He went to the Harrow District that afternoon.
This was, objectively, a bad idea. Kael was fully aware of that. The Harrow was twelve blocks of the city that the rest of the city had collectively decided to forget existed, a stretch of old industrial buildings, failing grid infrastructure, and the kind of silence that sat on a place like weight.
He went anyway. He had one reason.
John Doe had been found there. John Doe had the mark first. If there was an answer to what was happening, it started where John Doe ended.
The transit worker who had found the body was a man named Gordo Pereira, according to the incident report Kael had photographed before leaving the morgue. Gordo Pereira had given an address in the Harrow before quitting and apparently ceasing to exist as far as public records were concerned.
Kael found the building. Three stories, former textile factory, half the windows covered with boards, the other half dark. The front door was unlocked.
He went in.
The interior smelled like rust and old rain. Weak daylight came through gaps in the boards. Kael moved carefully, watching the floor for soft spots, the ceiling for anything that looked ambitious about falling.
He found Gordo Pereira on the second floor.
The man was sitting with his back against the wall, knees drawn up, staring at the space in front of him with the focused attention of someone watching a film no one else could see. He was maybe forty, heavyset, wearing a transit authority jacket with the badge torn off.
Kael stopped a few feet away.
"Gordo Pereira?"
The man's eyes moved to him. Slow. Like waking up. "You have it," Gordo said. Not a question.
Kael pulled back his sleeve.
Gordo looked at the mark, then looked away. "I had it for six hours before it disappeared. Some people it stays. Some people it passes through." His voice was flat, scraped out. "I was one of the lucky ones."
"You quit your job and you're hiding in an abandoned building," Kael said. "That's lucky?"
"I'm still alive." Gordo met his eyes. "The man in the drain tunnel wasn't."
Kael sat down. Not because he was comfortable. Because his legs had made a decision without him.
"Tell me what you saw," he said. Gordo looked at him for a long moment. "There's a layer," he said finally. "Under the city. Under everything. It's been there a long time. Longer than the city. Longer than people." He turned his hands over in his lap, examining them like they belonged to someone else. "Sometimes it cracks.
And things come through." "What kind of things?"
"Hungry ones." Gordo's jaw tightened. "The man you were called about. He didn't die of natural causes. He died because he went looking.
He found a crack and he climbed in and whatever was on the other side climbed back out."
Kael thought about drawer seven. The mark. The warmth beneath his skin.
"And the mark?" he said.
"The mark means you touched it. Or it touched you." Gordo shook his head. "Which means you're already in the system. There's no mark without entry. There's no entry without cost."
The number on Kael's arm pulsed once, like a heartbeat.
0.
Not for long, something in him whispered.