The sound a Tear made when it opened wasn't really a sound. It was more like the moment before a sound — a held breath, a pressure drop, the particular silence of something about to go very wrong. Cael had heard it enough times that his body moved before his mind caught up. Boots on. Coat off the hook. Down the stairs. The screaming started when he hit the street.
The grain market was three blocks south. He knew that without thinking — knew it the way you knew the shape of a room you'd lived in for years, by the specific quality of the silence breaking inside it. The Tear had good taste, at least. Grain markets cleared fast. Lots of exits.
What it also had was fifty people running in every direction, and fifty people in full panic was a thing Cael's body handled about as gracefully as a man handles standing in a river. The widow from the harbor road hit him first — her grief, old and specific and worn smooth from use, pressing against his sternum like a familiar bruise. Then the twins who ran the message circuit, their hunger a sharp low note behind his navel. A man he didn't recognize, raw animal fear that tasted like iron at the back of his throat.
He breathed through it. Always breathed through it. Let it pass the way water passed through a crack — present, moving, gone.
He'd been doing this since he was seven. You got good at it or you didn't survive it, and those were the only two options.
Three Wraiths through already. Mid-tier, man-shaped, which meant they were still new to air and light and would be fast and stupid rather than patient and strategic. He drew his blades — short, paired, the steel laced with silver-alloy that disrupted Hollow-matter — and went for the nearest one.
✦
The first was easy. It had its back to him, crouched over a merchant who'd gone down hard against a cart and was now doing the slow crawl of a man whose legs had stopped listening to him. Cael came in from the left, found the disruption point at the neck — the spot where Hollow-matter was thinnest, where the thing was most like nothing — and crossed the blades outward. The Wraith came apart. Violet light, then smoke, then gone. The merchant looked up at him with an expression so raw it landed in Cael's chest like a fist and he was already moving, already three steps gone, because if he stayed for the feeling he'd never get anything done.
The second one had cornered six people against the waterwell, three of them children, and the children's fear was — different. Always different. It hit lower, behind the ribs, in the place that had no name, and it stayed longer than adult fear did. He filed this away in the place where he put things he couldn't afford right now and went at the Wraith from the right, fast, drew its attention with a shout, and spent forty brutal seconds earning a gash across his forearm that he didn't fully feel until he saw the blood making his grip unreliable.
He switched his left blade to his right hand. Good enough.
The third one wasn't man-shaped.
Four limbs, low to the ground, the kind of form a Wraith took when the pressure behind the Tear was higher than the Tear's size suggested — like water finding a crack. He read this wrong, read it as smaller than it was, and it hit him across the ribs before he'd fully adjusted. Two of them snapped. He went down on one knee on the cobblestones and the sound that came out of him was not a word.
He got back up. Two ribs were a later problem. Right now they were just noise.
The Wraith turned to face him. He tracked it. Behind it, the Tear pulsed violet-black against the night sky, and for a moment everything was very still — the emptied square, the distant sound of people running, the specific quality of air that existed in the seconds before something got worse.
The Wraith lunged.
✦
And stopped.
Three feet from his face, it simply — stopped. Like something had grabbed it by the back of the neck. The Hollow-matter of its body flickered, contracting, confused, fighting against something that wasn't there. Three seconds of it, maybe four. Long enough.
Cael drove both blades through the disruption point and the Wraith went the way the others had gone.
He turned around.
A woman stood at the square's eastern edge, half inside a doorway's shadow. Her right hand was still raised, fingers slightly spread, the posture of someone who had just let something go. Dark hair, loose. Eyes he couldn't read from here. The stillness about her wasn't calm — it was controlled, which was different, the stillness of something that moved very quickly when it needed to and chose not to right now.
She was looking at him with the specific attention of someone who had already found what they were looking for.
Then she stepped back into the shadow and was gone.
✦
He didn't follow her. His ribs had started expressing opinions about running, and more practically, she'd moved like she knew exactly where she was going and exactly how to avoid being found. Following would've been theater.
He stood in the middle of the ruined square instead, alone with the overturned carts and the scorch marks and the Tear closing above him in its slow, natural way — days of work at this rate, the site marked as hazardous, a Warden notice to be filed with the Authority by morning. He'd file it. He always filed them. Anonymous, the way he did everything that touched official channels.
He walked home.
Bound his ribs himself in the dark — no physicker, same as always, because physickers asked questions and the questions always ended in the same place. He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling and thought about the woman, the way she'd raised her hand, the three seconds the Wraith had simply stopped being able to move.
That wasn't a Warden technique. That wasn't in any classification he'd read, and he'd read most of them. That was a Mark, used openly, in public, in front of a witness. Which meant she either had no fear of being reported, or she knew he wouldn't. He tried to work out which of those was the more dangerous conclusion and couldn't decide, so he let it sit with the cracked ribs and the dried blood on his forearm in the category of things that could wait until morning.
Sleep didn't come so much as arrive, the way it always did — less rest than a brief interruption of consciousness. He dreamed of the Lower Rings, which he usually did when he'd absorbed too much of other people's fear in a single night. His mother's apartment. Two rooms, four children, the window that faced a wall. His youngest sister crying in the dark and himself at seven years old, sitting with her, feeling everything she felt — every bit of it, hunger and fear and the specific confusion of a child who understands that something in her house is broken but doesn't yet know it's not her fault — and deciding, in the quiet way of someone with no other options, that someone had to hold this together.
He'd been holding things together for twenty years since. He was very tired of it. He was also constitutionally incapable of stopping.
The paper was on the floor beneath the door when he woke before dawn.
Small, folded once. Precise handwriting — economical, no flourishes, the letters of someone who thought of writing as a tool rather than an expression.
He read it standing by the door in the gray pre-light, still shirtless, his bound ribs making themselves known with every breath.
"You stayed after the square cleared. Nobody does that. I want to know why. Gilded Reed teahouse, merchant quarter. Dusk tonight. Come alone."
That was all. No name. No threat, no flattery, no explanation — just the assumption that he'd come, delivered with the confidence of someone who'd already worked out that he would.
He set the note on the windowsill. Looked at it for a while. Looked at the harbor beyond it, coming gray and slow into morning, the fishing boats and the early cargo ships and the ordinary world doing the ordinary work of another day.
She was right that nobody stayed. He'd been the only Warden at that Tear — unofficial, unregistered, same as every Tear he'd responded to in six years — and when the square cleared, every civilian had run, which was correct, and every other fighting-capable person had run with them, which was also correct. The protocol was clear: when Wraith numbers exceeded lone-fighter odds, you fell back and waited for the Authority's Warden response team.
Cael had never, in six years, fallen back.
The note told him she'd been watching him long enough to know that. Long enough to know where he lived. Long enough to know he'd be alone.
He should not go. He knew this with the same clarity he knew Tear-pressure and snapped ribs and all the other simple facts that his body delivered without drama. Going meant exposure. Going meant engaging with a woman who had an unregistered Mark and had looked at him across a wrecked square like she already knew what he was.
He put the note in his coat pocket. Started wrapping his forearm properly.
He was going.
He always went toward the thing that was going to cost him. Some people called this bravery. Cael had a more accurate word for it.
He'd stopped using the word years ago. It sat badly, in the same way that a name for an injury sat badly — the naming didn't help the healing, and sometimes it just made you more aware of the wound.
He pulled on his coat. Checked his blades. Looked once more at the note.
At the bottom, below the address, in writing slightly smaller than the rest — as if added after, as if she'd almost not included it:
"I know what your Mark does. I know you've never told anyone. That's not a threat. That's just so you understand that I'm not guessing."