"Where are we going," Dorian said.
"Two streets east. There's an alley behind the old tram depot."
"And?"
"And there's a kid there who's been bleeding for about forty minutes."
Dorian looked at him sideways. "You know that."
"Yes."
"From the future."
"Yes."
Dorian didn't say anything for a moment. They turned off the main street onto something narrower and darker, away from the clusters of people still standing in doorways and staring at their holograms like they were waiting for someone to explain the instructions.
"What happened to him," Dorian said.
"Three guys jumped him about an hour before the Debut. Took everything. Left him in the alley." Varen kept his pace steady. "He was already down when the System went live. Couldn't move. Couldn't get help. His Valuation opened at fourteen and it's been dropping since."
"Dropping why."
"Blood loss counts as physical degradation. System reads it as a decrease in base stats." Varen glanced at his hands — clean now, no sign of what happened in the apartment. "If he loses consciousness before we get there, his Valuation hits zero. The Collectors finish what the three guys started."
Dorian was quiet.
"So we're running," he said.
They ran.
The alley behind the tram depot smelled like rust and standing water and something else that Varen didn't want to identify. It was narrow, barely wide enough for two people, hemmed in by a chain-link fence on one side and a concrete wall slick with old damp on the other.
The kid was at the far end.
Sitting with his back against the wall, knees drawn up, head hanging. Dark jacket, dark jeans, one shoe missing. His hands were pressed against his side and the hands were dark too, in the way that things get dark in bad light when they're wet with something that isn't water.
Above his head: 9 SC.
Dropping.
Varen crouched in front of him. Up close he was younger than the jacket made him look — seventeen, maybe eighteen, with a face that hadn't finished deciding what it wanted to be yet. Sharp jaw, dark circles that predated tonight, the kind of tired that isn't just one bad night.
His eyes were open.
That was something.
"Hey," Varen said.
The kid's eyes moved. Slow, like the signal had to travel a long way. He looked at Varen, then at Dorian standing behind him, then back at Varen. His expression didn't change much. Just a slight shift — not fear, not relief. Assessment.
Even now. Even like this.
That's it, Varen thought. That's the thing.
"You're going to want to move," Varen said. "Can you move?"
"Who are you." His voice came out rougher than it should at his age. Like it had already been used hard.
"Someone who found you before someone worse did."
The kid looked at him for a long moment.
"There's a number above your head," he said.
"There's one above yours too."
"Mine's going down."
"I know. That's why we're here." Varen looked at the wound — hands pressed tight against the left side, below the ribs. Knife, probably, from the shape of it. Deep enough to matter, not deep enough to be immediately fatal. This half hour. "What's your name."
A pause.
"Cael," the kid said. "Cael Ryn."
Varen looked up at the hologram.
[Cael Ryn. Current Valuation: 8 SC. Projection +1h: 0 SC. Cause of decline: critical physical damage, blood loss stage 2, no Guild affiliation, no registered skills.]
[Hidden flag detected: ANOMALY CLASS — UNREGISTERED.]
There it was.
In the previous life Varen had heard about this exactly once — a rumor, three years in, passed through a contact in the Information Guild who said it like it was worth something. There's a kid in the Iron Guild with a flag the System doesn't explain. Something unregistered. They don't know what it does, they just know it's there and it's rare and they're not letting him go.
Varen hadn't thought much of it at the time. He'd been busy surviving.
He thought about it now.
"We're going to help you up," Varen said. "And then we're going to move. There's a place four blocks from here that's sheltered and off the main streets. We deal with the wound there."
Cael watched him. That same flat assessment.
"Why," he said.
"Because your Valuation is at eight and dropping and in about twenty minutes a Debt Collector walks into this alley."
"I know that." His eyes didn't waver. "Why do you care."
Varen looked at him for a moment.
"I don't care," he said. "I'm making an investment."
Something shifted in the kid's face. Not offense — recognition. Like that was the first honest thing anyone had said to him tonight and he knew what to do with honesty.
"What kind of investment," Cael said.
"The kind where you stay alive tonight. We talk later about what that's worth."
Another long pause. Cael looked at Dorian, who was standing back with his arms crossed and an expression that said he was filing everything away for a conversation later that Varen was not looking forward to. Then Cael looked back at Varen.
"Fine," he said.
Getting him up took longer than it should have.
Not because Cael fought it — he didn't, he was pragmatic about it in a way that said he'd done triage on himself and accepted the numbers. It was just the mechanics of it. The wound pulled when he moved, and the sound he made the first time he tried to straighten up was short and controlled, cut off fast, the sound of someone who'd learned not to let pain out where people could hear it.
Dorian got under his left arm without being asked.
Varen noticed. Didn't say anything.
They moved slowly through the back streets, keeping off the main roads where the crowd density was highest and the chaos was loudest. Twice they passed other people — a couple walking fast with their heads down, a man standing completely still in the middle of the pavement staring at the sky. Nobody looked at them twice. Everyone had their own problems tonight.
The place Varen had in mind was a covered loading bay on the side of an old warehouse — long disused, dry, with three ways in and three ways out. He'd used it in the previous life during the third month, after the first Guild sweep of the neighborhood, when having a place off the grid mattered more than having a bed.
He hadn't expected to be here this early.
They got Cael down against the wall in the far corner. Dorian pulled off his own jacket and folded it without comment, set it under the kid's head when he listed sideways.
Varen looked at the wound.
"I need your shirt," he said to Dorian.
"Of course you do."
"Not the jacket, the shirt under it."
"It's my only—"
"Dorian."
Dorian took off his jacket, took off his shirt, put his jacket back on. He handed the shirt over with the expression of a man building a very detailed list of grievances.
Varen worked quickly. The wound wasn't the worst he'd seen — the blade had gone in at an angle and the ribs had deflected it from anything critical. Dirty, bleeding badly, would need proper treatment within the next day or it would get infected. Not tonight's problem. Tonight was just keeping pressure on it and keeping Cael's Valuation above zero long enough for the body to start compensating.
Cael watched him work.
"You know what you're doing," he said.
"Somewhat."
"The number above my head stopped dropping."
"Blood loss slows when you stop moving and the pressure goes on."
"It's at six."
"I know."
"That's still very low."
"Yes." Varen sat back on his heels. "It'll stabilize. The System counts physical state in real time — if you're not actively deteriorating it holds where it is. You're not actively deteriorating."
Cael looked at the ceiling of the loading bay for a moment. Somewhere outside someone was shouting, far away, one of those sounds that was becoming the background texture of the night.
"The guys who did this," he said. "They took my bag. I had a System notification when the Debut happened — said I had a starting skill. I didn't get to see what it was before they knocked me down."
Varen looked at him.
"What kind of notification."
"It said—" Cael's eyes went slightly distant, reading something internal. "It said passive skill registered. Classification: pending review. That was all. Then they had my face in the pavement."
Pending review.
Varen had never heard that phrasing. In two years of living inside the System he'd seen thousands of skill notifications. They were always immediate — classified on activation, no delay, no ambiguity. Pending review meant the System had flagged something it didn't know how to categorize.
That was the unregistered anomaly.
Whatever Cael's passive skill was, the System itself didn't have a box to put it in yet.
"Can you access your System interface?" Varen said.
Cael closed his eyes for a second. "It's there. Skill panel says—" A pause. "It says Null Reading. Classification: anomalous. Function: undetermined. Status: dormant."
Dorian, who had been leaning against the wall pretending not to listen, looked up at that.
"Null Reading," he said.
"I don't know what it means," Cael said.
Varen didn't know either. Not exactly. But he knew what the Iron Guild had paid for it three weeks from now, and he knew what they'd used it for after that, and he knew that by year two Cael Ryn had been the most reliable bounty tracker in the eastern district — finding people who didn't want to be found, people who'd scrubbed their public Valuation data, people who thought they were hidden.
Null Reading.
He could read what the System deliberately obscured.
"It means," Varen said carefully, "that you have something worth keeping quiet about."
Cael opened his eyes. That flat look again, the one that assessed and filed.
"Worth keeping quiet about from who," he said.
"From everyone." Varen met his eyes. "Until you know what it does and who wants it, you tell nobody. Not a Guild recruiter, not a potential ally, not anyone who asks nicely. Nobody."
A long silence.
"You're telling me," Cael said.
"I'm the one who found you bleeding in an alley. Different category."
Something crossed the kid's face that might, under better circumstances, have been the beginning of a dry smile. It didn't make it all the way. He was too tired and too hurt and the night was too heavy for that.
"Fine," he said again.
Above his head the hologram read 7 SC.
Still low. Still precarious. But stable.
Dorian settled against the wall beside Varen, close enough to talk quietly.
"So," he said. "The three of us. In an abandoned warehouse. On the first night of whatever this is." He looked at the hologram above his own head — 34 SC, unchanged. "What's the plan."
Varen looked at Cael, who had his eyes half-closed, conserving energy, not asleep, listening to everything.
He looked at Dorian.
He thought about the Iron Guild finding this alley in three weeks. About the Silver Guild's fourth tier and whoever had decided that he needed to be dead. About the Valuation projections and the conditions attached to them and the way the System laid everything out in numbers if you knew how to read them.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we find out how to raise Valuation without registering with a Guild."
"And tonight."
"Tonight we make sure nobody dies."
Dorian considered this.
"Minimum viable plan," he said.
"It's the first night. We work with what we have."
Outside the city hummed and screamed and tried to understand what it had become. Inside the loading bay the three of them sat in the specific silence of people who have just made a decision they can't take back, waiting to see what it costs.
Cael's hologram read 7 SC.
Then, very slowly, 8.