The transport bay smelled like ozone and burned coolant when Caleb walked in. The Yoju kill was already on the bay’s secondary monitor, looping. Somebody had cut the gantry-crane footage into a thirty-second highlight package with bid graphics overlaid.

Tali sat on a bench with the medical kit open. She did not look up.

"Strip to the waist."

Caleb peeled the field jacket off, then the shirt under it. The bypass module’s amber light reflected off the wall.

Tali’s hands were on his ribs before he had time to brace. She moved fast. Sealant gel under the cracked plate, fresh adhesive over the bruise from the Yoju shockwave, two adrenaline tabs pressed into his palm. The bay’s ambient noise filled in for her.

"Hassek’s still here," she said when she was done.

"I know."

"He didn’t go home."

"I know."

Tali snapped the kit shut. "Suit’s hanging on the rack."

The titanium case sat open on the bench. The fabric inside caught the overhead light and held it.

Caleb reached for the jacket.

The crushed-orchid scent rose out of the lining the moment he lifted it.

The fabric settled over his shoulders like water settling into a glass. It had been cut around the exact measurements he had taken twice in three years, both times in private. Somebody had transmitted them across the continent in time for a same-day fit. His wrist module had a notification. He did not check it.

Tali stepped back and studied him.

"That fits," she said.

"Yeah."

"You look different."

"I look like a guy who can afford the suit."

"Mmh."

She dropped a pair of polished black shoes at his feet without comment. The shoes also fit.

Caleb tied them, stood, and walked to the bay door without looking at her.

The gala car was an old First Division transport with the back stripped down to leather and a chilled water glass in the seat-back holder. Caleb sat with his wrist module on his thigh, sleeve up.

The audit text from Kikaru sat on the screen.

[KIKARU: Compliance found a routing entity.]

[KIKARU: Single name. Attending tonight.]

[KIKARU: I need a positive ID. I can’t do it myself.]

He had asked her, four hours ago: a face? a description? a starting point?

Her answer was already in the thread.

[KIKARU: Veil-Ward Holdings. The signatory is on the registered guest list. I do not have a face. The audit cannot get one without alerting them. That is what you are for.]

Caleb pulled up the registered guest list on his module. Twelve hundred names. A single shell company name that meant nothing.

He closed the module.

"Looking for one face in twelve hundred," he said to no one. "Sure."

The car door opened to flashbulbs.

A doorman in matte black gloves escorted him out. Cameras swarmed before his foot was on the carpet, broadcast drones and sponsor cams and two journalists with handheld rigs who were not supposed to be that close.

A floor producer’s voice came through his earpiece, polite and pre-recorded.

"Welcome to the First Division Sponsor Appreciation. You are on Channel Twelve. Please walk at a steady pace. Smile if you want to. Your bid window opens at twenty hundred."

His bid window. Right. Investors were going to bet on him in real time.

Caleb walked at a steady pace. He did not smile.

The doors opened on a ballroom big enough to hold a transport hangar. The ceiling vaulted over a chandelier the size of a small monument. The floor was polished black stone. The crowd moved in slow currents of formal dress, rich in a way he could read at a glance, fabric weight and stitch density and the shoes most of all. A string quartet played from a balcony.

The crushed-orchid scent hit him at the doorway.

He kept moving.

Caleb scanned the crowd the way he scanned a freight yard before a drop.

The man at the bar shifted his weight wrong, like a tree about to fall sideways. Drunk and hiding it. The woman holding her champagne flute kept the glass too high. Covering her left wrist, possibly a scar, possibly a tracker tan-line. A waiter with a tray of canapés had pristine cuffs on shoulders that flinched a half-second before the tray bumped a pillar. Military training under the service uniform.

Five minutes in, Caleb had marked thirty people he could not place. The room had thirty-two layers of social protection between him and any of them.

His earpiece clicked.

[UNKNOWN USER: I see you came alone.]

The chip behind his ear warmed. The crushed-orchid scent intensified. Somebody had passed close enough to leave it in the air on his side of the room.

Caleb did not react.

"Mercer."

A man in his fifties, sponsor-tier suit, gray at the temples. Caleb had seen the face on a corporate broadcast. G-Corp executive division, possibly the auto-bid signatory from his Honju feed.

"Halsworth Crayne." The man extended a hand with a glass of champagne already in it. "Mid-tier sponsor council. You’ve had an impressive night. May I?"

Hadley Crayne. The drug-the-glass guy from Elara’s warning.

Caleb did not take the glass. He took the offered handshake instead. "Thanks. I’ll get my own drink in a minute."

"Of course." Crayne smiled. "Where are you posted next?"

"Wherever they send me."

"That’s a polite answer." Crayne’s eyes moved past Caleb’s shoulder. "Have you met Captain Vall? Third Division command."

Caleb angled to keep his back from the wall and turned with him.

A clean tone rang from the balcony, three rising notes from the lead violin. The crowd stilled for half a beat and resumed.

"Five-minute warning," Crayne murmured into his glass. "The Director’s about to give the toast. Everyone re-positions for it. After the toast, there’s a draft window. Ten minutes where Captains can extend offers in person. Then the formal dance."

Caleb noted the timing. Toast in five. Draft window. Formal dance.

His audit window was closing. The crowd was about to compress around the toast platform, and after that the room would be locked into a ritual nobody escaped without notice.

Across the floor, near the bar, Kikaru caught his eye. She was in a dark green dress that did not match her armor profile at all, hair down for the first time he had ever seen. She gave him a nod so small a camera would have missed it.

The audit was alive.

He needed a face in five minutes.

Caleb scanned the converging crowd as people drifted toward the toast platform.

He saw the face at minute four.

A man, mid-forties, dark suit, no sponsor pins, an empty glass he had not raised once. He stood where the camera blind spots overlapped. His eyes worked the room the way Caleb’s worked the room.

Caleb knew that face.

The name was gone. The face was older than the memory, gray at the temples, weight in the jaw the memory had not carried. But the eyes had not changed, and Caleb had seen those eyes on the wall of his father’s old office, before the family debt, before the disposal yards, in a photograph he had not looked at since he was nineteen.

The man turned his head in the crowd. He had not seen Caleb yet.

Caleb took one step toward him.

A woman stepped into his path.

Black dress, cut to the knees, fitted. A neon-green streak ran through dark hair pulled half up. The crushed-orchid scent was on her skin and not just in the air. She was close enough that Caleb felt the chill of the climate-controlled fabric.

He did not recognize her face.

It was not a face he had seen on a broadcast or a sponsor wall or a junior officer’s casual posting. She was nobody he had ever met, by any version of that word, and that was somehow worse than if she had been someone.

She tilted her head. Her smile reached her eyes a beat after her mouth.

"You look like you have somewhere to be," she said. "Where?"