Gordo opened the door before they knocked.
He had heard them on the stairs. His sensitivity to frequency, Kael noted, had not reduced in the months since the first mark transfer.
If anything the prolonged proximity to crack sites had sharpened it in the involuntary way that any consistent sensory input sharpened the system that received it.
He looked at both of them with the expression of a man who had called for help and was now uncertain whether the help was going to make things better or more complicated.
"There are two of you," he said.
"Mara Olsen," Mara said. "You have been in our awareness for a while."
"Wonderful," Gordo said. He stepped back and let them in.
The apartment was as Kael had described it to Mara on the way up: small, tidy in the way of someone who had very little and took care of it. A bed, a table, two chairs, a window on the east face of the building that looked out onto the narrow alley below. The window was closed. The curtain was drawn.
The shadow-follow's frequency was visible to Kael's Resonance through the wall, a structured cold presence on the other side of the glass.
Gordo sat on the bed.
"Tell me what is at my window," he said.
Kael sat in one of the chairs. Mara took the other without being invited, which was her habit in any room where the seating was finite.
"The system is telling you that you are at a threshold," Kael said. "Your balance has been accumulating through proximity engagement for three months. The passive interest has been running on top of that. You have reached a point where the system considers your account significant enough to require a formal acknowledgment."
"In the form of a thing at my window."
"In the form of a thing at your window, yes."
Gordo looked at the curtain. "What does it want?"
"It wants you to decide," Kael said. "The system's logic at this stage is to present the marked individual with a recognition event that makes clear the engagement is real and ongoing and will not stop on its own. It is offering you the opportunity to engage consciously."
"And if I do not engage consciously?"
"The passive accumulation continues. The balance grows. Eventually a passive collection event occurs anyway and you are not prepared for it." Gordo looked at his arm.
He looked at the lighter-than-Kael's mark on his forearm with the expression of someone examining a physical symptom they had been hoping would resolve on its own and was now demonstrably not resolving on its own.
"I am not like the two of you," he said.
Mara spoke before Kael could. "Correct," she said. "You are not a convergence-pattern carrier. You do not have the cognitive profile that the system invests in heavily.
Your engagement with the system will not produce the same depth of ability development or the same stakes of cost collection." She looked at him steadily. "What your engagement will produce is manageable, predictable, and survivable if approached correctly. What your non-engagement will produce is unpredictable and potentially not survivable."
Gordo looked at her. "That was not a reassurance," he said. "It was accurate," she said.
Kael said, "After the Bleed entry, we will bring you in. Controlled first entry, with support, with preparation, with the compound to delay cost collection. You engage the system on terms we set rather than on terms the passive accumulation sets for you."
Gordo was quiet for a long time. He looked at the curtain. "What is on the other side of that window right now," he said. "Specifically."
"A system-generated acknowledgment entity," Kael said. "Not a predator. Not a collector. A recognition event given form." He paused. "It will leave when you acknowledge it."
"Acknowledge it how?"
"Look at it," Kael said. Gordo looked at the curtain.
He reached out and moved it aside. The structured shadow-follow was on the other side of the glass, twelve feet off the ground, present in the specific way that things in the Rift were present when they were being something rather than just existing.
It looked at Gordo. Gordo looked at it. Three seconds.
The frequency shifted. The coherent structure in it resolved into something simpler, the ordinary diffuse quality of a standard shadow-follow, and then it dropped away from the window and was gone. Gordo let the curtain fall. He sat for a moment.
"After the Bleed entry," he said.
"After the Bleed entry," Kael confirmed.
Gordo nodded once. The nod of a man who had run out of alternative options and was acknowledging the mathematics of the situation with as much dignity as he could assemble on short notice. "This," he said, "continues to be the worst thing that has ever happened to me."
"It gets better," Mara said. He looked at her.
"Eventually," she said.