Scraps N' Scraps sat where it always sat, crammed between a gas station and a Bangboo repair shop, sign as crooked as the day someone hung it. The window display had changed since morning. The busted rice cooker was gone. In its place sat something that was either a power converter or the wreckage of three power converters that had crashed into each other. Hard to say. Cael had always suspected that was the point.
Paz stopped a few steps short and read the storefront the way she'd read the hollow. Exits, angles, whether it could be trusted.
"This is it," she said. Not really a question.
"This is it."
"Smaller than I pictured."
"I thought you had been here already?" Cael asked.
"I never said that I did. I only know the place as a drop-off for the commission."
"Then how did you get the commission?"
"The inter-knot..." She replies. "You know every commission is digital, right?"
Cael went silent for a few seconds
"Oh, that's... errrr... makes sense. Ehm... They're all smaller than you pictured. She likes them that way." He pushed the door open. "After you."
"Old man..." she mutters
"I'm... twenty-one..."
The bell chimed.
Inside, the cool and the clutter swallowed the street in one step. Stripped casings, coiled wire, parts sorted into a system only one person and one Bangboo understood. The air smelled like solder and dust and equipment left running too long.
George was behind the counter.
He looked up the second the bell rang, sensors brightening, and made the little happy chirp he always made when Cael came in. Then he spotted the second figure, the chirp cut off, and he froze the way a small machine freezes when it hits a variable it didn't plan for.
"Ehn. Ehn-na?"
"Her name is Paz. Same job. Long story. Don't worry about it."
George studied her with the slow seriousness of a Bangboo who took counter security personally. Paz studied him right back, just as seriously, which seemed to settle it. After a moment he relaxed, the way a cat relaxes once it decides you're furniture and not a threat, and went back to his tray of capacitors.
"Ehn-na-nha,"
"He runs the place?" Paz asked.
"Yep, he runs the place."
"He's looks cute wearing that apron."
"He takes it seriously." Cael set the case on the counter. "George. We've got the item. Tell her she's got a delivery."
George changed.
The friendly host drained right out of him. His sensors cooled from warm green to a sharp blue, and he leaned toward the case without touching it, the way you lean toward a stove to check if it's still hot. He just looked at it for a second. Then he made a low sound with none of his usual cheer in it.
"...Ehn. Ehn-na-na."
Cael watched him. "You can hear it too."
"Ehn," George said, quiet. And there was something in how he said it, flat, a little wary, that Cael filed away with everything else from today that didn't fit.
George pulled the comms unit out of his apron like it was a chore he'd stopped enjoying, set it on the counter facing them, and tapped through. The screen flickered, settled into that same useless grey ceiling Cael had spent two years failing to place, and the signal opened.
The voice that came through wasn't the one he knew.
"Oh, you're back."
Fast. Clipped. None of the slow, dry drawl she opened with on a normal day. The words came out the instant the line caught, like she'd been holding them ready for hours.
"Both of you. Both signals. Standing in my shop, with the item, alive."
"Hello to you too," Cael said.
"Don't." A breath, filtered, sharp. "Don't be glib with me right now, Cael. I've spent most of this afternoon watching two locator signals I genuinely didn't expect to see come back out of that sector. Let me be unprofessional about it for one minute."
Cael blinked.
Two years. He'd heard her bored, amused, dry as a riverbed, and once, properly irritated. Never rattled. He hadn't been sure she could be.
Beside him, Paz had gone still and watchful, arms crossed, head tilted at the screen like she was recording every word for later. He could practically see her running the math, the same something feels off about this math from the boundary wall, and adding this to the pile.
"You knew we might not come back," Cael said.
"I know that about every job." A pause. The processing crackled. When she went on, some of the old calm was back, but not all of it. "This one I had reason to worry more than usual. I'll explain. Not here."
"Not here," Cael repeated.
"Not on this line. Not in that shop. Not on any channel I don't own outright."
Paz spoke for the first time since the call opened. "You're being recorded."
A pause. A recalibration.
"Who's this," the Fixer said, the dryness creeping back in, which was almost a relief.
"Paz. The second contractor you sent into a hollow without mentioning there was a first one."
Longer pause this time.
"...Ah, the one from inter-knot. So you've met. Properly."
"There was a misunderstanding," Cael said. "Involving a sword. And my throat. We worked it out."
"I'm sure you did." Careful now. The voice of someone re-sorting a plan in real time. "Paz. Yes. I owe you a conversation too. A real one. Same one I owe Cael, which is why I'm only saying this once, and I'd like you both to listen instead of arguing, which I know is a lot to ask of at least one of you."
Cael decided not to ask which one.
"Come to me. In person. Both of you. Now, while the item's still in hand, and before anyone with a Bureau badge figures out which two contractors walked out of a sector they'd sealed."
Cael went still.
Two years, and she'd never once asked to meet in person. It was the whole legend of her. Nobody met the Fixer. She was a voice, a screen, and a network of little green machines in aprons. The idea that she had a room you could walk into was somehow more unsettling than anything in the hollow.
"You've never asked that," he said. "Not once."
"I know what I've never done, Cael. I'm doing it anyway." A breath. "I'll send the location to your nav unit. Sixth Street. Janus Quarter."
Paz frowned. "Sixth Street's almost a few hours out."
"An hour if you take the eastern spur and don't stop to admire the scenery, which I'm trusting neither of you will, seeing as one of you is carrying an unstable piece of gear of mine and the other can't stop narrating her concerns about it on an open channel."
A crackle. Cael chose not to look at Paz, who'd gone very quiet in the way that meant she was deciding whether to be offended.
"There's another branch on the corner of Sixth and the old freight road. Newest one. Barely fitted out, no signage up yet, half the shelves still empty. You'll know it by the lack of anything in the window. Go to the back."
"You opened a sixth shop and didn't tell me," Cael said.
"I don't tell you when I open shops, Cael."
"Why this branch?"
"Because it's new enough that nobody's mapped it to me yet, and far enough out that the walls are thick and the street is quiet." A beat. "I picked it for the privacy. That's the only feature it has. Oh, and the noodle shop, its good place."
Cael looked at the case on the counter. At the grey, nothing on the screen. At George, who'd climbed halfway onto the counter to watch, sensors flicking anxiously between blue and green, a small machine that knew something was wrong and couldn't work out how to fix it.
"The split holds," Cael said. "Whatever this turns into. Fifty-fifty, confirmed before the engine leaves either of our hands."
"The split holds. I'll confirm it in person, in front of you both, before we touch anything else. You have my word. For whatever you've each decided that's worth."
"Haven't decided yet."
"Then decide on the way." The processing softened, just a little, that buried register that slipped out when she forgot to keep her distance. "...I'm glad you're both alive. I'll say the rest when I can see your faces. Sixth Street. Come quick."
The line cut.
The screen went dark.
For a second nobody moved. George looked from the dead screen up to Cael, sensors dimming.
"Ehn-na...?"
"Honestly? No idea, buddy." Cael lifted the case off the counter. The hum found his palm right away, familiar and unwelcome. He clipped it to the strap across his back, where the shotgun usually rode, and let the shotgun drop into his hand instead. "Ask me again tonight."
He turned to Paz.
She'd already pulled her hood up and was rolling her shoulders loose, settling back into that economical readiness he'd watched her move with all day. She caught him looking and raised an eyebrow.
"What."
"Nothing." He nodded at the door. "For the record. The smart move here is to take the engine, split it now, and walk the opposite way from someone who's refused to meet anyone in two years and is suddenly very keen to meet us."
"I know."
"That's the smart move."
"I know." She pulled the mask up over the bottom half of her face. Above it, her gold eyes caught the dim shop light, bright and certain. "Seven people died for what's in that case. The HMB sent an off-books team into a third-sector hollow to get it. And the one person who might actually know why just broke a two-year rule to ask us to come find her." She headed for the door. "You really think either of us was walking the other way?"
Cael looked at her. At the case humming against his back. At George, hauled fully onto the counter now, watching them go with one little arm half-raised, somewhere between a wave and a question.
No, he thought. No, I don't.
That was the whole problem with him. Always had been. He couldn't leave a thing alone once he'd seen its shape, and this one kept getting bigger and stranger by the hour. Under the part of him that knew better, the part two years of this work had built specifically to know better, there was a smaller, more honest part that was already halfway out the door.
He sighed.
"Bye, George."
"Ehn-na-ehn!"
"No promises."
The bell chimed as they stepped out into the amber afternoon, and the outer ring rushed back in to meet them.
Paz didn't head for the transit spur.
Cael clocked it three steps out the door, the way she turned left instead of right, toward the open stretch where the district thinned out into the haul roads. He stopped.
"Spur's the other way."
"I'm not taking the spur." She didn't slow. "There's a lot of guys in Blazewood. I'll thumb a ride off the haul road; one of the cargo runs always goes that way this time of day. Few kliks, maybe. Faster than waiting on a half-dead transit line."
"You're going to hitchhike."
"I'm going to catch a freight run. There's a difference."
"There's really not."
"With an unstable S-rank engine in your bag, you want to stand on a packed transit car for an hour? Be my guest." She kept walking. "I'll see you there."
Cael watched her go for a second. Then he sighed, the long kind, the kind that meant he'd already decided something and didn't love it.
"Hang on."
He went back to the shop front. Not inside. To the side of it, the narrow strip between the storefront and the gas station next door, where a lump of something sat under a heavy tarp gone grey with dust, the kind of shape the eye slid right past because it had clearly been parked and forgotten a long time ago.
He pulled the tarp off.
Underneath was a motorcycle.
Old frame, low and heavy, the bodywork matte and scratched in the places that came from use rather than neglect. Outer-ring build, half salvage by the look of it, but the chain was oiled and the tank wasn't rusted through and somebody had clearly kept it alive on purpose. It had the same quality as everything Cael owned. It looked like junk until you looked twice.
Paz had stopped. She came back a few steps.
"That's yours?"
"That's mine."
"You parked a motorcycle under a tarp next to a gas station and just... left it."
"Nobody steals from a Scraps N' Scraps. George remembers faces and so do I." He swung a leg over, kicked the stand up, and the engine turned over on the second try with a low, even growl that said whatever else was wrong with the thing, the part that mattered worked. "Coming, or are you flagging down a cargo lorry full of strangers? I want to get paid, damn it."
Paz looked at the bike. Then at him. The mask was back up, so he couldn't see her face, but the angle of her head did the thing he was learning to read, the one that meant she was weighing whether accepting this cost her anything.
It didn't, apparently.
She got on behind him. Settled her weight, found the foot pegs, kept a careful hand's width of space between them out of pure habit before the realities of a single seat collapsed it.
"If you crash this," she said, "I'm landing on you."
"Noted."
"On purpose."
"Also noted." He twisted the throttle. "Hold the bag, not me. It buzzes less if you keep it off your spine."
She adjusted the strap. The engine on his back hummed its three wrong notes into the gap between them, low and patient, riding along to a meeting neither of them was smart enough to skip.
Cael pulled out onto the haul road, and the outer ring opened up ahead of them, the haze going gold in the late light, Blazewood a low grey smudge on the horizon with Sixth Street somewhere past it.
He opened the throttle.
The shop, the boundary markers, the whole ordinary, indifferent afternoon fell away behind them, and for a few minutes there was just the road and the engine and the wind and the thing in the bag, all of them going the same direction at speed.