Three cycles into the new arrangement, the rhythm of Kael's life changed in ways he had not entirely anticipated.
He fought twice in the first cycle — a Melodist from the Tier Three center who fought with a modified flute and a tactical patience that forced Kael to win ugly, taking two solid harmonic disruptions to the ribs in exchange for establishing a tempo lockdown that eventually walked her out of the ring, and a Harmonist who had more raw output than sense and kept building his chord structures too wide, leaving gaps a careful Rhythmist could walk through and disrupt at the foundation. He won both. He collected his credits, cleared the remainder of his debt to Rennick as per the contract's terms, and had, for the first time in approximately a year, a positive credit balance.
He used some of it to replace the grip tape on his left rod, which had been fraying in a way that transferred inconsistently. He used some of it on food that was not synthesis-product from the Tier Three communal dispensary, which was an experience roughly comparable to what he imagined music sounded like to people who had only previously heard noise.
He used none of it on the training space access code, because that was already covered.
Joss found him on the third morning, when he was leaving the Ostrev facility.
"You look different," she said.
"I look the same."
"You look like you slept." She fell into step beside him. She had the tessaviol under her arm, which meant she was coming from or going to a session of her own somewhere — Joss played in three informal groups across two Tiers, a complicated social network maintained with the precise scheduling of someone who understood that access was a resource to be managed. "How's the new arrangement?"
"Clean."
"Rennick's usually clean," she agreed. "Until he isn't."
"I know."
"Just noting it." She pulled the tessaviol out and plucked one string absently, a single note that resonated in the corridor for longer than physics strictly justified. Melodist habit. "There's a situation developing on Four."
Kael looked at her.
"Territory thing. Between the Ondas crew and a Dissonant faction that's been pushing up from Three." She glanced at him. "You fought at Ostrev this morning."
"I used the training space."
"Ondas territory."
"Rennick's facility."
"On Ondas territory." She plucked the string again. "There's a difference between the map and the deed on Three and Four that I'd want to understand before I signed arrangements that put me on one side of it."
Kael filed this. "What do you know about the Ondas crew?"
"Mid-size operation, mostly Harmonists, three generations deep on Four. The head of it has been running territory claims since before the Resonance Event, which means she got there the old way — manufacturing, logistics, the kind of infrastructure work that doesn't photograph well but builds real influence." She paused. "The daughter does music. Academy track."
Sera Ondas. He'd known the name was territorial — Ondas was a sufficiently prominent name on Four that you heard it — but he hadn't connected it to the girl in the training space until just now. Which was, he recognized, probably evidence that he had been spending too much time focusing on practice and not enough on the environment the practice was situated in.
"The Dissonant faction from Three," he said. "Who runs it?"
"Goes by Verse. Twenty-four, came up through the Pit circuit on Three, started consolidating territory about eight months ago." Joss shrugged. "He's ideological about it. Not just resources. He thinks the Lower Tiers should be administered by Awakened, full stop. No contracts with non-Awakened interests, no upward-mobility arrangements that route through the licensed system."
"Sounds almost reasonable."
"It sounds reasonable until you ask what happens to the sixty percent of the population that isn't Awakened under that administration system, and he doesn't have a good answer." She put the tessaviol back under her arm. "The point is that things are moving on Four, and Rennick's facilities are on Four, and you are now contractually on Rennick's side of whatever this turns into."
Kael walked for a moment in silence. The corridor was mid-morning busy — maintenance workers, transit staff, the early-shift laborers who kept the Tier's systems running and were, he supposed, among the sixty percent that Verse's ideology didn't account for. Normal people doing the normal invisible work that cities required.
"I'll be careful," he said.
Joss made her not-quite-sigh not-quite-laugh sound. "Kael. You walked through a forty-one centimeter gap at speed in the dark. Your definition of careful and the standard definition are not the same definition."
"I'll be aware," he amended.
"Better." She turned off at the next junction, heading toward whatever her morning contained. "Sound check later?"
"After my afternoon session."
She waved without turning and disappeared around the corner, one note still hanging in the air where she'd been standing.
He went home.
Home was a six-by-four meter room in a residency block on Tier Three's east side, a building that had been constructed for temporary worker accommodation forty years ago and had been temporary-worker accommodation ever since, in the particular way that things in the Lower Tiers were temporary. The room had a bunk, a storage locker, a narrow window that looked onto another narrow window across a two-meter gap, and a fold-out surface that served as a desk, a workbench, and a meal surface depending on what was currently on it. Currently on it was a project.
He had started it two weeks ago, before the Rennick arrangement. It was a rebuild of his right-hand rod, the one whose resonance cell he had been nursing along for the better part of a year on a charging cycle that was increasingly unreliable. The cell itself was a salvage piece — pulled from a decommissioned military amplifier that someone had brought down from a recycling facility on Tier Seven. It had more potential output than the cell it was replacing, which was the reason he'd chosen it, and also the reason he had been taking the rebuild slowly, because the difference between a cell that performed at Class Three and a cell that performed at Class Four was the difference between legal and flagged in Maren's scanners, and he was not interested in the complications that came with the flagged designation.
He sat down and looked at the project. Then he reached into his coat and took out the recording chip.
He looked at it for a moment. Then he did something he didn't do often, which was to plug it into the room's audio system rather than the handheld playback unit he usually used. The audio system was old and its speakers had the particular warmth-and-distortion profile of components that had been run past their service life, but it filled the room rather than just the space in front of a single earpiece, and tonight he wanted to fill the room.
He pressed play.
The recording opened the way it always did: ambient noise, the crowd settling, a low feedback whine from the venue's amplification as the system calibrated. Then the announcer's voice, compressed by eleven years of encoding, naming the performer. Then silence.
Then Seren began to play.
Kael had listened to this recording hundreds of times. He knew every beat, every tempo change, every moment where the rhythm shifted and deepened and opened into something that felt less like performance and more like gravity. He knew all of it. He had transcribed most of it, by hand, into notation shorthand that he'd taught himself from a methodology document he'd found in a public archive, and the notation now covered twelve pages that lived in the back of his storage locker.
But knowing it and hearing it were different things. They were always different things. The knowing was a map. The hearing was the territory.
He sat with his back against the bunk and his rods in his lap and listened to forty-three minutes of the greatest Rhythmist performance that had ever been committed to recording, and at the thirty-one minute mark — the moment where Seren's tempo suddenly opened, where the rhythm that had been building with almost unbearable precision for thirty minutes suddenly expanded into something vast and inevitable, like a door opening onto a space you had suspected was there but had never been able to see — he felt, as he always felt at exactly this moment, the particular quality of knowing with absolute certainty what he was trying to do with his life.
The recording ended at forty-three minutes and twelve seconds.
Then there was something new.
He sat up. He had played this recording so many times that he knew its contents the way he knew the measurements of the alley where Croix had blocked him — completely, precisely. After the forty-three-minute mark there was digital silence, and then the recording file terminated. That was how it always was.
Except tonight, in the room's audio system with its better speakers and its years of distortion subtly removed by a different playback chain, he heard something. Not silence. Not quite. Forty-three minutes and twelve seconds, and then after — very quietly, underneath the file's declared termination point, buried in what should have been digital silence:
A rhythm. Four beats. A pattern he didn't recognize. Quiet enough that he would never have heard it in the handheld playback unit, only here, only now.
Then nothing.
Kael sat very still for a long time.
He picked up the chip and examined it. It was the same chip it had always been. He'd had it for eleven years. There was nothing unusual about the casing beyond the repaired crack along one edge, nothing that suggested he'd been listening to something other than what he thought he was listening to.
He played the last thirty seconds again.
Forty-three twelve. Silence. Then, just barely: four beats. The same pattern.
He played it six more times.
He sat with his rods in his lap and the chip in his hand and the room's audio system playing silence, and he thought about what it meant that the recording he had been carrying for eleven years had something in it he had never heard before.
He thought about Seren, who had been the greatest Rhythmist the city had produced and who had vanished mid-concert and who had never been found.
He thought about four beats of a pattern he didn't recognize.
Then he got up and went back to work.