The wagon stopped and Ren looked up and immediately wished he had prepared himself better for this.
Cauldron City's south gate was three lanes of stone-flagged road compressed between two towers, grey granite without a single missing chip. People moved through it in a current so steady it barely resolved into individual people. The buildings behind the gate ran four stories, five on the east side. Ren had to tilt his head back to see the top of them. He had not known buildings went that high.
Okay, he thought. So that's a thing.
He grabbed his bag and climbed down. His boots hit the paving stones. The pavement was flush and solid, joints fitted without gaps, not a single loose piece. He looked at it for probably a second too long and made himself stop.
He joined the current and tried not to walk into anyone.
He had gotten about a block in when something noted the young man behind him. It was the same registration that had fired four nights ago when the Rank 2 beast moved along the ridge, not a conscious thought, just a shift in attention before he could name what he was attending to. Ren did not turn around. He counted the block. At the second corner, the young man was still there, same gap, same pace.
Ren turned left, went three storefronts down, stepped into a recessed doorway. The current moved past without the young man in it.
Huh, he thought.
His Perception had done that without being asked. It had flagged the pattern, something in him had moved on it, and now the pickpocket was somewhere else. He filed it. The whole sequence had taken about forty seconds and he had not consciously started any of it. That was going to take some getting used to.
He was briefly annoyed that the most impressive thing his Perception had demonstrated so far was helping someone decide he was not worth robbing. Thirty-five, he thought. Outstanding.
He stepped out and kept walking south.
The Iron Veil's Cauldron district office had a window case Ren slowed at without meaning to. Three cores sat on black cloth inside. One glowed faintly amber. One had something red turning at its center. The third was larger than his fist and he could feel the faint pressure of it even through the glass.
"Thinking of selling?"
A man was standing in the doorway in a grey coat with Iron Veil trim at the collar. He had a measuring look, professional, built on years of reading things other people couldn't see.
"No," Ren said. "Already consumed mine."
"I'll take a look regardless, free of charge. What grade?"
That attention was a specific weight, focused and professional, a man who had read thousands of cores now reading him. Not hostile, just present.
"F-provisional," Ren said. "Unclassified creature."
The appraiser's expression did something very small and very fast. A flicker, there and gone. Then he nodded and stepped back. "Not much I can do with that. Good luck at the academy."
Ren walked on.
He replayed the flicker for half a block. It was not the look Tess had given him, and not the look the wagon girl had given him. Those were recalibration. This was something else.
One half-second of a man whose job was noticing things looking at Ren with his full attention, and then letting it go. Ren did not know what he had seen. The appraiser had not said. He kept walking.
The academy satellite intake office was a narrow building in the administrative quarter. Three people ahead of him. Ren joined the line and looked at the intake board on the wall while he waited. He had been on his feet since the wagon and his left boot was rubbing a blister on the outside of his heel that he was choosing not to acknowledge.
The student ahead of him was collecting a slip, not submitting. Broad-shouldered, travel case with an Iron Veil crest embossed on the flap. He tucked his certification away without looking at it. When the clerk turned the register to sign, Ren caught a glimpse of the entry over his shoulder.
Neat handwriting. Creature identified with full common name and subtype. Stat projections, plural, with ranges. Blueprint affinity cross-referenced under two categories. A note on anticipated technique development windows.
That was what a real intake entry looked like.
The B-grade student left. Ren stepped up and put the F-provisional card on the counter.
The clerk was a woman in her forties with ink on her right thumb. She took the card, looked at it, and started writing. No questions. After eleven seconds she slid the card back with a printed slip.
"Foundation Track Six. Intake in two days. Bring this."
"What's the boarding deposit?"
"Twelve marks."
He had nine marks and twelve coppers.
"Is there a short-payment option?" he said.
The clerk looked up briefly, professional and not unkind. She had given this answer before and she knew what it meant for the person asking. "Academy accepts a promissory note against your first placement contract. You sign at intake."
She pulled a second form from the drawer. He signed at the bottom. Twelve marks owed. Nine marks twelve coppers paid at intake. Two marks eighty-eight coppers deferred. She initialed it and handed him a copy.
He folded it and walked out.
On paper he was a kid who could not cover the front door. He had signed it. It was accurate. That was the situation.
He turned south toward the warehouse quarter and told himself to stop thinking about it, which worked for about a block.
Davan was a wide-shouldered man in a brown coat, running a manifest against a clipboard outside the main freight yard. He looked Ren over in a three-second sweep that landed on his hands, his boots, his posture. He assessed bodies for a living and it showed.
"Looking for the dawn-to-midday post?"
"Yeah."
"Rank 1?"
"Yeah."
"How long?"
"Two weeks," Ren said.
It came out clean. He had been Rank 1 for five days, and Davan had no way to check the two weeks, and the lie was ordinary enough that nobody would. Two weeks was the first specific number he had attached to the performance. Grade was on paper. Creature type was unverifiable. Two weeks was different, a date attached to a place, a thing anyone who happened to know Davan could in theory verify. Nobody who had seen him in the last five days knew Davan.
"Warehouse work before?" Davan asked.
"The Harken mine. Three years."
Davan looked at his hands again. Three years of mine work was on his hands and that part at least was true.
"Twelve coppers a day, midday meal, dawn to midday. Two-day contract." Davan wrote on the manifest. "First light tomorrow. Don't be late."
"Right," Ren said.
He walked back toward the main street. The food smells from the freight yard stalls hit him before he got ten meters, something frying in oil and spice from a cart where three dock workers were eating standing up. He did not stop. He had eaten twice since Harken and a midday meal was coming tomorrow with the shift. The smells did not care, and they followed him for half a block.
He found a bench near the south district fountain. He had a contract and a deficit note and a certification slip and two days before intake. A woman in a very serious hat walked past arguing with a man who was not arguing back. Two boys ran across the square chasing something Ren could not identify. The fountain was carved into a beast he did not recognize, water coming from its open mouth in a low arc.
Fine, he thought. He had nothing to do about any of it tonight.
The appraiser's flicker was going to sit in the back of his head being unexplained until it wasn't, and there was nothing he could do to move that along. The promissory note was signed. The foreman lie was out there. Day after tomorrow was intake, and the academy had real instruments, better than anything Tess ran in Harken. He needed to find somewhere to sleep that cost less than a mark. He started figuring.