He won the second and third movements with less drama and more efficiency, which was how Kael preferred it. Drama was expensive. It cost energy and attention and the kind of calculated risk that compounded dangerously when you were tired. Efficiency was repeatable. Efficiency was what you had left when the interesting options ran out.
Scratch recovered from his shorted synthesizer and tried to fight through the disruption, which showed character if not wisdom. He had real ability — the Dissonant's gift of finding the cracked frequency in anything, the instinct for discord that no amount of training created from scratch, only refined. In two years, with a real teacher and an instrument that wasn't modified past its own specs, he might be genuinely dangerous.
Tonight he lost all three movements and walked out of the Pit with his synthesizer tucked under his arm and the expression of someone filing information away.
Kael collected his forty credits from Maren's window, changed back into his regular coat, and went to find Rennick.
Rennick Sous operated out of a converted logistics office on Tier Three's northern edge, near the supply intake from the structural maintenance lifts. The location was practical — constant foot traffic, the kind of ambient noise that made recording difficult, multiple exits, a staff of four who had the look of people who were paid to be where they were told to be and ask no questions about why. The office itself was clean, well-lit, and contained a desk, four chairs, a resonance dampening unit that hummed quietly in the corner, and Rennick.
He was fifty, Kael estimated. Maybe older. He had the compact, weathered quality of someone who had spent a long time in the Lower Tiers and found a way to make that fact work for him rather than against him. He wore no resonance equipment. He was not Awakened — or if he was, he didn't choose to advertise it, which amounted to the same thing in practice. What he was, in practical terms, was a resource allocator. He lent money, equipment, and access to people who needed those things. He expected them back with interest. He had a clear and well-communicated policy about what happened when they weren't.
"Voss." He gestured to the chair across the desk. "Sit."
Kael sat. He put two hundred and forty credits on the desk — everything he had. "I'm short. I'll have the rest by the end of the cycle."
Rennick looked at the credits without touching them. "You said that last cycle."
"I was short then too. I made it up."
"Four days late."
"I made it up."
Rennick leaned back in his chair. He was doing the particular calculation that people in his position did, which was the assessment of whether someone was worth the continued expense of patience. Kael had been through this calculation before with people who ran it less carefully than Rennick, and those situations had ended in ways that still featured in his dreams occasionally. Rennick was different. He was, by the standards of his profession, methodical.
"I sent Croix after you," Rennick said.
"I noticed."
"You went through a forty-centimeter gap at a run."
"It's a bit wider than forty."
"Croix measured it afterward. Forty-one." A pause. "He said you used your cells on the pipe."
"Class Two output. Nothing that would flag a scanner."
"I'm aware. Croix also said you moved well." Rennick tapped the desk once, his index finger, a single beat. "Maren tells me you won Slot Seven tonight."
"Three movements."
"Against a Dissonant from Four."
"He was young. Poorly trained."
"You took forty credits."
"Yes."
Rennick nodded slowly. He picked up the credits on the desk and sorted them with the practiced speed of someone who had handled a great deal of money in a great many forms. "I have an offer for you," he said.
Kael waited.
"I have interests in five facilities on Tiers Three and Four. The Pit is one. There are four others — two on Four, one back toward the center of Three, one in the transition zone that technically doesn't have a Tier designation but everyone knows where it is." He set the sorted credits into a small stack. "I need a house fighter."
"I have a house fighter arrangement at the Pit."
"A house fighter arrangement at the Pit means Maren books you into slots when she needs bodies and pays you standard rate. I'm talking about something different." He looked at Kael directly. "Exclusive arrangement. My five facilities. You fight when I need you to fight, against opponents I designate, at terms I set. In exchange you get a guaranteed monthly credit draw, equipment maintenance on my accounts, and use of the training space at my Tier Four facility three days a week."
Kael was quiet for a moment. The training space at Tier Four. He'd never had access to a proper training space. He'd been working in whatever corners and rooftops he could find, practicing against walls and his own reflection in water treatment mirrors.
"What terms?" he said.
"Sixty per win, twenty per loss, minimum four slots per cycle. Monthly draw of three hundred regardless of slot outcomes."
Kael ran the math. Three hundred monthly guaranteed was twice what he currently cleared in a good month. With sixty-per-win on top of that, in a month where he fought well, he was looking at income that would let him clear Rennick's current debt inside two months and have something left over.
"Exclusive means I don't fight anywhere else," he said.
"Correct."
"That includes the open circuits. The independent slots."
"Correct."
"And opponents you designate. Which means I don't get to review the matchup."
"You get an hour's notice of element type. Nothing more." Rennick's expression didn't change. "I run clean facilities, Voss. I'm not going to put you against a Master on a bad day. I need my fighters functional."
"What's the exit clause?"
A brief flicker — not surprise exactly, but something that acknowledged the question was smarter than expected. "Ninety days notice. Mutual. I can release you with ninety days, you can exit with ninety days, no penalties on either side if the notice terms are met."
Kael looked at the dampening unit humming in the corner. He thought about the training space. He thought about the recording chip in his pocket and the forty-three minutes of someone who had clearly had access to real training in a real facility with real equipment.
He thought about Rennick's collector standing in the alley and the measurement of forty-one centimeters.
"I want the debt cleared as a signing condition," he said.
Rennick considered this for four seconds. "Done."
"And the training space access starts immediately."
"Upon signing, yes."
"Then I'll take the arrangement."
Rennick produced a contract chip from his desk drawer. It was a physical chip rather than a network document, which meant it existed outside the city's registration systems — standard practice for arrangements of this type, since the city's systems technically required all Resonance performance contracts to route through the Tier authority's licensing office, a process that added costs and visibility that neither party in this kind of arrangement generally wanted. Kael took the chip and examined it. The terms were as stated, plus several standard clauses about non-disclosure and non-interference with Rennick's other business interests, plus a liability waiver for performance-related injury that Kael read carefully because it was the kind of clause people put in contracts precisely because they expected it to matter.
Nothing was unreasonable, by the standards of the Lower Tiers. Those standards were admittedly not high.
He pressed his thumb to the chip's registration surface. The chip logged the biometric and chimed softly.
"Good," Rennick said. He took the chip back and placed it in his drawer. "Training space is at the Ostrev facility on Four. I'll send you the access code tonight." He looked at Kael for a moment. "You fight well. You think well. Those aren't always the same quality in the same person."
"Thank you," Kael said, because there wasn't really another response.
"Don't thank me. Gratitude in these arrangements creates expectations." Rennick returned his credits to the cashbox. "You're dismissed."
Kael stood, nodded once, and went back out into the Lower Tiers.
Outside, the dripping overhang was still dripping. The maintenance strip was still amber. He was now under exclusive contract to a man who lent money at rates that technically constituted a crime under four of the city's seven regulatory frameworks, but who had a training space on Tier Four that Kael had not been able to access before tonight, and who had just cleared a debt that had been pressing on him for three months.
He took out the recording chip and turned it over in his fingers.
"Instrument is the last thing," he said to himself, in the empty alley.
Then he put the chip away and went home.