May I?

The car is black and silent and smells like snow.

Nobody talks to you on the drive. The driver wears a Nordlys pin, a silver star over three wavy lines, and keeps his eyes on the road. Through the tinted window, Neo-Brookhaven slides by: the gate-scarred blocks of Lowmarket with their concrete barriers, the clean towers of the Financial District, and then, rising over all of it, Nordlys Tower.

Sixty floors of glass and white stone. At night it glows faintly blue, like ice with a light inside it. You've carried loot past its doors a hundred times. You've never been inside.

A woman meets you in the lobby. Late twenties, sleek black bob, a tablet held like a shield, a look that weighs you and finds you underweight.

"Pernille Haldorsen," she says. "Director Nordahl's chief aide. You'll be searched, scanned and asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. If you speak to the press about anything you see today, Nordlys lawyers will make your life very small."

"It's already pretty small."

She almost smiles. Almost. "Smaller."

The sixtieth floor is all glass. The whole city is spread out below like a map someone spilled lights on. In the middle of the room is a desk made of a single slab of frosted crystal, and behind it, Ottoline Nordahl.

She's changed. White suit, sharp at the shoulders. Hair back in its low knot, every strand obedient. Black gloves.

Up close, in daylight, without a ceiling falling on you, she's worse. Worse meaning more. You've seen her on buses and screens, but the pictures flatten her. In person there's a stillness to her, a cold bright focus, like the moment before a storm. Her eyes are the gray of deep winter water. Her mouth is set like she's never once been surprised.

You forget what you were going to say. You had a whole speech in the car.

"Sit, Ethan," she says.

You sit. Pernille stays by the door.

"You were fired this morning," Ottoline says. Not a question. She has a file open on the crystal desk. Your file, you realize. Thin. "Ironjaw blamed you for Tibor Vasko's mistake."

"How do you..."

"I'm offering you a contract." She slides a folder across the desk without touching it directly, two gloved fingers on the corner. "Porter, Nordlys Guild. Triple your Ironjaw rate. Full medical. Housing allowance."

You stare at the number on the first page. It's more money than you made last year.

"Why?"

"There's one condition." She folds her gloved hands. "You report to me. In person. Every day."

"Why?"

"That's the condition."

"That's not an answer." You lean forward. "Yesterday you pulled me out of a collapsing gate with your bare hand, and something happened. I can see a window. It says things about seals and keys and S-rank. I got measured an hour ago and I'm E-rank, which everybody keeps telling me is impossible. And you said my name. I never told you my name."

Ottoline doesn't move. Not a flicker.

"I read the Ironjaw roster before I went in," she says.

"You came through that rift in under a minute. You didn't read anything."

Silence. Over by the door, Pernille's eyebrows go up very slightly.

Ottoline looks down at your file. When she looks up again, something in her face has shifted, like ice when a crack runs under it.

"I can't explain yet," she says. "I'm asking you to trust me without an explanation. I know what that's worth. I know it's unfair."

"Then why should I?" You hear your own voice crack. "I don't even know what you want from me."

"Because I'm the only person in this city who knows what that window is." Her voice drops. "And because whatever you saw yesterday is going to keep happening. You'll want me there when it does."

You hold her gaze. She holds yours. Neither of you blinks.

Then she does something you don't expect.

She takes off her right glove. Slowly, finger by finger, the way you'd defuse something. She lays her bare hand on the crystal desk, palm up, halfway between you.

"I need to test something," she says. "It may change the window. It may hurt. Not much, I think. I don't know." She takes a breath. "May I take your hand?"

It's so formal it sounds almost old-fashioned. May I. Like asking for a dance.

You look at her hand. Pale. Long fingers. The silver ring on her thumb. A faint pink mark across the palm, like a burn that hasn't healed.

"Yes," you say.

She doesn't grab this time. She slides her fingers over yours, careful, and closes them.

Cold. Then not cold.

The window opens before you can breathe.

[CONTACT DETECTED: KEY-BEARER (OTTOLINE NORDAHL)]

[KEY-BEARER CONSENT: YES]

[VESSEL CONSENT: YES]

[KEY TURNING...]

The heat comes again, slower this time, up your arm and into your chest. It feels like stretching after sleeping too long in a bad position. Like a stiff joint finally cracking. Somewhere deep in you, something enormous shifts its weight.

[SEAL INTEGRITY: 97% → 94%]

[MANA OUTPUT: 31 → 44]

You hear Ottoline make a small sound. You look up.

Her jaw is locked. A thread of frost is crawling up from her palm, across her wrist, white and lacy like a window in January. And a line of red has started from her left nostril, bright against her pale skin.

She lets go.

She stands so fast her chair rolls back into the glass. She turns away and touches her face with the back of her gloved hand and looks at the red on the leather.

"Director," Pernille says, already moving.

"I'm fine." Her voice is perfectly level. "Get him the pen."

"You're bleeding," you say.

"I'm aware." She doesn't turn around. She's looking out at the city, and her bare hand is curled into a fist at her side, and you can see it shaking. "Sign or don't, Ethan. But decide now."

You look at the window, still glowing in front of you. Ninety-four percent. Forty-four. Numbers that shouldn't move, moving.

Then you look at her back. The straight spine. The fist. The woman nobody touches, who just touched you on purpose and is bleeding for it.

You sign.

You don't sleep.

You lie in your walk-up on Ibsley Street with the radiator clanking and the window open to the rain, and you open the System window over and over just to look at it.

[RANK: E]

[SEAL INTEGRITY: 94%]

[KEY-BEARER: OTTOLINE NORDAHL]

There are more fields below, gray and locked. You can't read them yet.

At eleven fifty-nine, your phone lights up on the nightstand.

Unknown number. No profile picture. You open it.

The first text is just three words, the kind of thing a general sends from a war room.

Status report. Now.

Then, before you can answer, a second one, and you can almost hear her saying it, cold and precise, in an empty office sixty floors above the city:

Mana: ? Nosebleed: ? Sleep: no. Acknowledge.