The empty core housing stayed wrapped in oilcloth beneath Vell's arm while he crossed the southern belt. The Association had stamped his salvage card, but no clerk had offered to tell him whose living mana had soaked the metal.
Yenna walked beside him with both chain-knives hidden under her coat. Her core had carried the same silver scarring for three years, so she watched every passing hunter as if one might recognize the damage inside her.
Luna Marr worked beneath a condemned clinic near the old rail yards. The sign above the entrance had lost half its letters, while the lower windows held plywood over the places where glass had stopped being worth replacing.
Vell knocked three times, then waited with his hand clear of his knife. A slot opened at eye level, showing a grey eye, a magnifier lens, plus the end of a shock baton.
"If you are selling repairs, leave a card," Luna said, keeping the slot closed, "I do not buy miracles from strangers."
"I have a Grade 2 housing carrying fresh human mana," Vell said, holding the oilcloth where she could see it, "you can tell me whether the dead are still paying."
The bolt withdrew after Luna settled her last doubt about the sample. She led them through a waiting room stripped of chairs, then down a stairwell where every third light fixture had been removed to save power.
Her lab occupied a former treatment ward below the clinic, though its clean benches belonged nowhere near the cracked tiles. Core readers, reagent vials, and three battered monitors crowded the room around a single reinforced chair.
Luna looked younger than her tired voice had suggested, perhaps thirty, with ink on both hands. She wore a respirator at her throat, plus a coat whose pockets held more tools than cloth.
"Set it there," she said, pointing at a steel tray, "then tell me who else touched it."
Vell gave her the Association claim number, the public appraisal time, Dorr's switch, plus the route from table to oilcloth. He kept the description plain because the value of evidence lived in every person who could claim it had been altered.
Luna wrote each fact on a paper form instead of recording it on a device. When Yenna glanced at the old method, the researcher tapped the paper with her pen.
"Network archives get corrected by people with badges," Luna said, signing the bottom line, "paper burns, but it does not change while you sleep."
She cut the oilcloth seam and lifted the housing with insulated tongs. The exterior looked ordinary until she opened its charge chamber beneath a hood, where a faint silver residue clung to the inner channel.
Vell kept his attention on her hands instead of the changing monitors. The Forge had told him the mana was human, but an invisible answer inside his skull would never put Dorr in a cell.
Luna introduced three reagents through a needle tip, then watched the housing answer with a thin blue line across the monitor. Her shoulders went still when the line rose instead of falling away.
"This is not residual charge from a corpse," Luna said, changing the reader range, "the material came from an awakened core that was still functioning."
Yenna rested one hand on the back of the reinforced chair while Luna watched the curve. She had not moved toward the tools, but the nearest chain had slipped beneath her sleeve.
"How recent?" she asked, watching the monitor, "give us a number."
"Thirty-six to forty-eight hours," Luna said, printing the comparison curve, "after that, this pattern loses its living signature."
The report did not name the hunter, but it made the Directorate's method harder to dismiss. Someone had been opened, harvested, then reduced to residue inside a worthless test sample Dorr had thought nobody would examine.
Vell felt anger settle into a useful shape, cold and narrow behind his ribs. The sample was not a clue asking to be admired; it was a timer attached to a person still missing.
"Can you testify?" Vell asked, setting his salvage card beside the printed curve.
Luna looked at the card, then at the clinic's locked door, weighing the familiar cost of accepting facts. Her eyes went toward a black square on the ceiling where an old security camera had been pulled from its mount.
"Not from a sample handed over in a basement," she said, folding the printout once, "the Association will call it contaminated before I finish my first sentence."
"The sample came from a recorded hearing," Yenna said, keeping her voice level, "the clerk logged its seal before Dorr switched it."
"That gets us halfway," Luna said, opening a cabinet beneath the bench, "I need a documented copy, a continuous custody record, and a recipient who cannot claim I changed the original."
Vell understood the demand before Luna finished describing the chain of custody. If he gave her the only piece, then Dorr could make Luna disappear and call the remaining report a rumor.
If he kept everything, then nobody with a clean credential would touch the evidence. Directorate work had already taught him that a secret held alone was a secret waiting to be buried.
"Make a verified copy," Vell said, placing the housing on the tray again, "I keep the original, and you sign for the copy against my claim number."
Luna did not answer immediately, which improved his opinion of her caution. A researcher who accepted dangerous evidence too quickly was either desperate or owned.
She brought out an imprint press, a fresh sterile housing, plus two numbered seals. Yenna checked the serials against Luna's written form, then read them aloud while Vell entered each number on his salvager card.
The copying process took forty minutes because Luna ran every comparison twice. Vell watched the original in its sealed tray, while Yenna kept checking the stairwell whenever the clinic pipes knocked.
Their caution made the slow work feel longer, but it also gave the trail a spine. Every delay became a fact Dorr would need to fight rather than a hole where he could hide a threat.
When the second curve matched the first, Luna sealed the copy in a clear container and signed across both edges. Vell sealed the original separately, then photographed the two containers beside the claim number and the clinic clock.
"I can certify the copy in seven days," Luna said, placing the container inside a lead-lined case, "maybe less if nobody decides I need an accident."
"How long before the residue degrades?" Vell asked, checking the original seal with his thumb.
"Six days for a hard match," she said, meeting his eyes, "after that, I can still explain the technique, but I cannot prove this came from a living hunter."
That gave them less than a week to find a victim, a route, or a second sample. Vell pocketed the sealed original, thinking of the rail-yard records Rynn had not lived to show him.
Yenna caught his wrist as he prepared to reach for the clinic door. Her grip was firm, though the pulse beneath her thumb skipped once as the silver scar inside her core answered something distant.
"Do you feel that?" Yenna asked, turning toward the reinforced chair, "my core is pulling toward the east."
Luna opened the reader again and moved a sensor over Yenna's chest. The monitor filled with a thin repeating pulse, unlike the residual curve from the stolen mana.
The rhythm came every twelve seconds, growing stronger with each returning pulse. Vell recognized its control shape from the Glassback collar, a command signal waiting for a response.
"That is not a natural flare," Luna said, tightening the sensor strap, "someone built a locator into the scar tissue."
Yenna's jaw tightened, but she did not step away from the reader. Her right hand closed around the chain handle beneath her sleeve, then opened when she noticed herself gripping it.
"Can they find us?" she asked, looking at Vell instead of Luna.
"They can find the place where the pulse stays still," Luna said, checking the signal strength, "then they can send a lock command through the same route."
A lock command would turn Yenna's repaired core against her body, returning the Directorate's control whenever they decided she had become inconvenient. Vell could not let the procedure wait for seven days while that signal grew stronger.
Luna showed them the waveform beside the stolen-mana curve, keeping the two records apart. One proved a living hunter had been harvested, while the other proved the same people still owned a route into Yenna's body.
The new connection changed the entire meaning of all their collected evidence. Dorr had not put a random sample on the appraisal table; he had tried to destroy a person while daring Vell to examine the remains.
Vell asked Luna to transfer the waveform record to the same claim file as the housing copy. It would not make the signal admissible by itself, but every timestamp made a later denial more expensive.
She agreed after making him sign a second custody line for Yenna's consent. The form stated that the reading belonged to Yenna, then required her own mark before Luna would preserve a copy.
Yenna pressed her thumb to the form with a cut from her chain handle. She watched the blood-print settle beside her name, then looked at Vell as if daring him to call her a patient instead of a partner.
"I want every record," Yenna said, handing the form back, "if somebody tries to own my core, I want their paper trail too."
"You get it first," Vell said, placing the original housing beside his salvage card, "then we decide who else earns a copy."
Luna sealed the waveform record inside a separate envelope marked for Yenna alone. The small act made the lab feel less like another place where someone had taken a piece of her without permission.
He signed Luna a provisional evidence receipt covering her reagents and custody work. It put her cost beneath ORS-7741-C without claiming protection from a nonexistent workshop.
"Move your copies before dark," Vell said, checking the stairwell with Yenna, "send me the new location after you have chosen it."
"You are planning to cut that signal out," Luna said, looking from Yenna to the sealed original, "do not tell me you can if you have not read the failure rate."
"He will tell me every number," Yenna said, tightening her coat around the chain-knives, "then I will tell him whether to start."
They left before the next pulse peaked, then Yenna kept the signal moving along the freight loop. Vell crossed the fen road alone outside toward the distant pump house.
He lifted the loose stove stone, recovered the cracked Needle-Step imprint, then left six credits buried. The grey sliver returned to his pack without entering the empty Trait Slot.
Vell met Yenna at the butcher-row hideout before her pulse settled into a fixed location.