Varn found Kai at the zone access station the next morning.
He was a large man, the build of someone who had spent fourteen years doing hard physical work in zones where the wrong choice cost you your life. Gold A-Rank, the badge carrying the deep notation of someone who had been accumulating zone depth for a long time and had the output to show for it. He looked at Kai with the assessment attention of a hunter evaluating another hunter—not hostility yet, but not warmth. The specific look of a professional who had been working a problem for eleven months and had just been told a solution was arriving from somewhere else.
"I've run zone 5 since it opened," he said. "More contracts here than anyone in the branch. If you're going into zone 5, I'm coming."
Not a request.
"Yes," Kai said.
