The courier was a kid of maybe nineteen in a bonded-delivery jacket, carrying an address that was not supposed to exist.

He apologized twice on the doorstep, checked the sling against his instructions, and put the envelope in Caleb’s hand like it was hot.

Caleb gave him forty credits and told him to forget the street. The kid said sorry one more time and went.

Inside the envelope was a single sheet of good paper, and folded inside the sheet, a work glove.

Caleb knew it before he had it all the way out. Left hand, the palm worn through at the heel where a man braces against a rib to lever himself up into a chest cavity, the leather gone the color of old tea.

He had watched that glove for the better part of a year, three years ago, doing the work his own hands were still learning.

He sat down at the table with it, and Iris came and stood over his shoulder while he read the page.

*Mr. Mercer. I have something of yours, which is to say I have something of his, and I think you will understand that this now amounts to the same thing.*

*I am told you are looking for the man who wore this. So am I. For once we are looking for the same person, and I am old enough to know a window like that does not stay open.*

*I would like an hour of your time. Come alone, which you will want to do anyway. The address is below, and the hour is yours to pick. I will be there whenever you choose to come. A.V.*

Caleb set the page down, and for a second nobody said anything.

"Well," Iris said. "That’s the most polite ransom note I’ve ever read."

"He doesn’t have Marek." Caleb turned the glove over. "He has Marek’s glove."

"Which he kept for three years after the man stopped showing up at your yard." Iris pulled a chair around and sat on it backward. "You want my read, you’re getting it either way. The glove is bait, the we-want-the-same-thing is bait, and the friendliest line in there is the most threatening one."

She tapped the page over the words come alone. "He knows it, and he wrote it anyway, because he wanted you to know he knows. And you’re already holding that glove like a relic."

"It is a relic." He kept hold of it.

The comm on the table lit up. Kim had been listening, because Kim was always listening.

[Hacker]: The address is a private residence in the upper sectors. Aldric Voss has owned it through four shell layers for nineteen years.

[Hacker]: One road in. I can put two people across the street with a sightline to the front, I can hold the road, and I can keep eyes on you up to the door. Past the door I have nothing.

[Hacker]: If you go inside, you are alone, and the nearest help I can send is four minutes out at a sprint. Four minutes is a long time in a room with that man. Those are the numbers. What you do with them is yours.

"You don’t have to go," Marcus said.

It was the first thing he had said. He sat in the chair by the window with the cane across his knees, and he had left the envelope alone, because he could have written that letter himself from memory.

"I know I don’t," Caleb said.

"I want you to hear that I mean it, and that I’m saying it as more than a thing fathers say." Marcus looked at the glove in his son’s hand. "Aldric Voss has spent fifty years getting people into rooms. The room is where he does what he does."

He shifted the cane an inch, squaring it. "You are walking onto his floor, on his invitation, on the strength of a glove he chose because he knew it would work. It is working. I watched it work on you in eight seconds."

"I know that too."

"Then say the part you’re leaving out."

Caleb turned the glove over again, the worn heel, the leather gone soft at the seams.

"He taught me to listen for the breath," he said, and it came out lower than he meant it. "Nobody else would say a word to me. I was nineteen and a month from dying inside a chest cavity, and a gray old man who looked twice his age decided a washout was worth the time of day."

He stopped there. The rest of it, the I owe him, the he is why I’m alive to sit at this table, stayed where it was. Saying it out loud would spend it, and he wanted to keep it.

"If there’s a chance of finding him, I’m taking it. The man dangling the chance is dangerous, and I know he’s dangerous, because he told me so himself. He was very polite about it."

Iris blew out a breath. "You’re going."

"I’m going."

"Then we do it smart." She stood, and the chair scraped. "You pick the hour, even though he said you could, because if he means it the courtesy costs him nothing, and if he’s lying we learn something. You go in the morning, in full light, and you eat first."

She glanced at the comm. "You wear the thing the Hacker gave you that I’m not supposed to know about. And if he walks out of that house with him instead of you, I will personally burn nineteen years of shell companies to the ground. Put that in the reply."

[Hacker]: I will not be putting that in the reply.

"Put a nicer version in the reply."

"There’s no reply." Caleb folded the page closed and kept the glove out. "He said the hour is mine, so I’ll just show up. If he meant it, the door opens. If he didn’t, I’ll know before I’m through it." He stood, careful of the arm. "Tomorrow morning."

His mother had come to the kitchen doorway at some point, drying her hands, and she had let all of it pass without a word. Now she looked at the glove in her son’s hand.

"Take him something," she said.

Caleb turned to her. "Sorry?"

"The man you’re looking for. Marek. If you find him." She hung the towel on the oven handle and squared the corners. "You don’t walk into a sick man’s life with empty hands. It doesn’t have to be much."

She went back to the stove. "His own glove, maybe. So he knows somebody kept it."

Caleb looked down at the worn leather and could not trust his voice with anything, so he nodded, and his mother, still facing the stove, said, "Good."

-----

That night sleep stayed out of reach, which had stopped being news weeks ago. He lay in the dark with the glove on the nightstand and his arm aching on the pillow, running the letter through his head line by courteous line.

*We are looking for the same person.* Probably true. *A window like that does not stay open.* True as well, the truest thing on the page, and the part that worried him most, because Aldric Voss said true things to move people, and at his level of the game the truth and the lever were usually the same sentence.

Up one road in the upper sectors, a patient man was sitting in a house he had owned through four shells for nineteen years, content to wait, certain Caleb would come. Out past anyone’s reach, a woman with no face was keeping a dying mentor who had smiled at her like she was the answer to a long question.

In the morning Caleb was going to walk onto the patient man’s floor with his eyes open and Marek’s glove in his pocket, and find out what the most courteous man in the city wanted badly enough to give back a thing he had kept for three years.

He turned the glove once more in the dark and put it in his coat, where he could not forget it, then watched the ceiling until the window grayed. When it did, he got up ahead of the alarm and ate first, because Iris was right, and because the hour was his.