Rennick's shows of presence came in the form of a fight card.
It was organized differently from the regular Pit schedule — not individual slots in a fixed program but a series of bouts across three of Rennick's facilities in a single cycle, running simultaneously, with the results visible across the facilities through a linked display system that Maren set up with more technical competence than Kael had expected of her, which was a useful lesson about underestimating infrastructure people.
The display system was the point. Not the fights themselves — the fights were the mechanism. The point was that every fighter Rennick had on arrangement was visible, performing, winning if possible, demonstrating that the facilities were alive and operational and defended. Territorial performance, conducted through the medium of actual Resonance combat, because this was the Lower Tiers and that was how territory worked here.
Kael's assignment was the Ostrev facility specifically. Which was either a vote of confidence or a statement about his relative expendability in the context of the facility most likely to be contested. He had been in enough of Rennick's arrangements long enough to accept that both might be true simultaneously.
Joss found him during the setup hour.
She wasn't supposed to be at the Ostrev facility — she had no arrangement with Rennick, no presence in his fighter network. She was there because she knew where Kael would be and she'd figured the timing correctly.
"You look like you've been thinking too hard," she said.
"I talked to Rennick."
"About what?"
He told her. The anonymous documents, the Resonance Event framing, the patron concept, Yava's assessment of him as significant in unspecified ways. He told it concisely, the way he'd learned to process information — what was known, what was inferred, what was unknown.
Joss listened without interrupting. When he finished, she was quiet for a count of eight.
"The documents that framed the Event as engineered," she said. "Did Rennick say where they circulated?"
"Lower-level Resonance communities. He didn't specify."
"Because I've read them." She said it without particular drama, which was how she said most significant things. "Not all of them — they came through a secondary net sharing chain, fragments rather than complete documents. But I read enough." She looked at the floor. "I thought they were interesting theory. I didn't think they were documented reality."
"What did they say, specifically, about how the Event was designed?"
"They said it was frequency-based. That the Resonance Event was a structured broadcast — a specific combination of frequencies, transmitted through a delivery system that could reach everyone simultaneously. The framing was that this was done to activate a latent capacity in human neurology, something that had always been there but needed a specific trigger." She paused. "The documents said the intent was to create a distributed network of individuals with Resonance ability who would, over time, develop the capacity to hear a specific communication. A signal."
Kael was very still.
"They called it the Second Frequency," Joss continued. "The idea was that the Event was the first transmission. The people it awakened were supposed to be receivers for the second one — a follow-up signal that would come later, once enough people were awakened and developed enough to receive it."
"When?"
"The documents didn't specify. They said the timeline depended on conditions that the original designers hadn't been able to predict precisely." She looked at him. "You understand what I'm telling you."
He understood. "The cipher," he said. "The four-beat pattern at a frequency below consumer threshold. The column resonance at Harrow block." He was working through it. "If someone designed the Event to create Resonance users who could eventually receive a second signal — and if that someone left a message in a recording specifically hidden at a frequency range that Resonance users with developed technique could detect — then the message isn't pointing to an archive."
"It's pointing to whoever designed the Event," Joss said.
"Or to what they were trying to communicate."
They looked at each other.
"Kael," she said carefully. "Someone gave that chip to a six-year-old. At a specific shelter. At a specific structural column. Someone calculated that the child would grow up to be exactly the kind of Rhythmist who could eventually hear what was hidden in that recording." She paused. "That's not something you do for random children."
"I know."
"That's something you do if you know who the child is. Or what they might become." Her expression was careful, controlled, carrying something she didn't want to say. "Did you ever find out who your parents were?"
He had not. The shelter system's records on Kael Voss began at the point of his arrival at the Harrow block, age three, accompanied by no documentation and no identified family contact. He had made peace with this absence in the way that people make peace with absences — not by resolving it but by building around it, the way a structure builds around a gap in its foundation and is shaped by the gap without the gap ever being filled.
"No," he said.
Joss nodded. She didn't push further. She had the quality, which he valued, of knowing the exact edge of what was useful to say.
"The fight card," she said, shifting back.
"Yes."
"After. When this is done. We go through everything we know from the beginning and we map it properly." She looked at him. "And we think very carefully about the fact that someone may have been planning around you specifically before you were old enough to be planned around."
"That's a comfortable thought," he said.
"No," she agreed. "It isn't."
The fight card ran four bouts across three facilities over six hours. Kael fought twice. The first was a local Dissonant from the upper end of Three — experienced, controlled, the good kind of Dissonant who had learned to be precise about their destruction rather than just being large about it. Kael won the second movement after losing the first, a comeback that required him to adjust his tempo to accommodate the Dissonant's frequency pattern rather than competing with it, which was counterintuitive but effective.
The second bout was against a Melodist who used a keyboard instrument and had the particular ability to layer multiple melodic lines simultaneously — not as complex as what Joss did, but competent, with a specific tactic of creating a false rhythm illusion to disguise the actual timing of their actions. Kael spent the first movement figuring out the illusion mechanism and the second movement ignoring it, which was the only reliable counter once you'd identified what you were dealing with. He won in the third.
Across the display system, Rennick's other fighters were winning at a rate that Kael suspected had something to do with careful matching rather than pure competitive merit, but the results were the results and the territorial statement was made.
By the time the card was over, it was late in the cycle and he was tired in the bone-deep way that came from two fights close together. He went back to the Tier Three residency block and lay in his bunk and looked at the ceiling.
He thought about the second frequency.
He thought about a six-year-old receiving a chip that had been placed specifically for him.
He thought about growing up at the bottom of the city, practicing alone on rooftops, learning a technique that turned out to be Academy methodology without anyone teaching it, becoming exactly the kind of fighter that a message written in rhythmic cipher would require.
He put the chip on the fold-out surface beside his bunk, where he could see it.
Then he closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.