Gordo talked for two hours.
Kael listened.
He was good at listening. People assumed that because he was quiet, he was not paying attention. He was always paying attention. He had grown up in situations where missing a detail got you hurt, and he had never fully stopped living in those situations even after the formal circumstances changed.
He catalogued what Gordo told him the way he catalogued everything: without judgment, without panic, in order of importance.
First: the hidden layer was real. Gordo had no reason to lie and every reason to stay quiet. He had chosen to talk anyway, which meant he had been waiting for someone to talk to. That detail mattered.
Second: the mark was an entry record. Not a curse. Not a disease. A record. Something had noticed him and registered his presence the way a system logs a new account.
Third: the number. Gordo had heard about the number from someone else, someone who had also carried the mark and survived longer than John Doe. The number tracked what was owed.
"What's the currency?" Kael said.
Gordo was quiet.
"Gordo. What does it collect?"
"Nobody knows exactly." He scratched the back of his neck. "The ones who've made it further. Who've gotten stronger. They talk about it in pieces. Things they can't remember. Time they lost. Parts of themselves they reached for and found missing."
Kael looked at the zero on his arm. It stared back, patient and precise.
"And the power?" he said.
Because there was power. He knew it the same way he had known it was a debt counter: the knowledge arrived whole, like something planted.
Gordo nodded slowly.
"You survive something in the Rift, you come out stronger. Different. You can do things. See things. Some people get abilities that don't have names yet." He paused. "But every ability has a price attached that you don't know until you try to pay it."
"Wonderful," Kael said.
"And the deeper you go," Gordo continued, "the more the Rift changes. It escalates. It's not random. Something in there is designing the difficulty. Like it's studying you." Kael stood up.
"Where's the nearest crack?" he said.
Gordo stared at him. "Did you hear anything I just said?" "I heard all of it." Kael pulled his sleeve down. "Here's what I know. The mark is on my arm whether I look for cracks or not.
The debt counter starts at zero, which means it will move. And if I sit in a building waiting for that to happen to me, I'm already losing." He looked at the older man. "I don't lose on other people's schedules."
A long silence. Then Gordo reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
"Three blocks east," he said. "Basement of the old sorting facility. The crack there has been stable for months." He held out the paper. "This is everything else I know. Names. Locations. What I heard from the others before they went quiet." Kael took it.
"Why are you helping me?" he said.
Gordo looked at him with the eyes of someone who had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time.
"Because," he said, "every person I've told about this has died. And you're the first one who didn't look scared."Kael tucked the paper into his jacket.
He was scared.He was just better at math than fear.