Caleb stayed in the alcove for thirty seconds.

The napkin was still folded in his hand. The handwriting had not changed in the time it took him to read it twice. The shape of the letters was old. The slope was a teaching from a school that did not exist anymore. He had spent eleven years in disposal yards reading carcasses, and the principle was the same. You did not look at the wound. You looked at the body around the wound. You looked at what was missing.

What was missing here was the layer he had not seen.

He had walked into the gala with one job. Find a face for a routing entity. He had assumed the routing entity was the deepest piece on the board. The napkin said otherwise. The napkin said the man with the eyes was already on a board with at least one other player, and that the other player was watching them both, and that the man wanted Caleb to know it before Caleb did anything stupid.

Caleb folded the napkin smaller and slid it into his breast pocket.

He walked back into the ballroom.

His vantage was the column nearest the service corridor. He took it without looking like he had taken it. The string quartet had moved to a piece that let people dance without committing to dancing, and the floor had thinned around the bar. Across the room, Hassek had not moved.

Caleb watched him for a count of forty.

Hassek’s weight was on his right leg. The left was rested. The bandage on his neck was new gauze over old gauze; the stain had been wicked through twice and replaced. He was not drinking. His hand was open. His hand was open because his hand was waiting to do something. Caleb had spent seven years working alongside men whose hands were open like that, and they had all been waiting to do the same thing.

Hassek pushed off the door frame.

Without looking around, he turned his shoulders, opened the service door, and stepped through it.

The door swung once and stilled.

Caleb did not follow.

Following was the wrong move. Following put two military bodies in the same back hallway, and one of those military bodies was Hassek, and Caleb was wearing a borrowed suit with a phase-dagger sewn into a sleeve sheath he had not had time to test. He needed information first.

He moved toward the bar.

Elara was where Caleb had last seen her. The dark-gray collar of the First Division uniform sat at her neck in the way that collar always sat, like she had been issued it at birth. She was holding a glass without drinking from it. The glass was a prop. Her eyes were not.

Caleb stopped at the bar two stools down from her and asked the bartender for water.

"Mercer," Elara said. She did not turn her head.

"Captain."

"You stood for the photograph."

"I did."

"That was good of you."

"Wasn’t really a choice."

"There’s always a choice. You just made the right one." She paused while the bartender slid Caleb’s glass across. "Try to look like a man enjoying himself."

Caleb took a sip. "Hassek’s posting."

Elara’s eyes did not change. The angle of her shoulders did not change. The hand holding her glass did not change.

"Off-grid sweeps," she said. "Three weeks. No requisition through First Division. No logged engagements. Two members of his squad have not come back through the gates."

"On whose orders."

"Not the Defense Force’s."

"Then whose."

She finally turned her head, and the look she gave him was the look she had given him in the disposal yards when he was sixteen and she was eighteen and she had told him to stop asking questions about something he could not afford to know the answer to.

"Caleb," she said. "Whoever you came here to find tonight. You’re not the only person in this room who came for them."

He had already known. The napkin had told him. Hearing it from her was different. Hearing it from her made it not paranoia.

"Thank you," Caleb said.

"Don’t thank me yet."

He set his glass down and turned away from the bar.

Halsworth Crayne was three feet behind him.

"Walk with me, Mercer."

Crayne did not wait for an answer. He angled himself toward the edge of the floor where the marble met the carpet, where the cameras did not have a clean line. Caleb walked because not walking would have been louder than walking.

"You scan a room well," Crayne said. He was holding a fresh glass. He did not offer this one. "I’ve been watching you scan. So have a few other people. Most of them are not as polite as I am."

"That’s reassuring."

"It isn’t, but I appreciate the deflection." Crayne’s smile did not reach the corners of his mouth. "There’s a Veil-Ward signatory in the room tonight. The signatory has made certain accounts very nervous. The kind of accounts that pay people to stop being nervous." He glanced at Caleb. "You wouldn’t happen to know that name, would you, Mercer?"

"I know a lot of names."

"That’s a careful answer."

"I’m a careful man."

Crayne laughed once, quietly. The laugh did not carry. "I could trade with you, you know. I have a name. I would take your impression of the room in exchange for it. Honest barter."

"I’ll pass."

"Smart." Crayne stopped walking. He turned to face Caleb without crowding him, with the practiced distance of a man who had learned what distance meant. "The signatory is smart too. Be careful you don’t learn from the same teacher, Mercer. Some teachers are difficult to outlive."

He walked off into the crowd without waiting for a response.

Caleb watched him go for two seconds.

Then he turned and crossed the ballroom toward the staircase that led to the upper balcony.

-----

She was on the balcony. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

The crushed-orchid scent hit him before he saw her. Her back was to the rail, looking at something out past the ornamental garden lights. The neon-green streak in her hair caught a lamp at the corner of the balcony and held it.

She did not turn when his footstep landed on the marble.

"You came to find me," she said.

"I did."

"That wasn’t the script."

"No."

She turned then. The smile reached her eyes a beat after her mouth, the way it had downstairs, the way it had downstairs the first time. Her glass was empty. She had not refilled it.

"Ask," she said.

"Why this suit."

"That isn’t the question you came up here with."

"It’s the one I’m starting with."

"The lining is a fabric that holds scent for forty-eight hours. I wanted you to wear something that I could find in a room without looking." She tilted her head. "Next question."

"Why are you here tonight."

The half-beat was so small he almost did not catch it. The corner of her mouth did not move. Her eyes did. They cooled by a single degree, and then they were warm again, and the warmth this time was something else.

"You did come up here with a real question," she said.

"Answer it."

"I came because someone came back tonight," she said. "Someone I’ve been waiting for. Someone who disappeared a long time ago and was not supposed to come back through any door I could see." She let that settle. "I’m not here for you tonight, Caleb. Not first. You are second."

Caleb went still.

"Who is he."

"You don’t get that one." She set her glass on the rail. "Not from me. Not yet. But I’ll tell you this, since you came up here when you weren’t supposed to. Some of us were not done with him when he disappeared. Some of us have been waiting eleven years for a door to open. Tonight a door opened."

Below them, on the ballroom floor, the service door swung open.

Hassek stepped through it.

He was alone. The bandage on his neck was no longer clean. His hand was no longer open; it was closed around something he was keeping out of sight against his thigh. He scanned the floor once, slow, with the patience of a man who had finished a job and was now looking to see who had been watching him do it.

The man with the eyes had not come back through the door.

Beside Caleb, the Hacker’s hand tightened on the rail. The cool came back into her face and stayed this time.

"Now we’ve got a problem," she said.