Two Words for Vassili

Twelve steps. I take them in the dark, Vassili's grip wedged under my forearm, my thumb on the bare patch.

The man is already in the sanctuary. I hear him before I see him: a drawer forced, papers tossed aside. He is looking for the names of the Dissolved in the wrong lockers. He cannot read our shelf marks.

I cut his implant at four meters. The bill comes due at once: behind my eyes, the address of a canteen on level 9 goes blank. I log it as lost. He staggers, catches himself on the shelving, and turns with the same polite calm he had over the transmitter.

"Praetor. You came alone."

I set the barrel under his jaw. The metal has kept my warmth from the night.

"The four minutes forty. All of it."

He does not struggle. He recounts it the way one reads a report: the shelf, the cough, the nineteenth blow. Then the silence, and her voice, wet, almost cheerful. She gave an address. South gallery, third locker, under the air vent. Here.

I open the locker. Dust. A rubber band.

"She lied," he says. "She smiled while she lied. You had prepared this decoy with her, hadn't you? Or else she sold us the real one, and you moved it without remembering."

My register queries its columns. Agreed decoy: missing data. Transfer of the names: missing data. The day we might have decided it together, I spent against Castellane.

The Law asks me to engrave. I hold the stylus above Vassili's line in the Alpha Register. Two possible words. Traitor. Witness. The tip hangs a millimeter from the screen, and my hand, for the first time since the vat, does not know how to come down.

The man waits, his eyes on my fingers.

"You don't know, Praetor. And someone, outside, knows where the real names sleep."

At the end of the gallery, a door closes. Not the one I came in through.