He walked home through the Sunday afternoon city with Resonance low and his mind on the meeting.
Nine AM Monday. Cross's building in the government district. The mid-century block he had walked past without stopping a dozen times, the one that looked like it might be a regional tax office or a permit processing center, the kind of building designed to make people look away. He had never had a reason to go in before.
He would have one tomorrow.
He spent the rest of Sunday doing what he always did when a significant unknown was approaching: he worked through what he knew and identified what he did not know and thought about which gaps were closable before the meeting and which ones he would have to carry in and manage in real time.
What he knew: Cross had been watching the Rift for twenty-three years. The Veil Office had monitoring equipment at eleven stable crack sites.
They had sent people through in the early years and lost three of them. They had a file on the port district event eleven months ago, something that had come through a directed-pressure crack and required a significant response to contain.
What he did not know: the full scope of what the Veil Office understood about the mark mechanics. Whether they knew about the debt counter.
Whether their understanding of the Ledger was genuine or peripheral. What they had done with the port district entity after containing it.
He made dinner. He ate at the kitchen table with his notebook open, writing questions in the order he intended to ask them, noting which ones were worth trading information for and which ones he would ask without offering anything in return.
He slept six hours.
At 8:15 Monday morning he put on the jacket he wore when he wanted to project the specific quality of someone who was there by choice rather than necessity, and he walked the twenty minutes to the government district.
Mara was on the steps of Cross's building when he arrived at 8:52. She was looking at her phone, but when he came within threading range she looked up, which meant she had felt him coming two blocks out.
"He has three people inside," she said quietly as he reached the steps. "I can feel the Veil Office frequency from here. It is dense. They have been running equipment in that building for a long time."
He looked at the building's unremarkable facade.
"Ready?" he said.
"I have been ready since Friday," she said.
Then They went in.
The lobby was what he had expected: deliberately ordinary, a security desk, a sign-in system, an elevator bank. The security officer at the desk had the specific quality of someone whose job was not what it appeared to be. He had the alertness of Rift-adjacent work without the mark.
Cross was waiting for them at the elevator.
He looked the same as he had in the diner. Controlled, lean, the jacket that was part of a consistent self-presentation. He shook Mara's hand with the measured courtesy of someone who understood that the handshake was a data exchange and was conducting it accordingly.
"Thank you both for coming," he said.
"You gave us good reason," Kael said.
Cross looked at him with the fractional register that passed for expression in his face.
"I did," he said. "Come upstairs."
The elevator opened on the fourth floor and Cross led them down a corridor that had the specific frequency density Mara had felt from outside: twenty-three years of Rift-monitoring equipment humming in the walls at a register just below ordinary hearing. Kael ran Resonance across it without deciding to. The building knew things.
Cross's office was at the end of the corridor.
He opened the door and gestured them in and closed it behind them.
There were two chairs across from his desk. A whiteboard on the left wall covered in a notation system Kael did not immediately recognize. A terminal with three screens. And on the right wall, a map of the city with eleven locations marked in red.
Eleven crack sites.
Kael looked at the map.
He looked at Cross.
"The port district file," he said. "Start there."