Soren was still holding Celia’s question when Dani found him, which meant he’d been holding it most of a day, because Dani only came looking with a screen in her hands when the screen was worse than whatever he was already carrying.

"The line’s still climbing," she said.

She didn’t sit. She turned the terminal around on the desk so the curve faced him.

Same slope. The one from the fall, the unnatural one, the fan-club number going up on a grade that no organic thing climbed.

"It never came down," Soren said.

"It never even flattened."

◆◆◆◆

He’d stopped treating the too-convenient timing as noise a week ago and here was the noise, still going, on a graph in his own room.

"That’s the old problem," Soren said. "Show me the new one. You didn’t turn the screen around for a curve I already knew about."

Dani almost smiled. She didn’t, but the corner of it was there and then it was gone.

"There’s a second layer now." She swiped the curve away. "Somebody’s buying festival access. Not tickets. Access. Vendor slots that never posted publicly. Press credentials issued to outlets that don’t have bylines. Reception seating in the tier they said was faculty-only."

"How much."

"More than a class charity festival brings in on its own, which means somebody’s spending to be in the building who wasn’t invited to be in the building."

◆◆◆◆

She’d mapped it.

That was the thing about Dani, she didn’t bring him a worry, she brought him a worry with the work already done under it, and she’d taken every purchase she could pull and dropped it onto the festival floor plan.

Soren read the map.

The slots clustered. Not evenly, not spread across the hall, which was what paid access did when it was just money chasing a good view.

They clustered around the Class Z exhibition. Around the information booth Dani had claimed. Around the demonstration floor near the kitchen where Maren was slotted. Around the center of the reception hall where Selah was going to stand under lights all night and make ice for strangers.

Around, Soren read, wherever the grid had already decided to put him.

"They’re not buying seats at the festival," he said.

"No."

"They’re buying seats near us."

Maren leaned in from the doorway with half a roll in her hand, because Maren heard the word festival two rooms away and came whenever it was said.

"Is it a real festival or a fake one," she said.

"It’s a real festival somebody’s using for a fake reason," Soren said.

"So I still get the kitchen slot."

"You still get the kitchen slot."

"Good." She bit the roll. "The ovens down there are better than ours."

She wandered back out, and Dani waited until she was gone before she pulled the map back up, because what came next wasn’t for the doorway.

"It’s not random access," Dani said. "I checked the ones that bought early against the grid. Every early buyer landed a slot next to a pack member before the grid was public."

"Which means they knew the grid before it posted."

"Which means somebody handed it to them."

◆◆◆◆

The old version of Dani would have sat on this.

Soren knew that the same way he knew the fan-club slope, from the novel, from the winter, from the eight days she’d once held a routing before she’d been ready to say whose office it ran to. She’d learned something in that eight days and she’d learned it was expensive.

So she brought this one fast, before he asked, while the ink on the purchases was still fresh enough to trace.

"There’s one more," Dani said. "I almost didn’t pull it. It’s buried under three resale layers and a name that isn’t a person."

"A shell."

"A shell." She pulled it up. "Vendor slot, front row of the exhibition, bought through an account with no history and one billing address."

"How long did it take you to find it."

"An afternoon."

"An afternoon." Soren looked at her. "You brought it the same day."

"I brought it the same day." She said it flat, but she held his eyes a second too long on it, because they both knew what the old her would have done with an afternoon’s find and a name she didn’t like at the end of it.

She’d sat on the last one. She wasn’t sitting on this one.

"Read it to me," Soren said.

She stopped.

She read the account number and the resale layers and the dead name on the front of it, and then she got to the billing line and stopped.

Soren waited, because he’d learned this winter that when Dani stopped it was never because she’d lost the thread. It was because she’d found the end of it and didn’t like where it tied off.

"The billing address routes to an office," Dani said. "One office. The same one the nightly reports feed into. The one two floors up that Voss doesn’t know she’s serving."

Soren looked at the shell account, and the vendor slot, and the front row of the exhibition, and the curve she’d swiped away that had never once come down.

The fame and the festival weren’t two operations circling the pack from two sides.

They were one hand, buying its way close from the outside while it wrote the grid from the inside, and the office paying for the outside was the office reading the inside, and it had a name on the door Soren had been carrying since the fall without letting himself write it down anywhere it could be found.

"Don’t pull anything else off that account tonight," Soren said.

"Because he’ll see the pull."

"Because he’ll see the pull." Soren closed the terminal. "We already know the address. We don’t need to knock on it."

Dani took the screen back and stood there a second longer, and for once she didn’t have more work folded under the work.

"You could’ve sat on this," Soren said.

"I know."

"You didn’t."

"I didn’t." She looked at the closed terminal in her hands. "Last time I had a name at the end of a routing I held it eight days. I told myself I was confirming it. I was deciding whether to tell you."

"And now."

"Now I decide faster." She said it like it settled something, and it didn’t, quite, because there was still a small held thing behind her eyes that Soren clocked and let sit, since a person who brought you the hard find same-day had earned the right to keep one thing back for a while.

He didn’t ask what it was.

"So what do we do with it," Dani said.

"Nothing they can watch us do."