Three days.

  That was how long Stillson gave him.

  Zelig spent those three days the way he spent time when he knew something was coming and could not stop it from coming, by making the ground under his feet as solid as possible before it arrived. He worked the Great rank pool every morning until he understood its edges. He ran the forms in the Metarealm each night until the movements stopped feeling new. He read everything he had on Stillson twice and found nothing he had not already found.

  He told Flint on the second day.

  Not everything. Enough. Stillson, the box, Great rank, the connection to Amalak. He laid it out at the east docks wall in the grey morning and watched Flint receive it piece by piece with the focused stillness he had when something required his full attention.

  When Zelig finished Flint was quiet for a long time.

  “The box.” He said. “You still have it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Stillson is coming back for it.”

  “Yes.”

  Flint looked at the water. “When.”

  “Soon.” Zelig said. “He’s not a man who leaves a conversation unfinished.”

  Flint nodded slowly. He turned the empty food paper over in his hands the way he turned things over when he was thinking.

  “I’m there when he comes.” He said. Not a question.

  Zelig looked at him.

  “I’m there.” Flint said again. The tone that meant the decision had been made and was not available for debate.

  Zelig thought about the man on the floor of Burgalow Vermillion’s office. The four seconds. The Eastern technique.

  “Alright.” He said.

  They did not tell Ervan.

  This was Zelig’s decision and he made it knowing it was the same mistake he had made twice before and making it anyway because the calculation was different this time. Stillson was connected to Amalak and Amalak was connected to things that went beyond the Hollow Hand’s scope. Bringing Ervan into it meant bringing the crew into it and the crew was not built for what Stillson represented.

  He told himself this on the second night.

  He believed it on the second night.

  Stillson came on the third morning.

  Not to Arbor Street this time. To the Row.

  Zelig and Flint were there when it happened, which was either luck or Stillson having watched their patterns long enough to know where to find them at this hour, and given what Zelig knew about Stillson it was not luck.

  He came around the corner of Canner’s Row with four men this time, not two, and the morning crowd on the Row did what crowds did when something with that kind of weight moved through them. It parted. Not dramatically, not in panic, just the instinctive sideways movement of people whose bodies understood something their minds had not yet articulated.

  Stillson walked through the gap toward Zelig and Flint and stopped ten meters away.

  He looked different from the apartment. The same suit, the same correctness of presentation, but something in his bearing had shifted. The patience was still there but it was thinner now, pulled tight over something underneath it that had not been visible on Sunday.

  He looked at Zelig.

  “The box.” He said.

  “No.” Zelig said.

  Stillson looked at him for a moment.

  Then he nodded to the men on his left.

  Two of them came forward and they were cultivators, Zelig felt that immediately, the specific mana signature of people who had trained their pools to be weapons rather than tools. Challenger rank both of them, which under normal circumstances would have been a problem.

  Great rank was not normal circumstances.

  He pushed a wide pulse outward from his pool, not targeted, just presence, the way Great rank mana filled space differently from Challenger, and both men slowed. Not stopped. But the hesitation was there, the instinctive recalibration of cultivators who had just felt something larger than what they had prepared for.

  Flint moved into the space the hesitation created.

  He was fast in a way that Zelig had seen once before and which still required adjustment to witness. The Eastern technique, the same structural logic, the same use of the opponent’s momentum, applied here at a different scale and with more fluency than the Burgalow office because this time he had been ready.

  The first man went down in three seconds.

  The second took five because he adjusted mid movement which meant he had training of his own, but Flint adjusted faster and the second man went down on the Row stones and did not immediately get up.

  The remaining two men looked at Stillson.

  Stillson was already moving.

  Great rank moved differently.

  Zelig had read this and had understood it theoretically and had felt the edge of it in his own pool over the past three days but watching Stillson move was the practical education that the texts had not been able to provide. There was no visible preparation, no gathering, no telegraphing of intention. He simply closed the distance between himself and Zelig in a way that seemed to involve fewer steps than the distance required and his hand came up with a mana construct that was tight and dense and precise in the way of someone who had been working at this specific level for years.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Zelig got his own construct up in time. Barely.

  The impact rattled through his arms and into his shoulders and he stepped back two paces absorbing it and felt the Great rank pool do something it had not done in three days of training, activate fully, completely, all of it coming up at once in response to actual threat rather than practice.

  It felt like the walls coming off in all directions simultaneously.

  He pushed back.

  Stillson took one step back. One.

  They stood ten meters apart on the Row and the morning crowd had fully evacuated to the edges, pressed against the buildings, the fish stall woman behind her counter, the glow lantern buzzing overhead indifferently.

  Stillson looked at Zelig.

  “You’ve had three days with it.” He said. The educated voice unchanged even now, even here. “You’re carrying power you don’t know how to use yet.”

  “I know enough.” Zelig said.

  “We’ll see.” Stillson said.

  He came again, faster this time, and the construct he built on the way was different from the first one, layered, two components working in sequence, the first one designed to be blocked so the second could come through the guard it created.

  Zelig blocked the first.

  The second got through.

  It hit him in the left side and it was not the brute force of a combat mage going for damage, it was something more specific, something designed to disrupt the pool rather than the body, and Zelig felt his Great rank mana stagger the way you stagger when the ground moves unexpectedly.

  He went down on one knee.

  The Row was very quiet.

  Stillson stood over him with the grey eyes and the patience that was not thin anymore but was completely gone, the thing underneath it fully visible now, not anger, something colder and more purposeful than anger.

  “The box.” He said.

  Zelig looked up at him.

  He was reaching for the pool, pulling it back into coherence, feeling the edges of it come back under his control. Three days was not enough. Stillson was right about that. But three days was what he had and enough was what he needed it to be.

  He felt something behind him on the Row.

  Footsteps he recognized.

  No.

  Ervan had come from the north end of the Row.

  He had come alone, which meant he had heard something or seen something or had the specific instinct of a man who had been running a crew in the Underlayers long enough to know when two of his people were in a situation they had not told him about.

  He walked onto the Row and took in the scene in the two seconds it took him to cross from the corner to the space between Zelig and Stillson.

  His posture was the posture Zelig had spent months trying to name.

  He had the word for it now, standing here on the Row with the Row quiet and Stillson in front of him and Ervan between them.

  The word was decided.

  Ervan was a man who had decided a long time ago what he was for and had not second guessed it once since.

  He looked at Stillson.

  “Walk away.” He said. The flat voice, the voice for things that were not up for discussion.

  Stillson looked at him.

  Something passed between them that Zelig could not fully read, the specific recognition of two people who occupied similar spaces in the world and understood each other’s nature without introduction.

  “This is not your matter.” Stillson said.

  “He’s my crew.” Ervan said. “That makes it my matter.”

  Stillson looked at Zelig behind Ervan.

  Then back at Ervan.

  “Move.” He said quietly.

  “No.” Ervan said.

  Stillson’s construct came fast and it did not come at Ervan the way it had come at Zelig. It did not come designed to disrupt. It came designed to remove an obstacle efficiently and permanently and Zelig was on his feet and moving before it landed but he was not fast enough and Great rank was three days old and Ervan was not a cultivator, had never been a cultivator, had built everything he was on other things entirely, and the construct hit him and he went down and did not get up the way the two Challenger rank men had not gotten up and the difference was immediately and completely apparent.

  Zelig caught him.

  He did not know how he crossed the distance. He was just suddenly there, Ervan in his arms, the Row stones under his knees, and Ervan’s face looking up at him with the expression that was not surprise, Ervan had never looked surprised by anything in his life, but was something close to satisfaction, the expression of a man who had made a decision and found it was the right one.

  He said something.

  Zelig could not hear it over the sound of his own pulse.

  He looked at Ervan’s face and understood that the math he had been running his entire life, the framework that turned people into variables and relationships into calculations, had just encountered something it could not process and had stopped.

  It had just stopped.

  Ervan’s eyes were still.

  Zelig stood up.

  He was not running calculations. He was not assessing the situation. He was not doing anything he recognized as himself.

  He turned and looked at Stillson.

  Stillson looked back at him. The grey eyes reading the new information on Zelig’s face and finding something there that made him shift his weight backward slightly, the first involuntary movement Zelig had seen from him.

  The Great rank pool came up completely.

  Not in pieces, not in careful managed increments. All of it, the full expansion, the walls off in all directions, the space his father’s blood had opened three days ago in the Metarealm filled entirely and pushing outward in every direction without restraint.

  The Row felt it. The crowd pressed harder against the buildings. The buzzing lantern above cracked its housing and went dark.

  Stillson built a construct.

  Zelig walked through it.

  Not around it, not over it, through it, the Great rank pool absorbing the impact the way deep water absorbs a stone, the disruption spreading through the pool and dissipating before it reached anything essential.

  Stillson stepped back.

  Built another.

  Zelig walked through that one too.

  They were at the edge of the Row now, the place where Canner’s met the drop, the old retaining wall that ran along the eastern edge of the Underlayers where the ground fell away sharply into the infrastructure of the lower city, a chasm that the Underlayers had been built around rather than over, forty feet of dark air between the wall’s edge and the bed of old stone below.

  Stillson stepped back and found the wall behind him.

  He looked at it. Looked at Zelig.

  For the first time something moved in the grey eyes that was not calculation or patience or the cold purposeful thing underneath them.

  He built a third construct, different from the others, larger, the kind of construct that cost something to build and was designed to end a conversation rather than continue it.

  Zelig pushed.

  Not a construct. Not a targeted application. Just the pool, extended outward in a single direction, the full weight of Great rank mana moving like weather rather than weaponry, and Stillson took it in the chest and went back over the wall.

  He did not make a sound on the way down.

  Zelig stood at the edge of the wall and looked down.

  The chasm was dark. He could not see the bottom from here. He stood there for a long moment and then he turned away.

  The Row was completely silent.

  Flint was standing twenty feet away. He had been watching. His face was doing something Zelig had not seen it do before, all the layers of it stripped back to something simpler and more raw.

  The two Hollow Hand men were still on the ground. Stillson’s remaining men had gone, somewhere between Ervan going down and the wall, vanished into the Underlayers the way people vanished when the situation became something they had not been paid to be part of.

  Ervan was on the Row stones where Zelig had set him down.

  Zelig walked back to him and crouched down and looked at his face for a long time.

  Decided.

  That was the word. It was still there, even now. The expression of someone who had been exactly who they intended to be all the way to the end.

  Zelig put his hand on Ervan’s chest and stayed there for a moment.

  Then he stood up.

  Flint came and stood beside him.

  Neither of them said anything for a long time.

  The Row was beginning to come back to itself around them the way it always came back to itself, slowly, the sounds returning first, a voice somewhere, the fish stall woman putting something down.

  “He knew.” Flint said finally. His voice was not quite level. “When he walked out here. He knew what Stillson was and he came anyway.”

  “Yes.” Zelig said.

  “Because of us.”

  “Yes.”

  Flint looked at the Row stones.

  Zelig looked at the space above the rooftops where the Shining Place glowed the way it always glowed, pale and steady, indifferent to everything that happened in the streets below it.

  He thought about Ervan’s handshake the first night. The thing he had spent months trying to name. The way a man stood when he had decided what he was for and had not second guessed it since.

  He had found the word too late.

  He stood on the Row in the morning light with the pool quiet inside him and Ervan on the stones behind him and Flint beside him and the Underlayers going on around all of it because it had no other choice.

  He did not run any calculations.

  He just stood there.

  For a long time he just stood there.