The Artifact Division building was quieter than the street outside.
The analyst—she gave her na as Sael without further detail—led them through a short entrance hall and into a side corridor that ran behind the main front rooms. The floors were plain stone. The walls were plain stone. Every door they passed was closed and unmarked. Whatever happened here, it happened without decoration.
Sael stopped at a door near the far end and knocked twice.
"Enter," said a voice from inside.
She opened the door and moved to one side.
The director was older than Kai expected. Sowhere in his late sixties, lean, with white hair cut close and hands that were calm on the desk in front of him. He wore no coat. His badge was on a plain cord around his neck instead of pinned to his chest, and the mark on it had more lines than anything Kai had seen so far.
He looked at the group as they ca in. He did not stand up.
"Sit down," he said. "All of you."
There were enough chairs. That was not accidental.
He looked at Kai first. Then at Mira. Then back at Kai.
"Maret’s report was thorough," he said. "I prefer to form my own view. Open the vault pair."
No greeting. No explanation. Just the direct move to the thing that mattered.
Kai opened the vault pair.
The shell-core regulator sat in the hidden space under his coat. The mont the pair opened fully, the air in the room changed. Not dramatically. The quality of the light shifted slightly, the way light shifted near water. Two of the objects on the director’s desk moved a small amount, pulled by the shell’s low field. Sael, standing near the door, took one careful step backward.
The director leaned forward and looked at the shell for a long ti without touching it.
"How long have you carried it?"
"Several months," Kai said.
"And the vault pair adapted around it in that ti."
"Yes."
The director looked at the altered architecture of the vault pair—the way the hidden space had reshaped itself around the shell, the way the vault’s interior structure had changed from its original form. He looked at it the way soone looked at sothing they had studied in books and were now seeing in front of them for the first ti.
"Close it," he said.
Kai closed the vault pair. The room returned to normal.
The director sat back. "Maret was right. This is a Rift-origin shell. Pre-settlent period, most likely. We have found four others in the last twenty years. All of them were empty and corroded." He paused. "Yours is active. It is bonded to a living carrier. And the path-thread inside it is not dead material. It is connected to a living source."
He looked at Mira.
She held his gaze.
"Yes," she said.
The room was quiet for a mont.
The director folded his hands on the desk. "I am not going to discuss your situation in front of a full group. That is not how this Division works." He looked at the others without any particular expression. "Your companions will wait outside."
Kai looked at Mira.
She nodded once. It was small, but it was clear.
He stood up. The older man, Liora, and Neral stood with him. None of them were happy about it. None of them showed it. They went into the corridor and Sael closed the door behind them.
Kai stood in the plain stone corridor and listened to the silence from the other side of the door.
He could not hear anything.
The older man stood beside him with his arms at his sides and his eyes on the far wall. Neral sat on the floor with his back against the wall and looked at the ceiling. Liora stayed near the door.
They waited for nine minutes.
When the door opened, Mira ca out first. Her face was calm. Her lines were still. She looked at Kai and gave a small shake of her head that ant: not now. Later.
The director appeared behind her in the doorway.
"Co back in," he said.
He spoke standing this ti, which changed the quality of the conversation.
"The shell will be logged as a Category Two active artifact pending full evaluation. That process takes between thirty and sixty days. During that ti you may carry it. You may not enter the eastern district or approach the Rift fra with it. If it pulses in a public space again, a patrol will respond and you will be required to co here imdiately."
He looked at Kai directly. "The transit letter Maret issued is now void. Its purpose was to bring you here. That purpose is complete."
Kai had expected that.
He had not expected the next part.
"Without the transit letter you are an unaffiliated vault carrier in Guild territory. That status allows you to be held at any checkpoint without cause for up to seventy-two hours." The director said it without apology. "To prevent that, you need to register as a hunter with the Guild. The registration hall is two streets north of the main gate. You have forty-eight hours. After that, any patrol in this city has the right to detain you until your status is resolved."
"And my rank?" Kai said.
"The registration hall will assign you a starting rank based on your appraisal. That is their process, not mine." The director’s voice was not cold, but it was final. "I evaluate artifacts. I do not assign hunters."
Kai kept his face level. "And Mira?"
A short pause.
"She has agreed to speak with this Division once per week while you are in the city. On her own terms." The director looked at Mira. "I will hold to that."
Mira nodded.
That was all he said about it.
The director looked at the group one last ti. "Lodging has been arranged for tonight. Sael will take you there. After that you are on your own until the registration is complete." He sat back down at his desk and picked up a docunt from the pile to his left.
The conversation was over.
The street outside the Artifact Division building was exactly as busy as it had been when they went in.
Sael walked them to a lodging house four streets west, confird the arrangent at the front desk without speaking to the group, and left without ceremony. The woman at the front desk gave them two room keys and pointed to the stairs.
They stood in the corridor between the two rooms.
Neral looked at the ceiling for a mont. "The transit letter is void."
"Yes."
"We have forty-eight hours."
"Yes."
"And whatever he said to Mira privately, she is not going to tell us yet."
"No," Mira said quietly, from the doorway of her room. Not defensive. Just honest. "Not yet."
Neral accepted that with a small nod and went into the room and closed his door.
The older man looked at Kai for a mont. "Registration hall. Two streets north of the main gate. First thing tomorrow."
"Yes."
The older man went into his room.
Liora looked at Kai last, her expression the one she used when she had already decided sothing and was checking whether he had too. Then she followed.
Kai stood alone in the corridor.
He went to the window at the end of the hall and looked out at the city.
Kael’s Seat moved below him in the last of the evening light. Hunters in the streets. Guild flags on every main building. The Rift’s deep glow on the eastern sky. A city built around sothing ancient and real, full of people who knew exactly where they stood in it.
He pushed the system one last ti before he slept.
Host status: functional
Evolution Points: 262
Shell-core: Category Two logging active / restricted zone applies
Transit letter: void
Guild registration: required within 48 hours
Current Guild rank: none
None.
He read that word and let it sit.
In this world, a hunter’s flag was their badge. It told everyone around them who they were, what path they held, how far they had co, and what they were worth in a fight. It was the first thing anyone read when they looked at you. Without it, you were not an unknown threat. You were not a hidden power. You were simply a gap in the system. A person-shaped space where an answer should have been.
He had survived Helios without a flag.
He had crossed a collapsing road without one.
He had walked six days through Guild territory carrying a shell that the most qualified people in the city did not fully understand, and he had sat across from a director who had studied it for twenty years and still could not say what it would do near an active Rift.
Tomorrow he would walk into a registration hall.
They would asure him the way this world asured everything—output, path, rank. They would look at what he had built in Helios through the frawork of a system that had never seen Helios, and they would give him a number, and the number would be wrong.
He knew that already.
He also knew that wrong numbers had a way of becoming useful ones over ti.
The Rift’s light held steady on the eastern sky.
Forty-eight hours.
He was ready.
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