Rex did not like jobs with bad coordinates.

A coordinate was supposed to be a promise. You stood where the numbers told you to stand, and the world was supposed to be there waiting. It never guaranteed safety. Nothing did. But it was fixed. Predictable. A man could work with something that held still. He'd built most of his second life on that and not much else.

The packet Null lifted off Pell wouldn't hold still. It hung on the staging bay wall in a dead projection field, and every few seconds the marker twitched north before sliding back south. Rex had watched it do that for a while. It bothered him in a way he couldn't name.

"That's going to annoy me," Wick said.

He was under the crawler, upside down, one arm shoved past the elbow into the engine housing. Something sparked near his wrist. He laughed at it. Wick laughed at most things that gave off heat.

Wick was a small man, compact and wiry, built more for crawling inside machines than for hauling them. Burn scars ran up both his forearms, pale and overlapping, and he wore his heat-shielded gloves so much of the time that his bare hands looked wrong without them. His left forearm wasn't all arm anymore. A forge rig rode it from wrist to elbow, a torch and a welder in a scorched housing. His left eye was an ordinary brown. The right one glowed a low amber, a blast-analysis upgrade that never stopped reading Wick's visible surroundings for angles and weak points.

The bay had been a city repair dock once, before Drossfield stopped pretending the lower levels counted. Now it belonged to whoever paid the elevator gangs that week. The walls were bare structural concrete, scarred where the good machines had been unbolted and sold, and tagged over three gangs deep in paint that never fully dried in the damp. Water came down them in thin black lines and pooled in the floor seams, and the place smelled of motor oil and cold granite. The cold came off the concrete and never let up this far down. Ten meters up, through the ceiling, the lower city went about its business as a low formless mutter of feet and machinery. Further up than that, past levels nobody in this bay would ever badge into, the corporate spires ran their filtered air and their self-washing glass, and the people up there paid not to know this bay existed.

Kite had three paper maps spread on the crawler's hood, the corners pinned under knives. She moved between them without sitting. She didn't sit while underground if she could help it. Null stood by the projection with her arms crossed and her coat still on. The coat staying on meant she planned to leave fast. They had all learned to read that much.

Rex had never been able to read her the way he read the others, and part of that was how she was built. She was lean, narrow through the shoulders, quick, and she never wasted a motion. She kept the sides of her head buzzed close, a patchy undercut that left the interface ports bare at the base of her skull, small dark sockets most people learned not to look at twice. Her clothes did work that most clothes didn't. The layered synthweave was shot through with a fine mesh that swallowed scans and masked her heat signature, so that to any machine watching she read as a smudge where a person should be. Only her eyes were untouched. Everything else had been tuned or hidden, but the eyes were just a woman's eyes, dark and quick, and they were the one part of her Rex trusted, because they were the one part she'd never learned to turn off.

Chanter sat on a crate, taking apart one of the antiquated scav earpieces they used and laying each piece on a cloth in some order of his own.

"Don't bless my comms," Wick called.

"I'm cleaning the contacts."

"With incense?"

"Conductive resin."

"Smells like regret."

"Most useful things do."

Rex let it run. The talk told him where everyone was without his having to look, and he'd never managed to break the habit of always knowing. Varn had put that in him a long time ago, along with some other things he couldn't give back.

He looked at the packet again. "We don't know who wants the core."

Null didn't turn around. "We know who doesn't want their name on it."

"Not the same thing."

"It's close."

"Close gets people killed."

"So does being broke."

He let that go. It was true, and she only got snappy like that when she'd already made up her mind. Being broke killed you slow, and nobody down here noticed it anymore because everybody was doing it. A bad job killed you fast. People made that choice every day. He'd made it himself more times than he wanted to count.

Wick rolled out from under the crawler on a maglev creeper, one cheek black with grease. "Good news. The left drive's either fixed or the trip will be much more interesting."

Kite didn't look up. "Define interesting."

"If I knew, it'd be fixed."

Rex looked at him until the grin wore thin.

"It'll get us there," Wick said.

"And back?"

"You always want the mean version."

Rex crouched by the crawler and put a hand flat on the chassis. He could feel the idle through his palm. The note had a hitch in it, the bearings were tired, the draw ran uneven, but none of it was going to strand them. The crawler would go down into the Corridor, and if nothing came after them, it would come back up. He took his hand off the metal. Wick clowned because it kept people from watching too closely. The man under the grease was about the most careful person Rex knew.

"We need the job scope," Rex said.

Null flicked two fingers on her wrist slate and the projection moved onto the service bay wall. The marker dropped away and a facility came up in its place, a rough box of a building with no interior, the Kronov access stamp buried under three coats of civilian paperwork.

"Target says telemetry core," she said. "But the power ledger says whatever's parked in there used to pull enough to run command hardware. That's not a weather post. Somebody dressed a war asset up as farm equipment and dropped it out there to rot. Now they want it back, or they want to know it's really dead, and they don't want to be the ones to go look."

Kite set a knife tip on one of the maps. "This approach road's gone."

"Public map says intact."

"Public map didn't walk it."

"Neither did you."

Kite tapped the paper. "Water did. Look at the contour. The roadbed sat under the old drainage line. Floods take the low ground first and they don't give it back. If that road were still there, these settlements would still have a way north. They don't. So it's gone. The grid shows a lot of things that washed away years ago."

Wick raised a greasy hand. "I'd like the room to know I hate when everyone's competent at once. It makes my sparkle harder to see."

"You don't sparkle," Null said.

"I've been called luminous."

"By fire."

"Fire has style."

Rex kept his eyes on the stamp under the paint. "What are the odds this is Kronov."

He wasn't really asking. He'd known the answer back in the booth, when the name came up out of his own mouth without his permission.

Null didn't answer fast. The silence was answer enough.

The pressure gathered behind his throat, where the flesh stopped and the modulator started. Varn's people had put the device there when he was thirteen, stupid enough to think that doing what he was told would buy him out of Hekaton. It was quiet now. It was always quiet, until it wasn't. He'd learned to live next to it the way you live next to a dog that's bitten before. You stay careful. You don't turn your back.

"Say it," he told her.

Null looked at him. There was no pity in her face, and he was grateful for that.

"It smells like Kronov," she said. "Not clean enough to be an official pull, or they'd have sent their own people and a kill order for anyone who got curious. Not sloppy enough to be scav bait. Somebody wants a crew they can deny to put their hands on a thing they're scared to touch."

"Why us?"

"Because we're good."

"That's not why."

She held his look. The room went quiet, the way it did when his old life came into it. Kite's knife stopped on the map. Wick's grin went flat. Chanter looked down at the earpiece in his lap.

"Could be any of us," Null said.

"Kronov doesn't know where I am."

"Rex."

Just his name, flat, nothing loaded into it. No pity. He looked away first, and she let him.

There were lies a man told himself because they were useful. Not because they helped. Kronov doesn't know where I am. He'd leaned on that one for years. He could feel it starting to give.

The room let the silence sit a few seconds. Then Wick cleared his throat. "For the record, if it's me, they're probably still mad about the turbine thing."

"Which turbine thing?" Kite asked.

"That question wounds me."

Rex stood. The marker jittered on the wall behind him. He made himself look at the others instead. "No contract until rules."

Null folded her arms tighter. "Listening."

"No live capture. Kronov shows, we leave."

"Kronov shows, we might not get to."

"Then we leave earlier."

Wick lifted two fingers from where he sat against the wheel. "I support early leaving. It's most of my personality."

"If we don't pull the core," Kite said, "somebody else will." She'd gone back to the maps, but she was half watching Rex, the way she watched a hold she didn't trust. "Bad jobs don't get better because we walk past them. They get cheaper people. Cheaper people don't test the line before they put weight on it. They drag whatever's in there out into the world, and then it's out, and we still have to live here."

Rex didn't argue. Kite looked as though she could see through the floor, always, at who fell when nobody "checked the rope". She'd come out of a tower collapse at fifteen with two broken arms, and she'd come out of it sure of one thing: nothing held together just because it was supposed to.

Chanter turned the earpiece over in his hands. "Sometimes the door of opportunity only calls once."

Null made a small sound. "Don't make this religious."

"I make nothing religious. I listen for what's already there."

"That's what religious people say."

"And dead locks open for me."

"Dead locks open for me too."

"Yes." Chanter's good eye came up, and the rebuilt one clicked through its focus. "But you insult them first."

Wick laughed out loud, the grease cracking at the corner of his mouth. Rex didn't. He was still on Kronov, on the way Pell flinched at the name like he'd touched a live wire, on a job about which he knew too much and not enough at the same time.

"We move at first light," he said, and the room settled around it. "No heavy profile. No broadcast gear unless Null clears it. Wick, keep the crawler quiet."

"Quiet and resentful."

"Kite scouts ahead. Paper, not network."

Kite nodded and folded a map into its sleeve.

"Chanter, you don't talk to anything unless Null says it won't scream."

Chanter looked hurt. "Screaming can be diagnostic."

"No screaming."

"A little screaming."

"None."

"Austere," Chanter said, and let it go for now.

Rex turned to Null last. "You see something wrong, we leave."

"I always see something wrong."

"More wrong."

Her mouth moved, almost a smile. "Fine."

He waited.

She sighed. "If I see more wrong, we leave. Yes. You're exhausting."

Rex crossed to the weapons rack. There wasn't much on it. Small arms, a row of Wick's breach charges with names markered on the casings, a coil cutter that only ran when its battery wasn't on the fritz. It was enough. The Lockout had killed off the long-range way of doing things, and the orbital cover and the licensed drones were all bricked or fused in dead silos now, locked up behind a firewall nobody had ever explained.

People still killed each other. That part never broke. They just had to do it up close now, where they had to look at the face. Some nights Rex thought the machine behind the Lockout, whatever it had been, understood something the corpstates never would. The distance had been the worst of it. The distance let you kill a person you'd never have to watch die.

He took a shotgun off the rack, pulled back the fore grip to open the breech, checked the chamber, closed it. None of it helped, and he did it anyway. You could clean a gun and count your rounds and walk the exits twice, and the world still saved its only real question for the worst possible second. What are you willing to do, and can you live with the consequences afterward.

Behind him, Null killed the projection. The marker went off the wall, and for a second the bay felt lighter.

Then the dead wall flickered on its own and put the marker back, alone, no map around it. Just a point hanging in the concrete dark. Nobody had touched the controls. Rex had been watching Null's hands. They were empty.

"That's new," Wick said, quietly.

The marker held. It didn't drift north or slide back. It just sat there, fixed, no jitter, no correction, nothing like the broken table's drift. Then it was gone, and the wall was a wall.

Rex looked at Null. Null looked at the wall. For the first time since the booth, she didn't look like somebody who'd taken a job. She looked as though she felt the whisper of a ghost, the air on her neck and arms at full attention.

"We're not waiting for first light," she said. "Someone put that marker back on the wall. We need distance before it happens again."

Rex held her eyes a second, then turned to the dead wall where the marker had been.

"We leave in ten," he said.

Nobody argued.