"So can you run me through the client again," Cael asked as he leads lazily into the counter as he watches George sorting out more of the store's stocks. "I want more on them before I give you an answer."
"What specifically?"
"Why is the engine in that hollow. Not the version where the previous owner brought it in for unspecified reasons you can't verify. The real version, if you have it."
A longer pause this time. Long enough that he heard, faintly, what might have been George's counterpart somewhere else in whichever Scrap 'N Scrap location the Fixer was actually in: the soft click of components being handled, the small ambient sounds of a shop that was occupied and working.
He noted the sound. He didn't comment on it.
"The engine was being transported. That's the client's account, unverified. The contractor who carried it in was moving it from one location to another through the hollow as a transit route, which isn't standard practice but isn't unheard of in the outer ring when surface routes carry too much visibility."
"Someone was using the hollow as a smuggling corridor."
"I'm not using that word. Someone was using the hollow as a transit route. The courier lost their footing in the sub-geometry, the engine was separated from them, and by the time anyone understood what had happened the hollow's geometry had shifted enough that retrieval wasn't immediate. It became a commission instead."
"What was the engine being transported to? Or from?"
"That I don't have."
"Can't have or won't share?"
"Don't have. The client's account ends at the hollow entrance. What the engine was doing before that point isn't information I was given."
He watched the amber markers through the window. Blink. Blink. The steady, patient rhythm of a system that was telling you something was out there and had been telling you the same thing long enough that nobody really heard it anymore.
"The seven contractors. Were any of them sourced by you specifically? Or were some of them from other fixers?"
"All seven were mine. The client has been working exclusively through me."
"Why?"
"Possibly a sketchy dealing but what am i to judge. Plus I can use. After publicity from a big shot client. They say they've found my network reliable. I'll note that I find this level of exclusive reliance uncomfortable and have said so to the client."
"And?"
"And the client says they have their reasons for keeping the commission narrow and would prefer not to share them. Which is, in my experience, either a legitimate privacy concern or an indicator that the commission is more sensitive than presented."
"Or both."
"Or both. Yes."
There it was again. The shape of the thing versus the thing. She was giving him the outline and letting him assemble it, which meant she either didn't have the interior herself or she was being careful about how much of it became his problem. He couldn't tell which yet. He needed more runs on this hollow before he could tell which.
An engine transported through a hollow for visibility reasons. Seven contractors sent after it by a client who won't explain the engine's origin or destination. Licensed firms declining the job. The Fixer uncomfortable with the exclusivity.
None of those things individually is the problem. All of them together is a shape I don't like the look of.
But the rate is the rate. And she thinks I can do what the others couldn't.
And I want to know what's in that third sector.
He recognised that last one for what it was, which was the least professional of the three and also the truest. He had been doing this for four years and the thing that had kept him doing it was not, if he was honest, the money.
The money was necessary. The money was the reason.
The thing that kept him walking through the entrance and not the exit was that hollows were problems shaped like places, and he was, in some way he had never found a better word for, constitutionally unable to leave a problem alone once he'd identified the shape of it.
He picked up his kit from the counter.
"I'll take the commission."
"I haven't finished briefing you."
"I know. Brief me on the way. I want to walk the Ouyang freight corridor from the surface before the light changes. If the hollow formed around existing sub-structure I want to look at what's above it."
A pause.
"You're already moving."
"I said I'd listen. Listening's done. I'm taking the commission."
"There are details I haven't given you yet."
"There are always details you haven't given me. Give them to me while I walk."
George looked up from the counter at the sound of his boot on the floor, tracking him with the attentiveness of a Bangboo that had been told to pay attention to departures.
"George, log the commission as accepted," the Fixer chuckled.
"Ehn-nhaaaa!," the Bangboo confirmed pleasantly.
"One thing before I go," Cael said, stopping at the door.
"One thing?"
"The courier who went in with the engine. The one who lost it in the sub-geometry. What happened to them?"
The signal processing ran. Behind it, that faint ambient sound he'd noted: a shop, somewhere, with things being handled and a routine being kept.
"They didn't come back out either."
"Same hollow?"
"Same hollow."
"So the count isn't seven."
The Fixer said nothing.
"It's eight. Before me, it's already eight."
The pause that followed was the kind that confirmed something without admitting it.
"The commission window opens at first light tomorrow. I'll send the Carrot data to your navigation unit by midnight. The briefing notes I haven't covered I'll transmit alongside it."
"Send them now. I'll read them tonight."
"Also, Cael."
"Yeah?"
"Be careful with this one. Can't have your dying before your debt is payed."
He pushed the door open. The morning light came in, warmer than the shop, carrying the smell of the metalic gears and the distant chemical note of the boundary markers running their cycle.
"I'm always careful."
"Better be. I can't lose my best client or my money. Not just yet…"
He stepped out and let the door swing shut behind him.
He walked the length of Boundary Road at the kind of pace that looked purposeless and wasn't, hands loose at his sides, the revolver sitting easy at his hip, the sealed Carrot case from the morning's completed commission already exchanged for the fresh data chip his navigation unit would be receiving tonight.
The outer ring moved around him: a delivery Bangboo trundling across the road with a stack of crates twice its height, two men in combat gear arguing over a map outside a gear shop, a woman hanging laundry from a window three floors up with the particular economy of someone who had been doing the same thing for long enough that her body did it without being asked.
The ordinary weight of it. The ordinary morning, continuing.
He turned north at the junction and headed toward what the maps still called the Ouyang freight corridor, though the corridor itself had been gone for two years, swallowed up when the hollow formed around it and rearranged the eastern edge of the district.
The area had been partly cordoned since. Partly. The outer ring's relationship with HMB cordons was the same as its relationship with most of the Bureau's administrative decisions: acknowledged, noted, and worked around on a practical basis by people who lived closest to the consequences.
He was thinking about what she hadn't said.
She had told him the original Courier brought the engine into the hollow for transit reasons, to avoid surface visibility. She had told him the client wouldn't explain origin or destination.
She had told him the client maintained exclusive use of her network across all eight attempts, which she had described as uncomfortable, and she was not a person who used that word casually.
She had not told him what an S-rank W-engine needed to move quietly for.
She had not told him who the client was.
She had not told him why two licensed firms with profesonial teams and deep-coverage Carrots had looked at this hollow and said no.
That was the detail that sat wrongest. Firms like that declined jobs for two reasons: the logistics were genuinely impossible, or the job was something they didn't want their name on. The geometry was bad, but bad geometry alone didn't make a reputable firm walk away from an S-rank retrieval fee.
Something else was in that hollow. She said it herself. Something the Carrot data isn't catching.
And someone moved an S-rank engine through it quietly, and then eight people went in to get it back, and none of them came out.
The freight corridor ruins came into view at the end of the block: a stretch of collapsed loading infrastructure, half-reclaimed by the hollow's boundary expansion, amber markers blinking at intervals along the cordon line. He stopped at the edge of the cordon and looked at the space beyond it.
Ordinary, from out here. Just broken buildings and old concrete and the amber blink of the warning system doing its patient, unheard job. Nothing about it said eight people. Nothing about it explained the shape of what she'd given him.
She knows more. She's always giving you the shape of the thing and not the thing. But this one she's giving you less shape than usual.
Which means either she has less than usual, or she's protecting you from something.
Either way.
He looked at the hollow boundary for a long moment. Then he turned up his collar against the morning air and started walking the perimeter, reading the space the way he always read a hollow before he went into it: from the outside first, slowly, until the shape of it was something he could carry.
Somewhere in his coat pocket, his navigation unit was waiting for midnight and a Carrot that would only get him two-thirds of the way.
He started thinking about what he was going to do with the rest.