The message bothered Kim more than its contents did.

[Hacker]: I cannot trace it. I want you to understand how strange that is. I can trace almost anything.

[Hacker]: This came into your handset through a relay that is on no registry I can reach, and I reach most of them, and it left nothing behind it. Somebody wanted you to have it and wanted me not to find them. I do not like either half of that.

"I thought they took your reach," Caleb said.

[Hacker]: They took the board and the votes. They did not take my hands. What I have left is what I built before VeilWard had a name, which is less than I had Tuesday and more than they think.

The message was three lines.

*The old yard off Cutter Lane. The one they shut down. Come alone, kid, and keep your lungs clear going in, the low bays still hold bad air.*

Caleb read it twice, then read the last line a third time on its own.

"It’s him," he said.

[Hacker]: It is a string of text. Anyone who knew about the yard could have sent it.

"Nobody knew about that yard except the men who worked it, and most of them are dead. And the line about the lungs is the first thing he ever taught me. It’s him. Or it’s somebody who got it out of him."

He was already pulling his coat on, one-armed, fighting the sling.

"Cutter Lane’s in the Eltham withdrawal. Nothing’s out there. They pulled the maps after the sinkhole took the east row, the year the yard shut."

[Hacker]: Which is exactly why it is a good place to take a man who is not coming back out. The withdrawal eats signal. If you go in there you are alone in a dead sector with someone who walked out of a clinic with people I cannot find.

"I know."

[Hacker]: Then you understand I am telling you not to go, and that I already know you are going anyway.

"He kept me alive when nobody else would give me the time of day. If he’s out there dying, I’m not leaving him alone in a dead sector because going is stupid." He stopped at the door. "You’d have done the same. You did do the same, for eleven years."

The comm went quiet a moment.

[Hacker]: Keep your lungs clear going in. Apparently it is good advice.

***

The Eltham withdrawal was dead quiet, and the quiet had weight to it.

Grass came up through the streets. The houses still had numbers on the doors and nobody behind them. Caleb came in on foot where the road gave out, past a rusted barrier and a sign too faded to read, and walked the half mile to Cutter Lane with his good hand loose and the bad arm aching in the cold.

The yard was where he remembered it. The chain fence was mostly down, and the long sheds at the far end had let their roofs fall in. The crane nobody had bothered to haul off stood rusted into one position, its hook still hanging over the empty wash bay like it was waiting for a carcass that wasn’t coming.

He had spent two years here, worse years than most, and had never planned on seeing the place again.

Marek was sitting on an overturned drum in the mouth of the second bay, out of the wind, with his hands on his knees, looking at the crane.

Caleb stopped twenty feet off.

He had braced himself for a lot of versions of this, and the one that got through anyway was how small the old man had gotten.

Marek had always been thin. Now he was less than that, the skin loose on him, his coat hanging off his shoulders like it was on a hook. He had looked twice his age the day Caleb met him. Now he looked ninety, and the piece had taken almost everything there was to take.

But he was sitting up. He was looking around like a man enjoying the air. And when he turned his head and found Caleb, he smiled, and the smile was easy, and that was the first thing that was wrong.

"There he is," Marek said. "The kid from the yard."

"Marek." Caleb’s voice came out rough. He cleared it. "You look like hell."

"I feel pretty good, actually." Marek said it like it surprised him too. "That’s the strange part. I’ve been dying for a long time, Cal. Years. You get used to the weight of it. How you hurt all the time, how getting up is a whole job."

He flexed one hand, watched it work. "Couple weeks now, that’s been lifting. Like somebody’s been carrying it for me."

Caleb came a few steps closer. He kept his eyes moving over the old man, over the yard, over the dark bays behind him.

"Who carried you out of the clinic, Marek."

"A friend." The word came out warm and certain, how a man says the name of someone he trusts all the way down. "You’d like her. Well. You wouldn’t, your father’s got you scared of everything that isn’t his way. But you’d understand her, which is better than liking."

"A woman," Caleb said.

"A woman." Marek nodded, slow and easy. "She came and found me at the end of it, when I was more gone than here, and she sat with me. She didn’t want anything off me."

"First person in twenty years who sat in a room with me and didn’t want the thing in my chest, or the thing I knew, or the thing my father wanted me to be. She just sat there. Then she asked if I wanted to feel better, and I said yes."

He looked back at the crane. "So I went."

Caleb’s stomach had gone cold and stayed there. He filed it, the small cold note of it, like he’d filed the nurse’s calm.

"Marek. Listen to me. You were in and out for weeks. The piece used you up. People who are that far gone don’t get up off a drum in a freezing yard and tell me they feel pretty good."

He kept his voice even. "Whatever she’s doing to make you feel better, that’s not you healing. That’s her hand on something."

"I know what it is."

Marek looked at him, and for a second the easy thing slid off his face. The man underneath was the one Caleb remembered, sharp and tired and not fooled by anything.

"I’m not stupid, Cal. I know I’m dying, and I know it’s borrowed. You think I don’t feel the strings?"

Then it passed, smoothed over and gone.

"But I spent two decades with my father’s hand on me, and his hand only ever pushed. Hers holds. There’s a difference, and you learn it fast once you’ve had both. I came to tell you about the difference. That’s the proposal."

"What proposal."

Marek nodded at Caleb’s chest. At the silver under the coat he couldn’t possibly have seen.

"That thing in you is growing wrong, and it’s going to keep growing, and one day it’s going to be more of you than you are. I know. I’ve lived it."

He said it plainly, the worst thing in the world delivered like a weather report.

"Your father can’t help you. He only knows how to walk people to a door and let them out clean. That’s all the four exits are, kid, dressed up nice. A way to leave. He’ll teach you to leave yourself, gentle, when the time comes."

"And Aldric offers a chair."

"My father will weld you to one of his and call it a gift, and it’ll eat you like it ate me, slower maybe, with a better technician, but it’ll eat you." The flatness in it was old grief worn smooth. "Two old men fighting over which way you should disappear. That’s your whole menu."

He leaned forward on the drum.

"She’s a third thing. She doesn’t want to make you leave, and she doesn’t want to weld you to a leash. She wants to show you how to be what you’re turning into and stay yourself the whole way through."

"Nobody ever offered me that. They offered it too late, when there was nothing left to save. They’re offering it to you in time."

His eyes had gone bright and urgent, the most alive thing in the dead yard.

"Come and let her show you, Cal. Before you find out the hard way that leaving and being eaten are the only two doors anybody ever held open for you."

It was the best pitch anyone had made him, and that was what made it bad. Aldric had stood on a porch and offered a chair like a king.

This was an old man Caleb loved, dying, telling him there was a way out of the thing Caleb lay awake afraid of, and meaning it with everything he had left.

"Who is she, Marek."

"I don’t fully know," Marek said, and at least that was honest. "I know she’s not what your father thinks. I know she’s not what Aldric thinks either. Those two are still fighting over the eleven like the eleven are the whole board."

Something moved behind his eyes, something he had no words for, or no permission.

"They’re not. That’s all I can tell you, and it’s more than she’d want me to. The eleven aren’t the board, kid. They’re the edge of it."

Caleb had no idea what that meant. He filed that too.

"Come with me instead," Caleb said. "Right now. Out of here. I’ll get you to people who’ll make you comfortable, real comfortable, no strings. You’ll have whatever’s left on your own terms. As you, not borrowed."

He took another step. He was close now, close enough to see how the old man’s hands shook under the calm.

"Let me get you out, Marek. Same as you got me out. I owe you the whole thing, and I’m trying to pay it."

For a moment, one real moment, the old man wanted it. The strings pulled, and something in Marek strained against them, like a man straining to remember a name.

Then the calm came back down over him and sealed.

"Can’t, kid." It came out almost peaceful. "I belong with her now. That’s done. That part’s already done." He smiled again, the easy wrong smile. "But you keep your lungs clear. That part I still mean, all the way down, wherever the rest of me went."

He stood, slow, steadying on the drum, and Caleb moved to take his arm and Marek stepped back out of reach, light on his feet in a way a dying man had no right to be, into the dark of the bay.

"Go home before the air gets to you," Marek said from the shadow. "She’ll send for you when it’s time. You’ll know it’s her. It’ll come too easy, like everything she touches."

The pause ran long, and the last of it came quiet, and Caleb could no longer tell which part of him was speaking.

"Tell your father I’m not angry. Tell him I just got tired of leaving. Some of us would rather be carried."

Caleb stood in the empty yard with the crane hanging over the dry wash bay and the cold getting into his arm, and he did not follow him into the dark, because he knew, in his gut, before his head caught up, that there was nothing in there to catch.

He turned and walked the half mile back out of the dead sector with his lungs kept clear, refusing to stop until he was past the barrier, where the signal came back and the city turned real again under his feet.