Don't Look at the Janitor

[Deep Clean initiated.]

The second skill did not feel like the first.

The first skill was a wipe. One stroke, and the dirt was gone. Quick. Clean. The kind of motion you do without thinking, the way you slap a fly off your forearm.

[Deep Clean] was patient.

It settled into my hands like cold water filling a glove. The Hollow Stag charged, antlers down, and I did not move out of the way, because the skill did not want me to. The skill wanted contact. The skill wanted me to put a hand on the contaminant the way you put a hand on a counter that has been sticky for a week.

I reached out, and the antlers passed through my palm like steam, and the Hollow Stag stopped.

It stopped the way a song stops when the speaker dies. Sudden. Mid-note.

Then, slowly, from the inside, it started coming apart.

Not bursting. Not dissolving. Disassembling, layer by layer, the way old paint comes off a wall under a careful scraper. First the ash-fur, peeled away into nothing. Then the muscle underneath, lifted off in long clean strips. Then the strange dark thing at the centre of it, which was not a heart, which was something the size of a fist that had no business being inside a living animal, lifted out into the air and held there, glowing, while the rest of the stag's body unmade itself around it.

[Foreign contaminant removed.]

[Non-native core extracted.]

[Area is now 38% cleaner.]

The core hung in the air for a second longer. Then the system, almost gently, set it down on the moss at my feet.

The Greylight Pack did not move.

The kid in the orange jacket sat down. The healer had taken his pin off and was holding it in his hand like he had forgotten what it was for. Haru had her sword half-raised, pointed at nothing, and her mouth was open.

"Sorry," I said, because someone had to say something. "I think your Gate was misfiled."

We got out of the warehouse in twenty minutes. The Greylight Pack walked in front of me, and not one of them turned their back fully, which was rude in a way I appreciated, because it meant they were taking me seriously and pretending not to.

Outside, the breach shimmered, smaller now, the colour of cooling iron. An Association response team was already pulling up in two grey vans. They had been called by Haru's healer the second we were clear of the trees, which meant my name and the Stag had already gone into a system somewhere, which meant the next forty-eight hours were going to be loud.

Haru turned to me by the vans. The braid had come loose. She had a long scratch down one cheekbone that the healer hadn't gotten to yet.

"What do you want," she said.

It was not a hostile question. It was the question of a woman who had decided, in the last twenty minutes, that I was a transaction she had not yet figured out the price of.

I thought about it.

"I want my name kept off the report."

She blinked.

"You cleared a B-rank boss with a class skill nobody has ever seen," she said. "In an E-rank that should have killed all four of us. And you want."

"I want my name kept off the report," I said again. "You four killed it. You hired me as a porter, I carried a bag, I saw nothing."

"Why."

The honest answer was: because I had been a janitor in that lobby for two years, and I had watched what happened to the people whose names went up on the rankings boards too fast. The kids with the wrong sponsor. The B-rank prodigies with the family debt. The Association liked talent the way a butcher likes a cow. Politely. Hungrily.

I wasn't ready to be a cow.

"Because I want to find out what I am," I said, "before someone else decides for me."

Haru looked at me for a long moment. Then she did something I will probably remember for a while. She bowed. Not deep. Not theatrical. A short, tight, professional bow, the kind one hunter gives another at the end of a clean job.

"Greylight Pack killed the Hollow Stag," she said. "You were lucky to walk out alive. I'll sign the report."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet. The Association won't believe it. The Stag's core is the size of a fist. We're a C-rank party. We don't kill cores that big. They'll audit us."

"Let them."

"They will. And when they do, somebody upstairs is going to start asking why our story is so clean."

She walked off toward her healer. The kid in the orange jacket gave me a last frightened look over his shoulder. I sat down on the bumper of the second van and waited for the Association inspector to come tell me to go home.

The inspector took my statement in nine minutes. Volunteer porter. Saw nothing inside. Got separated from the party. Came out when the noise stopped. I signed three forms. He looked at the Z on my card, snorted, and waved me off the lot.

I was halfway to the tram stop when a black car pulled up alongside me.

It was the kind of car that had nothing written on it. The kind of plate that came from a department most civilians could not name. The window rolled down. A woman in a charcoal coat looked out at me. She was maybe fifty, hair cut short, eyes the cold grey of an Association uniform without any of the rank pins.

"Mr. Yun," she said. "Get in."

"I don't know you."

"Director Ha Yeo-jin. Internal Affairs, Bureau of Hunter Oversight. Get in or I'll have you picked up at your apartment in an hour. The car is more polite."

I got in.

The inside of the car smelled like new leather and old cigarettes. She did not offer me anything to drink. She did not look at me. She handed me a tablet.

On it was a still from a security camera inside the warehouse Gate. Bureau cameras, then. Not the public feed. The kind of cameras the Association swore did not exist.

The still showed me, palm out, the Hollow Stag mid-disassembly. The system text was not on the still, because the system text was only ever in my own head. The image was just me, and the unfinished stag, and the look on Haru's face that I had not seen at the time.

It was the look of someone watching a god get out of bed.

"Your statement says you saw nothing," Director Ha said.

"My statement is correct."

"Your statement is a lie that the Greylight Pack has agreed to back you on. They will not, when we lean on them. I am going to give you an option, Mr. Yun, because I read your file and you have been mopping our lobby for two years, and I have a small soft spot for men who clean up after my agents."

She took the tablet back.

"You can come in as ours. Quiet. Special category. We list you as an A-rank to keep the press off, we give you a handler, and you do work for the Bureau that other people can't do. You vanish from the public ledger. Nobody outside this car ever sees that footage."

"Or."

"Or I file the footage with the full Association tomorrow morning, and by lunchtime every S-rank in this country knows your face, half the foreign embassies have offered you citizenship, and the rest of them have offered to have you killed. You will not get to choose, after that. You will be chosen for."

It was a good offer. It was a kind offer, by the standards of people in coats like hers.

I thought about the look on Haru's face. I thought about the kid in the orange jacket, sitting down in the moss. I thought about the system asking me, for the first time, to confirm.

"No," I said.

She did not look surprised. She looked tired.

"Why."

"Because if I take your offer I'm a tool of the Bureau, and if you publish the footage I'm a trophy for the Association, and I haven't even worked out yet what I am."

"And in the meantime."

"In the meantime I'll keep mopping. You can put whatever rank you want on the public ledger. Don't put my real one."

Director Ha looked at me for a long time. Then she leaned forward and tapped on the partition, and the car pulled smoothly back into traffic.

"You have a week," she said. "After that, the choice stops being yours. And Mr. Yun."

"Yes."

"The footage I showed you. The Stag's core. Bureau analysts have been looking at it for the last forty minutes. They say the core is not a Hollow Stag core. They say it doesn't match anything in our catalogue. They say it matches, very faintly, the kind of resonance signature we pick up on the inside of S-rank Gates, in the deepest rooms, the ones we lose teams in. Do you know what that means."

"No."

"It means somebody, or something, put a piece of an S-rank dungeon inside an E-rank breach in a shipyard warehouse. And then sent a B-rank boss to sit on it. In a Gate volunteered by a man whose rank the system can't read." She finally looked at me. "Somebody is fishing, Mr. Yun. And you just took the bait."

The car stopped at the kerb in front of my building. The door unlocked itself.

I got out into the cold. The car pulled away. I stood on the pavement with my hands in my pockets, watching the brake lights vanish around the corner.

The system pinged, very softly, in the back of my head. It had never done that outside a Gate before.

[Notice.]

[Custodian, you have been observed.]

[Something is looking back.]