They came Sunday morning.

  Zelig was at the table with tea when he heard the footsteps on the stairs. Not Marie’s footsteps, not the couple from the second floor, not anyone who lived in this building. The specific weight and cadence of people who were climbing stairs they had not been invited to climb.

  He was on his feet before the first knock.

  He looked at Marie across the room. She had heard it too. She was already looking at him with the expression that was not panic but was the thing that came before you decided whether to panic.

  He held up one hand. Stay.

  She stayed.

  He moved to the door.

  The knock when it came was not loud. That was the first thing. Loud knocks were for people who wanted you afraid before the door opened. This knock was measured, three times, the knock of someone who was confident the door would open because they had already decided what happened if it did not.

  Zelig opened it.

  Two men in the hallway. Large, the specific large of people whose size was professional rather than incidental, standing at angles that covered the staircase and the door simultaneously without appearing to. Behind them, one step back, a third man.

  Tall. Dark suit, fitted and correct, the same suit Marie had described from the Row. White shirt. Everything in its place. A face that was not remarkable in any individual feature but was remarkable in its composite effect, the way all the parts had arranged themselves into something that communicated a single clear thing without effort.

  That thing was: I have been doing this for a very long time and I am not finished yet.

  He was older than Zelig had imagined from the descriptions. Late forties, maybe fifty, the age sitting on him the way age sat on people who had spent it doing difficult things and had not been diminished by any of them. His eyes were grey and they looked at Zelig the way Zelig looked at things he was assessing.

  For a moment they just looked at each other.

  “Zelig Challots.” The man said. Not a question. A confirmation of something already known.

  His voice was unhurried and educated in the specific way of someone whose education had been extensive and had been followed by enough experience to make the education feel earned rather than inherited. He spoke the way people spoke when they had learned that the voice itself was a tool and had been refining it for years.

  “Hedral Stillson.” Zelig said.

  Something in Stillson’s expression shifted. A small thing. The recognition that the person across from him had done their own research, which had not been expected from a Base rank street performer from the Underlayers and was being quietly recalibrated.

  “May I come in.” Stillson said.

  It was phrased as a question. It was not a question.

  Zelig stepped back.

  Stillson came in. His two men stayed in the hallway. He looked at the room the way Zelig looked at rooms, briefly and completely, and then he looked at Marie.

  Marie looked back at him.

  To her credit she did not look away. She sat at the table with her hands in her lap and looked at Hedral Stillson with the expression she had when she had decided that showing fear was not useful and had set it aside for later.

  Stillson looked at her for a moment and then looked at Zelig.

  “Your sister.” He said.

  “Yes.” Zelig said.

  Stillson nodded once. He pulled out the chair across from Marie and sat down at the table without being invited to, which was not rudeness exactly, more like a man operating in a space he had already decided was his to operate in.

  Zelig remained standing.

  “The box.” Stillson said.

  “What box.” Zelig said.

  Stillson looked at him with the grey eyes.

  “You’re intelligent.” He said. “I know this because you found my name without anyone giving it to you and because you were in that building for less than ten minutes each visit and because you exited through the front on a night when I had someone watching the back.” He paused. “Intelligent people don’t waste time with denials that both parties know are denials. It’s inefficient.”

  Zelig said nothing.

  “The box.” Stillson said again. Same tone. Same patience.

  “What do you want with it.” Zelig said.

  “That’s a better question.” Stillson said. He settled slightly in the chair, the adjustment of someone who was prepared for a conversation rather than a transaction. “I want what’s inside it. The box itself is incidental.”

  “What’s inside it.”

  “Something that belongs to the person I work for.” Stillson said. “Something that was taken from them a long time ago through means I won’t detail and ended up moving through a number of hands before coming to rest in that building.” He looked at his own hands on the table, a brief look, and then back at Zelig. “I have been looking for it for three years.”

  “Who do you work for.” Zelig said.

  Stillson looked at him for a long moment.

  “You already know the answer to that question.” He said quietly. “Or you’re close enough to it that me saying it out loud would simply confirm what you’ve already deduced.”

  Zelig thought about Amalak on the horse. The columns of soldiers. The drums. The slow sweep of grey eyes across the crowd that was exactly like the sweep of grey eyes currently sitting at his table.

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  “Yes.” Zelig said. “I know.”

  The room was very quiet.

  Marie was looking at Zelig now, not at Stillson, reading his face for what he was not saying.

  Stillson reached inside his jacket and produced something small and held it on the table between them. A mark note, but not any denomination Zelig had seen. Black edged, the sigil in the center the same sigil that had been on every shield and breastplate in Amalak’s column.

  “I’m authorized to offer you a significant sum.” Stillson said. “For the box and its contents. Enough that you and your sister would not need to think about money for a considerable time.”

  Zelig looked at the note.

  “And if I decline.” He said.

  Stillson’s expression did not change. “Then we have a more complicated conversation.” He said it the way someone says something true that they would have preferred not to have to say. Without pleasure, without threat performed on top of the truth. Just the truth, plainly.

  Zelig thought about the box against his chest. The warmth of it. The blood finds the key. His father’s name on the side of a stone pyramid buried in a purple desert that no one else knew existed.

  He thought about what it meant that Amalak wanted what was inside it.

  He already knew what it meant.

  “I need a moment.” Zelig said.

  Stillson looked at him.

  “In the other room.” Zelig said. “One minute.”

  Stillson considered this. Then he nodded.

  Zelig went to the back room and closed the door and stood in the dark.

  He had one minute and he used all of it.

  The box in his hand, warm, the carved text invisible on the surface. Whatever was inside it was something Amalak needed and something his father had hidden and something he had been led to by a chain of events that he was increasingly certain had been arranged rather than coincidental.

  He could not give it to Stillson.

  He could not fight Stillson. Great rank, a class above him, two men in the hallway. The math was not in his favor on any axis.

  He needed to be somewhere Stillson could not follow.

  He looked at the box.

  He had brought Metarealm items into the realm before accidentally, things in his pockets, small things. He did not know what bringing this specific box in would do. He did not know what the realm would make of an object with his father’s name on it entering his father’s domain.

  He did not have time to know.

  He closed his eyes.

  He reached for the shift.

  He landed hard.

  The purple came up fast and wrong, not the smooth transition he was used to, a lurch, the realm receiving him with the specific quality of urgency that it had never had before. He landed on his feet in the sand and the sky above him was darker than usual, the purple deeper, and the air was not just heavy but pressing, pushing against him from all directions.

  The box in his hand was glowing.

  Fully, openly, the purple light of it flooding his hands and the sand around him, the carved text blazing, both lines visible simultaneously, his father’s name and the line beneath it and something else, a third line that had not been there before, appearing now in the light of the realm as if the realm itself was writing it.

  He read it.

  It said: now.

  And then the ritual began without him deciding to begin it.

  It was nothing like the Resonance Stone.

  That had been methodical, structured, a sequence he had read and followed deliberately. This was the opposite of that. This was the box opening something in him that the Resonance Stone had only started, something deeper, something that the Challenger rank had been building toward without him knowing it was building toward anything.

  His mana pool did not dissolve this time.

  It expanded.

  Outward, in all directions, the way a room expands when you remove the walls. Not painful. The opposite of painful. The specific sensation of something that had been constrained for a long time finding the space it had always been trying to reach and moving into it without resistance.

  He stood in the sand with the box blazing in his hands and felt the expansion continue past the point where he had expected it to stop and then past the point where he had recalculated it would stop and still it continued, the pool finding new edges and then finding that those edges were not the real edges either.

  The pyramid.

  He turned toward it without deciding to turn.

  It was rising.

  Not fast. But visibly, the sand around its base shifting and falling away as more of the stone emerged from beneath it, a meter, two meters, three, the carved columns extending downward as the structure revealed itself, and at the top the apex catching the light from the box in his hands and throwing it outward across the purple desert in long pale rays.

  He stood and watched it rise and felt the expansion of his pool slow and then settle, finally settle, into something new that was not Challenger and was not anything he had a name for yet from the texts he had read.

  Great rank.

  He knew it the way he had known Challenger rank after the Resonance Stone, not from outside but from inside, a fact in his body that had not been there an hour ago.

  The box stopped glowing.

  The warmth remained.

  The pyramid had risen another four meters above the sand and had stopped there, patient, more of it visible than ever before, the carved text running halfway down its visible surface now, and Zelig stood in the sand with his hands at his sides and breathed the heavy air and felt what Great rank felt like.

  It felt like more room.

  It felt like the walls he had not known were there were no longer there.

  He stood in the sand for a long moment.

  Then he thought about Hedral Stillson sitting at his table waiting for one minute and however many minutes had passed in the waking world while he had been in here.

  He let the realm push him out.

  He came back into the back room.

  His hands were shaking. Not from weakness. From the sustained effort of containing something larger than what he had been containing before. The pool was new and enormous and he did not yet know how to carry it the way he would eventually learn to carry it.

  He breathed.

  The shaking stopped.

  He looked at the box in his hand. Dark stone, no glow, the carved text invisible again on the surface.

  He put it inside his jacket.

  He opened the door and walked back into the main room.

  Stillson looked up at him.

  Something crossed the man’s face. Brief, controlled, but there. The specific expression of a cultivator who had just registered a significant change in the mana signature of the person walking back into the room.

  His eyes were different when Zelig sat down across from him.

  Not afraid. Stillson was not a man who did afraid easily or perhaps at all. But the recalibration was visible, the quiet adjustment of someone who had walked in expecting one conversation and was now having a different one.

  Zelig put his hands flat on the table.

  “No.” He said.

  Stillson looked at him.

  “That’s my answer.” Zelig said. “To the offer.”

  The room was quiet.

  Marie was watching both of them with the focused stillness of someone who had understood enough of what was happening to know that what happened in the next thirty seconds mattered.

  Stillson looked at Zelig for a long moment. The grey eyes doing their assessing thing, going over the new information, running the calculations that a man like Stillson ran when the variables changed without warning.

  Then he reached across the table and picked up the black edged mark note and put it back inside his jacket.

  “Great rank.” He said quietly. Not to Zelig. To himself, almost. The acknowledgment of a fact that had changed his picture.

  “Yes.” Zelig said.

  Stillson straightened his jacket. He looked at Marie once, briefly, with an expression that was not threat and was not quite not threat, the expression of a man filing information he did not expect to need but was keeping anyway.

  He stood.

  “This conversation is not finished.” He said to Zelig. Same unhurried voice. Same educated calm. The specific calm of someone who had learned that urgency was a resource to be spent carefully and this was not the moment to spend it.

  “I know.” Zelig said.

  Stillson looked at him one more time.

  Then he walked to the door and opened it and the two men in the hallway fell in around him and the footsteps went down the stairs and out of the building and faded into the Sunday morning sounds of Arbor Street.

  The room was very quiet.

  Marie let out a breath. Slow, controlled, the breath of someone who had been holding themselves very still and was now allowing themselves not to.

  She looked at Zelig.

  He looked back.

  “Are you going to tell me what that was.” She said.

  He thought about everything he had not told her. The Metarealm. Yegmet. The pyramid. The box warm against his chest. The third line of text that had said now and had meant it.

  He thought about what came next.

  Stillson would come back. Not today, not tomorrow. He would come back when he had recalculated the situation and decided on a new approach and Zelig would need to be further along than he was now when that happened.

  He looked at his sister.

  “Yes.” He said. “I’m going to tell you.”

  Marie looked at him with the expression she had when something she had been waiting a long time for was finally arriving.

  She folded her hands on the table.

  “Start from the beginning.” She said.

  "I'm going to fight Hedral, that's all I have to say."