Chapter 56: Re-ranked

Chapter 56: Chapter 56: Re-ranked

Hunter Association headquarters was eleven stories of glass and grey stone on Calder Street, two blocks from the exchange. Elias had walked past it a thousand times as a porter. He’d never once gone through the front doors.

At 8:52, he walked through them with Dex beside him.

"I should’ve worn a tie," Dex muttered. He’d ironed his shirt, badly, and there was a crease down the back like a spine. "Do people wear ties to this? I feel like people wear ties to this."

"Last night you were standing in a tomb filming an attempted murder," Elias said. "Nobody cares about your tie."

The lobby was wide and cold and full of hunters. Some still wore armor from night gates and sat slumped on the benches along the walls. Some wore suits. All of them looked up when Elias came in.

The talk didn’t stop, exactly. It dropped, the way a room drops when someone it’s been talking about walks in. He caught pieces of it as he crossed to the elevators.

"—that’s him, the porter—"

"—Ironfang’s done, my cousin’s on the night desk, he says—"

"—walked out with an A-minus core on an E license—"

A big man in scarred leather at the end of a bench, someone Elias half recognized from the line at the exchange, caught his eye and nodded once. Then he went back to his coffee.

The elevator let them out on the eleventh floor into a quiet corridor with a single door at the end of it, standing open.

Director Samuel Crane’s office smelled of black coffee and old paper. It was smaller than Elias had expected: one window, a desk of dark stone, a wall of filing cabinets, and a yellow legal pad covered in neat, cramped notes. Crane looked up at them over his reading glasses with the unhurried eyes of a man who’d spent twenty-two years learning which questions to ask first.

Iris stood by the window with her arms folded. She gave Elias the smallest nod.

"Mr. Pierce," Crane said, rising. "Mr. Moreau. Sit down, please. Coffee?"

"Yes, please," Dex said faintly.

Crane poured three cups from a battered pot on top of the filing cabinet and sat back down.

"I’ll start with what’s done," he said, "because most of it was done before either of you woke up."

He turned a page on the legal pad.

"Ironfang’s guild charter was revoked at six this morning. The council voted remotely. It was unanimous." A pause. "Almost unanimous. Councilor Marsh abstained." He let that sit for half a second, then moved on. "Garrick is in the Association infirmary under guard. When his leg is set, he’ll be moved to a holding facility. He’s been charged on four counts so far. There will be more."

"Vance and Rourke?" Elias asked.

"Licenses suspended pending review. They followed an unlawful order with weapons drawn, and whether that ends their careers is a question for a tribunal." Crane turned another page. "Sato and Petra are cleared. Both gave full statements last night, and both asked, separately, what would happen to the porter. The boy, Tully, is being moved into the Association’s own porter pool. Paid hourly. Insured."

Elias let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

"One more thing." Crane slid two thin folders across the stone. Each had a name on the tab: TOLLIVER, T. and BASK, C. "As of this morning, both cases are reopened. The finding of did not exit in time has been struck from both records. The families were informed an hour ago."

Elias looked at the folders for a long time. He didn’t open them. He didn’t need to.

Dex was staring at the tab that said BASK. His coffee shook a little in his hands.

"That was you," Crane told him. "Your logs. Two years of them. Most appraisers don’t keep their own notes, Mr. Moreau, and fewer still date them." He took off his reading glasses and folded them. "We’re short four appraisers on staff. The salary isn’t glamorous. The insurance is very good. If you want the job, it’s yours."

Dex opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He closed it again and nodded very fast, several times.

"Good." Crane put his glasses back on and turned to Elias. "Now. You."

"I entered a claimed gate without authorization," Elias said. "It’s logged."

"It is." Crane wrote something on the pad. "The law sets a fine of five thousand and a thirty-day license suspension. I’ve decided the fine stands." He tore off the sheet and handed it across the desk. "The suspension doesn’t. You’d have trouble serving it anyway, since the license it applies to won’t exist by lunchtime."

Elias looked at the sheet, then at Crane. "What?"

"Your E-rank license," Crane said, "is about to be retired."

Crane opened a drawer and set something on the desk between them: a smooth grey stone the size of a fist in a bronze cradle, with the rank letters etched around its base. E. D. C. B. A. S.

Elias had seen one before, on the day he awakened. It had glowed a dim, sullen brown and stopped at E, and a clerk had stamped PORTER on his file without looking up.

"Hand on the stone," Crane said.

Elias put his palm on it.

It was cold, then warm. Light rose inside it, brown at first, then the clean green of D, then a steady blue for C. The blue climbed and deepened and settled, at last, into a strong violet, and the etched B at the base of the cradle lit up.

For a heartbeat, something else flickered deep inside the stone, under the violet: a white-gold glint, like light through a crack in a door. Then it was gone.

Crane’s eyes went to it, and away.

A printer behind the desk hummed. Crane handed him a new card, still warm.

HUNTER ASSOCIATION — LICENSE

PIERCE, ELIAS

RANK: B

CLASS: ASSASSIN

Nowhere did it say Threshold Summoner. The stone hadn’t seen that part. Or it had, and Crane had decided not to.

"B-rank," Crane said. "Officially. Which means B-rank gates, B-rank bounties, and the exchange paying you full rate for whatever you bring in. Which brings us to that."

He nodded at Elias’s jacket pocket.

Elias took out the Barrow Lord’s core and set it on the desk. It was the size of a plum, cold blue, faintly pulsing.

"Irregular, A-minus," Crane said. "Ironfang’s claim was void the moment its master committed a crime inside the gate, which leaves the clear to the only party that actually cleared it. The exchange will pay a hundred and sixty thousand. The irregular-boss hazard bounty adds forty more."

Elias didn’t move.

Two hundred thousand. He did the arithmetic without meaning to, the way he’d done it every night for years: the ICU, the filtration machine, the specialists. It came to more than a year of Mira’s care. More than a year, for the first time in his life, without selling a single core under a counter.

His hands, he noticed, were shaking again.

Crane let him sit with it. Then he leaned back.

"There’s one thing I’m not going to ask you today," he said. "Garrick’s medical team ran him through a stone at four this morning. Where his skill used to be, there’s nothing. Not suppressed. Not damaged. Gone. They tell me that’s impossible." He looked at Elias over his glasses. "Garrick says a woman in a white coat did it with her hand."

Elias said nothing. By the window, Iris didn’t move.

"I’m not asking," Crane said. "Not today. But Councilor Marsh called twice before seven, and he will ask, and he won’t ask politely." He stood. "When you’re ready to tell me what you are, Mr. Pierce, my door is open. I’d very much like you to walk through it before someone else kicks it in."

Iris walked him to the elevator.

"B-rank," she said as the doors closed. "At this pace, you’ll pass me before winter."

"I doubt that."

"I don’t." She watched the floor numbers fall. "Be careful with Marsh. And Elias? Congratulations."

Lena was waiting for him at Merridan General, in the plastic chair beside Mira’s bed, with the ICU’s charts on her knee and an expression he had learned to read.

"I’ve mapped it," she said before he’d even sat down. "Every channel the gate’s mana has dug into her. I can take it out, Elias. All of it."

Something leapt in his chest. "Then—"

"But not alone." She set the charts aside. "That mana has been in her for ten years. By now it’s holding parts of her together as much as it’s hurting her. When I start pulling, her body will start to fail. Her heart. Her lungs. And I can’t hold her together and cut at the same time. Nobody can."

She looked at him steadily.

"I need a second pair of hands."

In the corner of his vision, quiet and patient, one line glowed.

[Summon slots: 4 / 5.]