The transit station was three blocks from the safehouse and Caleb kept his eyes forward the whole way.

His comms-chip ticked twice before he reached the entrance.

[Halsworth Crayne: Pushed to tomorrow morning. The name will keep. Stay public today. You are more useful to me on a feed than in a room.]

He read it twice and pocketed the chip back behind his ear.

A second ping followed.

[Iris Calder: Rank C briefing at thirteen hundred. PR sponsor slot at fourteen. You will sit in both. Don’t be late. Don’t bring a complaint.]

Then a third.

[Elara Voss: I need you at the side door, not the main. We’re going to talk about a bracelet before anyone else does.]

He let his eyes close for one second on the platform.

The transit pod arrived three seconds later and he stepped on without thinking about it.

-----

Elara was waiting at the side door of the Seventh Division block with her hands in her jacket pockets and her face arranged into something a stranger would have read as patient.

She fell in beside him as soon as he came through.

"You wore a bracelet to a gala you weren’t cleared to attend," she said. Her voice was the briefing voice, not the one she used in the medical bay. "You came back without it. The military quartermaster has it logged as missing equipment. The PR department wants to know whether the missing equipment was lost in the line of duty or sold in a back room in Sector Two."

"It wasn’t sold."

"I know it wasn’t sold. I’m telling you what the PR department is going to ask you. In about an hour. On camera. While a hundred thousand strangers watch."

"Where is it."

"Where you left it."

Elara understood which gala detail he meant. They had walked into the lobby together. The atrium was busier than it had been a week ago. Recruits watched him now in a way they had not watched him before. He felt the angle of their attention as a physical pressure at the base of his neck.

Elara dropped her voice.

"Iris is going to brief you in eight minutes on a sample they pulled out of Sector Nine. Current classification says it isn’t Kaiju. The military has no slot for what it is. Don’t ask questions in the room. Read the file after. We will talk about it tonight in a place that isn’t a hallway."

"What do you want me to do in the PR slot."

"Smile at the soft questions. Don’t answer the hard ones. If anyone asks about Hassek, you have not heard of Hassek. If anyone asks about the man at the gala, the question is below your pay grade. If anyone asks about the bracelet, I will handle it after the broadcast."

"And the live chat."

She looked at him properly for the first time that morning.

"The live chat is the problem, Mercer. Watch the live chat."

-----

The Rank C briefing room sat fourteen people. Caleb counted before he sat down because counting was the only thing that kept his thinking off his face.

Iris stood at the head of the table and spent no words warming the room.

"Sample R-9-Omega. Retrieved from the second drop into Sector Nine, four days after the initial corruption-zone engagement. The sample is currently in containment six floors under this building. It is alive. Standard Kaiju stimulus testing produces no response. No blood response. No feeding response to offered rations. Unknown dietary requirement."

A datapad on the wall lit up with a single image.

Caleb kept his face still.

The image was a rough scan, low-resolution, the kind of capture an automated containment camera produces when nothing is supposed to be looking at the thing inside the cell. The shape on the scan was small. About the size of a man’s forearm. Plated. Curled inward on itself. The plating carried an oldness Caleb lacked a word for. Not aged. Not weathered. The kind of old that meant the thing had been somewhere else for a long time before it ended up here.

The plating had markings.

Caleb counted seven on the side facing the camera. Kaiju anatomy had a different logic. Industrial stamps had cleaner edges. These looked closer to a mark pressed into living armor than a scar.

He had no name for them.

He knew, with a clarity beyond words, that the Hacker would know.

"The sample’s classification is currently pending," Iris said. "There is a high probability that pending will become permanent. Rank C and above have read access to the working file. You will not discuss the file outside this room. You will not photograph the file. You will not reference the file on a public feed. Questions."

Iharu raised one finger from the table without lifting his hand.

"Does it have a number."

"No."

"Does it have a name."

"No name."

"That’s a worse answer than I wanted."

"That’s the answer we have."

Iris dismissed them four minutes later. The seven other Rank C operators filed out without speaking. Tali, who had been at the far end of the table the entire time, kept her eyes off Caleb when he walked past her. She was already pulling her datapad apart and reassembling it in a way that meant she wanted nobody catching her expression yet.

Iharu caught up with him in the hall.

"You see the markings."

"Seven of them on the visible side."

"You ever see anything like that in the yards."

"No."

Iharu thought about that for half a step.

"I don’t like that you said no that fast."

"I don’t like that I said it that fast either."

They walked the rest of the way to the PR wing without talking about it again.

-----

The sponsor slot was lit like a furniture catalog.

The walls were a cream color the human eye produced nowhere naturally. The chair Caleb sat in was a designed-to-be-photographed chair, which meant it was uncomfortable in a way the photographer wanted instead of the sitter. The PR officer was a woman named Sarna in a charcoal blazer who treated him like content.

"Forty-five seconds to live," Sarna said. She was reading from a tablet without looking at him. "Soft open. Sponsor mention in the first ninety seconds. We have you on the rank-up, the squad photo, two questions about the gala that are pre-vetted and friendly, then we go to chat. We have a chat moderator on a five-second delay. You answer what reaches you. You smile."

"I don’t smile."

"You smile today, Mercer. The bid window for your next deployment opens in six hours and we’re showing the sponsors a product."

She tapped her tablet.

The lights brightened.

A red dot appeared in the corner of his visor.

[STREAM LIVE / VIEWERS: 18,000 / CLIMBING]

Sarna’s voice came in over the open broadcast in the warm professional register she had not used three seconds ago.

"Welcome back to the Seventh Division spotlight feed. We have with us today the newest Rank C operator in the division, the man who turned a Class-8 surface incursion into one of the highest-watched private feeds in the last calendar quarter, Caleb Mercer. Caleb, walk us through the rank-up. What changed for you when the badge came in?"

The viewer count climbed in the corner of his eye while she was finishing the sentence.

35,000. 51,000. 68,000.

He answered.

He said the words about disposal-yard work and First Division pull-up and the team behind him. He said the line about the support of the sponsors. He said the line about hoping the next deployment would be survivable. He kept his face arranged in something an outside reader would call composed and Elara would call locked down.

The viewer count broke a hundred thousand at the four-minute mark.

It kept climbing.

Sarna asked the first gala question. He gave the answer she expected. She asked the second. He gave that one too.

Then she opened the chat.

The scroll moved fast.

[GunnerFan: knew it knew it knew it the pipe guy made it]

[TitanSlayer: when do we get a sword stream]

[RedLine: how is the shoulder]

He answered Redline. He smiled at TitanSlayer’s question without committing to a sword stream. He let GunnerFan scroll.

A pinned super-chat dropped into the center of his visor.

The handle was new. The donation was large enough that Sarna leaned forward in her chair before she had finished reading it.

[Sponsor: KETTLE-KEEPER / Donation: 50,000 cr]

[Question: tell her the mark on the bottom is older than she thinks. and the spoon was facing the wrong way on purpose.]

Sarna’s professional smile flickered for half a second. The question missed her completely. She marked it as eccentric-sponsor and waved the camera technician to keep rolling.

"That’s a very generous donation, KETTLE-KEEPER. I’m afraid that one might be over our heads tonight. Caleb, do you want to take a stab at it?"

He felt the chair under him. He felt the lights. He felt the back of his neck where Elara had told him to watch the chat.

The man with eyes was in the chat.

The man with eyes had paid fifty thousand credits to put a line in front of a hundred and forty thousand viewers, and the line was a private message to one of two people in the world who could read it, and Caleb was the one looking at it on camera.

His face stayed still.

He looked into the lens, the way Sarna had told him to look into the lens, and he gave the answer he had practiced for a different question.

"Sponsors are always welcome to send their questions in. Sometimes they’re a little ahead of the rest of us. I’ll get back to that one off air."

Sarna beamed at him.

She had heard him give the right kind of answer.

The viewer count rolled past a hundred and fifty thousand and kept moving.

The pinned chat sat at the corner of his visor for another twenty seconds and then scrolled away on its own.

He answered four more questions. He smiled at one of them. He hit the cues Sarna had given him about the next bid window. He kept his hands flat on the arms of the catalog chair.

The light over the camera blinked off at the thirty-minute mark.

The viewer count froze at a hundred and seventy-one thousand and slowly began to drop as the feed wound down to the next sponsor slot.

Sarna stood up and stretched her shoulders like a woman who had just won a quarterly bonus.

"That was a very strong slot, Mercer. You should be proud of your engagement."

"Thanks."

"The kettle thing was odd."

"Some sponsors get strange."

"Mm. We’ll flag the handle for the moderation team. Get some water before the debrief."

She was already walking out of the room with her tablet against her hip.

Caleb sat in the chair for another second.

His comms-chip ticked.

He knew who it was before the glasses lit. The orchids were not in the air, but they were in his head, and the message that arrived behind his ear was hidden from the chat scroll.

[Unknown User: he was watching the broadcast. he was watching us in the safehouse. the bottom of the kettle has the same mark as the side of the thing in their containment cell. get here. now.]

Caleb put both hands flat on the arms of the chair and pushed himself up onto his feet.

The catalog room was very bright.

His ribs, low on the left, were warm again.