The rain in the Lower Tiers didn't fall so much as accumulate. It gathered in the seams of Caelum Spire's understructure, ran along the great gray maintenance pipes that stitched the city's belly together, and dripped from the corrugated overhangs in thin, dirty curtains that hadn't been clean since the city's founding. Kael Voss had lived beneath those curtains for most of his seventeen years, and he had long since stopped noticing them.
What he noticed tonight was the man blocking the alley exit.
He was broad. That was the first thing. The second thing was the way he stood — weight slightly forward, left foot angled out, the particular posture of someone who had spent a long time making sure people understood that moving him was not an option they should consider. He wore a coat the color of old engine grease, and the light from the maintenance strip above him caught the resonance amplifier banded around his left wrist: matte black, military-grade, illegal below the Fifth Tier and expensive everywhere else.
"Voss," the man said. Not a question.
Kael had been hoping to leave the way he'd come in. That exit was now also blocked — he'd heard the second one seal off thirty seconds ago, a soft click of magnetic locks engaging at the alley's far end. He'd been counting exits since he was nine years old. Old habit. He hadn't always been fast enough.
"You've got the wrong person," Kael said.
"Seventeen, brown coat, scar along the left jawline." The man tilted his head. "Six-two, walks like he's always about to start running. Uses a pair of modified percussion rods, charges in the upper grip, illegal resonance output on the downstroke." He paused. "Still the wrong person?"
Kael looked at the amplifier on the man's wrist again. Then at the exit. Then at the gap between the man and the left wall — forty centimeters, maybe less. Not enough for someone who didn't know how to compress.
"What do you want?" Kael asked.
"Rennick wants his money."
Of course he did. Kael calculated quickly. He had two hundred and forty credits on him, three-quarters of what he'd earned in the Pit over the last two weeks. Rennick was owed three fifty. The math was not in his favor, and the man in the grease-colored coat looked like the kind of person who expressed disappointment in very physical ways.
"Tell him I'll have the rest by the end of the cycle," Kael said.
"He told me you'd say that."
"Smart man."
"He also told me that if you said that, I should break one of your hands. His preference was the right one, since that's the one you play with."
The alley was seven meters long and three meters wide. The maintenance strip cast everything in the sickly amber of low-power lighting. Somewhere above them, three kilometers and twelve social strata away, the Upper Rings were blazing with full-spectrum bioluminescence, the city's crown jewel lit up for the evening performance circuit. Down here it was amber and dripping pipes and a man who was about to break Kael's hand.
Kael pulled the percussion rods from his coat.
They were thirty centimeters each, matte steel with wrapped grip tape that he'd replaced twice in the last year. The resonance cells were built into the upper third of each rod — salvaged tech, wired in by hand during three sleepless nights in his bunk at the shelter. They hummed faintly when he held them, a low sub-audible frequency that he felt in his back teeth more than heard. The cells weren't powerful. They didn't need to be.
He didn't use them to fight. He used them to set rhythm.
"Walk away," Kael said. "Tell Rennick I'll have his money."
The man came forward.
He was fast for his size, which Kael had expected, and he led with his right hand in a grab rather than a strike, which Kael had also expected. The grab was a disciplined technique — control the arm, control the person. It worked on people who didn't know that the correct response to a grab attempt was to stop being where the grabber expected you to be.
Kael moved left, felt the man's fingers close on air, and snapped his right rod down in a sharp quarter-beat against the pipe running along the wall. The resonance cell discharged on impact — a short, tight pulse of rhythmic energy, nothing dramatic, nothing that would show up on a Tier-watch scanner as a Breach Event. Just a beat. A single, precisely timed beat that hit the maintenance pipe and traveled.
The pipe rang. The floor vibrated. The man's forward weight shifted by two centimeters.
Two centimeters was enough.
Kael went through the gap between the man and the left wall — not with room to spare but with exactly the room he needed, which was all that mattered — and hit the alley floor in a roll that he came out of running. Behind him he heard a shout, the scuff of boots on wet concrete, the electronic whine of the amplifier warming up. He was already at the alley's mouth, already turning, already three steps into the side passage that ran beneath the water reclamation deck.
He knew this part of the Tier. He had grown up here. Every pipe, every gap, every maintenance hatch and emergency conduit and blind corner — he had mapped them all in the particular way that children map places they are afraid of and eventually stop being afraid of, which is to say completely, precisely, without sentiment.
He ran for four minutes. When he stopped, he was standing beneath the viaduct at Tier Three's southwest edge, the city rising above him like a wall of light and steel, and no one was following him.
He leaned against the viaduct support and breathed.
His hands were steady. They were always steady after — it was before that was the problem, the waiting and the calculating, the assessment of odds and outcomes. Once things started moving, he was fine. His body knew what to do.
He looked up. The city climbed in rings — three, seven, twelve, twenty, the numbering system growing more elaborate and the architecture more graceful with each increment of elevation. At Tier Three you got corrugated overhangs and amber lights and Rennick's debt collectors. At Tier Twelve you got glass facades and full-spectrum illumination and people who had never in their lives needed to calculate the width of a gap. At the Upper Rings — the top six levels, where the Resonance Academies and the licensed performance venues and the Headliners' compounds all lived — you got something that Kael had only ever seen from below, which was a version of the city that looked nothing like the city he knew.
He reached into his coat and took out the recording chip.
It was old. The casing had been cracked along one edge and repaired with two-part adhesive, the repair itself now old enough to be yellowing. The chip contained a single file: forty-three minutes and twelve seconds of a live performance, captured eleven years ago on a recording device that one of the shelter staff had smuggled in despite the no-media regulations in effect at the time. The quality was mediocre. You could hear the crowd. You could hear the ambient noise of Tier Eight's concert hall, the hum of the ventilation system, the occasional feedback whine from the venue's own amplification array.
And underneath all of it, clean and precise and utterly certain of itself, you could hear Seren play.
Kael closed his fingers around the chip.
He was six years old when he first heard it. He was seventeen now and he still could not fully explain what happened when he did — the way the rhythm got inside him, not through his ears but through something else, some part of him that existed below conscious thought. The way it made him feel, for the duration of the recording, that the world had a shape he could understand. That the chaos of the Lower Tiers and the cruelty of the debt systems and the arbitrary brutality of a life lived at the bottom of a city that rose and rose and rose without ever looking down — all of it had a tempo. All of it could be mapped. All of it could, in theory, be controlled.
He'd been trying to learn how to do that ever since.
He put the chip back in his pocket and pushed off the viaduct support.
He owed Rennick a hundred and ten credits. He had two forty on him and nowhere to be until morning. The Pit had two more open slots this cycle, and Maren, who ran the Pit's intake desk, had been asking about him specifically because two of her regular Rhythmists had gone up-Tier last week on labor contracts and she was short.
He wasn't going to get better by standing under a viaduct.
Kael Voss pulled his coat straight, pocketed the percussion rods, and walked back into the Lower Tiers.