Every soul has a frequency. The louder it sings, the higher it rises. The silent ones sink.
— Accord Doctrine, Vol. I — Principles of Resonance Classification
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Nine years later, Kael Voss stood in a room that smelled like copper and old stone and watched a man prepare to kill him.
The man's name was Drev. He was Tier-3 — Clamor-class — and his Echo Signature rolled off him in low, visible waves, distorting the air around his shoulders the way heat distorted summer roads. He was forty-three years old, broad through the chest, and he had killed seventeen people in sanctioned combat and four in unsanctioned combat and he did not appear to find any meaningful distinction between the two categories.
He was also, Kael noted, favoring his left knee.
"You're the one who's been taking contracts in my district," Drev said. Not a question.
The room was a basement. Valos Prime had a great many basements, most of which served purposes that didn't bear examination. This one had a drain in the center of the floor. Kael had been in enough rooms with drains to understand their primary utility.
"I've done some work in the area," Kael said.
"For Gareth's pit."
"Among others."
Drev's Echo flared — a pulse of compressed force that rattled the shelving along the far wall and set the hanging lantern swinging. It was a dominance display. It was meant to trigger the fear response that all Resonants learned to read in the non-Awakened: the flinch, the step back, the biological concession of smaller creature to larger.
Kael watched the lantern swing.
"You're a Null," Drev said, and the word had a specific texture in his mouth — not quite contempt, but the cousin of it. The texture of a man examining something that should not, by any reasonable measure, be functional. "You don't have an Echo. You can't fight. You can't feel a Resonance strike coming. How are you still working?"
"Carefully," Kael said.
✦ ✦ ✦
Let us go back four minutes.
Kael had been brought to the basement by two of Drev's associates, which was a polite way of describing men who had grabbed him outside the Ironsong Quarter and encouraged his cooperation with the specific eloquence of held blades. He had not resisted. Resistance at that stage would have been inefficient.
On the walk down, he had counted eight guards in the building above. He had noted the layout — two stairwells, one exit at street level, one at alley level. He had noted that Drev's left knee was wrapped beneath his trousers, the slight drag in his gait suggesting a recent Resonance-related injury; high-output techniques tended to stress joints when the Echo expanded faster than the body could adapt.
He had noted that the drain in the center of the floor was clean.
No recent use. Good. That meant this was meant to be a conversation first.
He had also noted, during the walk, that the two men holding him were Tier-1 — Murmur-class — and that their grips were trained but not creative. Left man held his elbow. Right man held his wrist. Standard escort formation for someone they had assessed as non-threatening.
The assessment was not wrong, exactly. It was simply incomplete.
✦ ✦ ✦
"I'm going to ask you to stop operating in my district," Drev said. "This is me asking nicely."
"What does not nicely look like?"
The Clamor-class Echo expanded. Kael felt it the way a deaf man might feel a bass note — not heard, but present, a pressure behind the eyes and across the surface of the skin. His own null-state produced nothing in response. No counter-pressure. No instinctive recoil. Just the empty space where a normal person's fear would have been.
Drev blinked. Most non-Awakened flinched at a direct Clamor pulse. Some collapsed. This one was looking at his knee.
"You keep looking at my leg," Drev said.
"You keep shifting your weight off it," Kael said. "High-output technique three, maybe four days ago. The scar tissue around a joint after that kind of expansion takes eight to ten days to fully restabilize. Which means your left side generates about sixty percent of your normal output right now. Your Echo compensates by pulling heavier from the right shoulder and upper spine." He paused. "Which is why you're standing with your right foot slightly forward. You've been doing it since I walked in."
The room was very quiet.
"You've been watching me for four minutes," Drev said.
"I watch everyone," Kael said. "I don't have a Resonance. I have attention. It turns out that's sufficient."
It was not, of course, only attention. It was nine years of learning to read the body language of Resonants the way a naturalist learned to read weather — the micro-expressions of power, the tells of technique, the architecture of a fighter's habits laid bare in the way they breathed and stood and chose to occupy a room. It was the thing the Accord's classification system had no category for: a man who could not be measured, learning to measure everything else.
But Drev did not need the full explanation.
What Drev needed was to believe, for the next forty seconds, that he was still in control of this conversation.
✦ ✦ ✦
"You're going to stop working in my district," Drev said again. More slowly this time. The Edge in his voice had acquired a new quality — not anger. Something closer to professional consideration. He was recalibrating.
That was the dangerous moment. Kael had learned to recognize it.
"Or?" Kael said.
"Or I demonstrate what a Clamor-class Resonance strike does to someone with no Echo to absorb the impact." Drev's right hand came up, and the air around it compressed visibly, light bending in a tight halo around his fist. Full-output right side. Everything Kael had predicted. "You don't have the physical conditioning to survive that. You know it. I know it. Let's be adults."
"Alright," Kael said. "Let's."
He moved.
Not toward Drev. To the left — specifically, to the left-side guard, whose elbow-grip loosened by exactly the amount it always loosened when someone nearby generated a large Resonance pulse. A trained instinct, the body unconsciously bracing against the expected shockwave. The grip opened by perhaps two centimeters.
Two centimeters was enough.
Kael's left arm came free. His elbow found the guard's solar plexus with the specific efficiency of a man who had spent nine years practicing strikes on every surface available to him in the Ashfields, including, memorably, a stone wall. The guard folded. The right-side guard reacted — half a second behind, because right-side guard was right-handed and his instinct was to reach across his body, which cost him the half-second — and Kael was already moving forward, underneath Drev's extended arm, inside the radius of the compressed-force strike.
Inside the radius, the technique was useless. Like trying to use a siege weapon on someone standing in your kitchen.
Kael's knee found Drev's left leg with surgical precision.
The sound Drev made was not a warrior's cry. It was the very ordinary sound of a man whose injury had just been reintroduced to him.
Kael stepped back. Both guards were down — one unconscious, one discovering that his wrist had been relocated during the confusion. Drev was on one knee, his right hand still crackling with compressed force he could no longer properly aim.
"I'll stop working in your district," Kael said, "when you tell me who authorized the Accord operation in the Ashfields nine years ago. The one filed under ACCORD/OPH."
Drev stared at him.
"How do you —"
"The file reference," Kael said. "Do you know it or not?"
The compressed force around Drev's hand dissipated. Slowly. The way a man let go of something he'd decided wasn't worth the cost.
"I don't know that file," Drev said. "But I know a man who brokered information for the Accord's eastern operations nine years ago. He runs a pit now." A pause. "Name of Gareth Wynn."
Kael went still.
He was very good at going still. He had practiced it until it was identical to the stillness of someone who had heard nothing important.
"Gareth Wynn," he repeated, with exactly the inflection of a man filing away a name he'd never encountered before. "Thank you."
He walked up the stairs and out of the building into the Valos Prime afternoon, and he did not run, and his face did not change, and his hands did not shake.
He thought: later. He thought: not yet.
He thought: first, let me understand what I am walking into.