in daylight had a different quality than the warrens at night. At night, the narrow streets and tall buildings created a maze of shadows and noise, every corner a potential encounter, every doorway a decision. In daylight, the warrens were just poor. Washing strung between buildings. Children too young for school playing in the street. Old women sitting on stoops with the focused blankness of people who'd been watching the same street for forty years and had long since stopped expecting it to surprise them.

I entered from the canal side, following the boundary of Ledger's marked zone. The streets narrowed as I moved southwest, the buildings pressing closer together, the ward-stones in the pavement cracked or missing entirely. Whatever magical infrastructure Drenwick's civic planners had installed down here had been poorly maintained for years, which meant the ambient suppression field that kept the arcane district clean and regulated didn't reach this far. Magic down here was either personal or absent.

The first person I asked was a man selling roasted nuts from a cart at the corner of a street whose name had faded from the wall. He was mid-fifties, weathered, with hands that had been doing physical work longer than I'd been alive.

"Looking for someone named Kae," I said.

The man's face did something interesting. Not a flinch — more controlled than that. A closing, like a door that had been slightly ajar swinging gently shut. His hands kept moving, scooping nuts into a paper cone, but the ease went out of the motion.

"Don't know that name," he said.

He was lying. The lie had a specific texture — not hostile, not frightened. Sheltering. His eyes didn't shift to check if anyone was watching. His posture didn't tighten with the coiled energy of someone preparing for trouble. He just closed, the way you close a cupboard that has something in it you don't want a stranger to see.

(*He knows Kae. He's not afraid of Kae — if he were, the lie would be sharper, more urgent. He's not afraid of me, either. He's protecting someone. The protectiveness is casual, practiced — he's been asked before and given the same answer before. This is a routine, not a reaction.*)

"I'm not with the Watch," I said. "Not Compact either."

"Don't know that name," he repeated. The door was closed. No amount of knocking would open it.

I bought a cone of nuts — three coppers, fair price — and moved on.

The second person was a woman hanging washing from a line strung between her window and the building opposite. She was younger, early thirties, with the wiry frame and quick movements of someone who managed too many tasks with too few hours.

"I'm looking for a man called Kae. I'm told he's in this area."

Her hands stopped on the washing line. Her eyes — brown, sharp, tired — flicked to a street behind me. The movement lasted less than a second, involuntary, a micro-expression that most people wouldn't catch.

Southwest. The street behind me ran southwest. She knew not just that Kae existed but where he was — or where he went. The eye movement was directional, not evasive. She'd looked where she'd last seen him, or where she expected him to be.

"Never heard of him," she said. Her voice carried the same weight as the nut seller's — not a lie built to deceive, a lie built to shelter. "Are you a healer?"

The question threw me. "No. Why?"

Her eyes stayed on me a moment longer than the deflection required. Whatever she saw didn't pass the test. "No reason." She went back to the washing. "You should try the docks if you're looking for people. The warrens aren't where you find anyone — it's where people go to not be found."

Clean deflection. But the question — *are you a healer?* — was data. She'd associated a search for Kae with medical need. That was new — Ledger hadn't mentioned anything about a medical condition. He'd given me a name and a territory. The woman with the washing had just given me something Ledger hadn't: whatever was wrong with Kae, the warrens knew about it, and it was the kind of wrong that made people think of healers.

Third conversation. An older man sitting outside a workshop door with a pipe and the unhurried posture of someone between jobs. The workshop behind him smelled like solder and hot metal.

"Afternoon. I'm looking for—"

"Kae," he said. "You're the third person today asking about the man."

That stopped me. "The third?"

"Two fellows this morning. Official-looking. Didn't buy anything." He drew on the pipe. "You don't look official."

"I'm not. Who were the two this morning?"

"Didn't say. Didn't need to — you can spot Watch at forty paces, and these weren't Watch. Too clean, too quiet. Compact maybe. Asked their questions, got the same nothing everyone gets, moved on."

(*Compact inquiries. In the warrens. Following the same name I'm following, with a head start. Either Ledger isn't the only one who knows the name 'Kae,' or his intelligence network has a leak. Or the Compact is investigating on its own timeline and our paths are converging from different directions. None of these options are comfortable.*)

"What can you tell me about Kae that you wouldn't tell them?"

The pipe smoker studied me. Longer than the woman had, more deliberate. He was older, more patient, and the arithmetic was different — not just *should I shield Kae?* but *from whom?*

"He's a good man," the pipe smoker said finally. "Or he was. Something's wrong with him — been wrong with him since he was born, from what I hear. Pain. Bad pain, the kind that doesn't stop." A draw on the pipe. Exhale. "Used to be quieter. Kept to himself, had a woman looking after him — Elara, I think her name was. She helped. Whatever she did for him, it helped."

"And now?"

"Now Elara's gone and he's worse. Lot worse. Can barely walk some days, from what people say. Other days he's—" The man paused. Not censoring. Choosing his words. "Other days he's different. Moving too fast, talking too much, eyes wrong. Like he's had too much of something or not enough." Another draw. "People feel sorry for him. That's all you need to know."

The fragments were assembling. Chronic pain — confirmed, long-standing, visible to the community. Elara — the dead woman from Ledger's folder, now named by a street contact who didn't know she was dead, just that she was gone. The oscillation between debilitation and manic energy — consistent with the crystal's dependency cycle. Pain when the effect wore off, too-much-of-everything when it hadn't.

"Where does he go?"

"I don't follow the man around." The pipe smoker looked at me one more time. The calculation finished. "But if you want to know about anyone in this part of the warrens — anyone at all — you should talk to the Reverend."

"The Reverend."

"Carson. Runs a workshop off Greywell Lane, three streets southwest. Fix anything, knows everyone. If Kae talks to anybody, it's the Reverend." He tapped the pipe on his boot heel. "Tell him Drannick sent you. He'll still make you wait while he finishes whatever he's building, but he'll talk."
