Theron pulled her out of the Commander's office before Aldwyn could ask questions he wasn't ready to answer.
In the corridor, voice low: "It's a Bloodweaver marker. It's a calling card."
"Someone left a handprint on the outside of a fourteen-story window as a calling card."
"He does things like that." Theron's jaw was set. "He's announcing himself. Letting us know he's been watching."
"Who?"
He didn't answer immediately. That told her more than the answer would have.
"His name is Cael Vorne," he said finally. "Bloodweaver. Approximately three hundred years old. He operates in the Verge district — the eastern industrial sector. He and I have had two field contacts in four years and neither of them ended without someone nearly dying."
"Nearly being the operative word."
"Nearly."
"And he left you a handprint on the window."
"He left it for you." Theron looked at her directly. "He knows you activated. Bloodweavers have their own perception network — they feel Void-resonance shifts the way we feel weather. A full-activation mark in the Obsidian district would have registered to every Bloodweaver in Caelveth within hours." A pause. "He came to see for himself."
"What does he want?"
"That's what I intend to find out before you speak to him."
"You're planning to speak to him?"
"I'm planning to prevent you from speaking to him unsupervised. There's a difference." He moved toward the elevator. "Cael Vorne doesn't do anything without a reason. He doesn't leave calling cards without meaning to. He's already thinking three moves ahead of whatever we think this is."
Riven followed him. "You don't like him."
"I don't trust him."
"Is there a difference?"
Theron pressed the elevator button and said nothing.
"You mentioned a predecessor," she said. "Caius Ferren. The one who died in the eastern sector."
His hand stopped moving.
"You think Cael was involved."
"I think Cael was in the area." He looked at the elevator doors. "I think the eastern sector is his territory and nothing happens there that he doesn't know about. I think Caius was investigating the same seam-site anomalies we're now investigating, and that his investigation ended in his death, and that the timing was not coincidental."
"But you don't know."
"I don't know."
The elevator opened. They stepped in.
"Which is why," he said, as the doors closed, "you don't speak to him alone."
She looked at the elevator's mirrored surface. Her own face, the mark on her palm, the ghost of the handprint still in her mind — something that had stood on the outside of a building fourteen stories up and pressed its palm to the glass the way you'd press it to say hello.
She wasn't afraid of it.
That, she thought, was probably something she should examine more carefully later.
⁂
Training began at five the next morning, which told her everything she needed to know about Theron Dast's philosophy of preparation.
He handed her a practice blade and swept her feet before she'd adjusted her grip.
She hit the mat. Looked up at him from the floor.
"Again," he said.
She got up.
For three hours he took her apart and put her back together — her stance, her grip, her footwork, her breathing, the way she committed to a strike before she'd read the environment. He corrected without cruelty but without softening, and she didn't ask him to soften. She'd wanted this her whole life without knowing what it was. Some instinct had always told her she was supposed to know how to fight, and she'd taken every class she could access and read every manual she could find and none of it had felt like the thing she was actually reaching for.
This felt like it.
By the second hour she was blocking forty percent of his strikes. By the third she landed one.
He stopped. Looked at his wrist where she'd tagged him.
"Less bad," he said.
She had a feeling that was the highest praise in his vocabulary.
The perceptual training came after — resonance markers scattered around the room, her eyes closed, the mark on her palm reading the space the way a compass reads north. She found five of seven on the first pass, seven of seven on the third.
He was quiet when she opened her eyes. A different kind of quiet from his usual one.
"You're accelerating," he said.
"Is that unusual?"
"For a first-week Branded? Yes." He picked up one of the markers, turned it in his fingers. "Your mark is calibrating to your biology faster than standard. The perceptual sensitivity is weeks ahead of where you should be."
"My father modified my encoding," she said. "Before he died. He transferred something into me — I don't know what yet, but I can feel it responding to things. Like it knows what it's doing even when I don't."
Theron looked at her.
"You felt that," he said.
"From the first night. Whatever the mark is, it's not just new to me. It knows things." She held his gaze. "Whatever my father put in me — it has been waiting. For this."
He was quiet for a long moment.
"That," he said carefully, "is not in any activation record I've ever reviewed."
"That's because nobody in the activation records had a father who went looking through the deep archive six months before he died and found something nobody was supposed to find."
The marker in his hand stopped turning.
"We need to find what he found," he said.
"Yes," she said. "Before the Voidwarden does."
He looked at her for a moment longer. Then he set the marker down and went to the weapons rack.
"Left-hand blade work," he said. "You're leading too hard with your right."
She picked up the practice blade.
Outside, the city moved through its day. And somewhere in its eastern reaches, in a district the Order avoided and the Hollow increasingly haunted, a three-hundred-year-old Bloodweaver was waiting for the moment she'd come looking for him.
She didn't know that yet.
But the mark on her palm was already pointing east.