The maintenance hatch hit the ground behind them with a sound like a filing cabinet falling down a staircase.
Cael didn't look back.
He walked three paces into the open air of the outer ring, stopped, and tilted his head back. The sky above the Outer Ring was the particular shade of amber-grey it always was at this hour, filtered through the boundary marker haze and the chronic low-grade particulate of a district that was always slightly on fire somewhere. He'd never liked it.
Right now, it was the best thing he'd seen all day.
Paz came out behind him and pulled the hatch shut with more control than the situation strictly required, which was the kind of detail he was starting to recognise as characteristic. She did things properly even when no one was watching, and there was no consequence for doing them badly.
He filed it away.
She let out a breath. Long. Controlled. The kind that had been waiting some time.
"We made it," she said.
"We made it."
A pause.
"That was a good run," she said.
"That was a terrible run that ended well."
"Those are the best kind."
He almost agreed. He didn't, because agreeing with her too readily was a habit he was consciously trying not to develop after four hours of being wrong about things she turned out to be right about.
The extraction case was in his hand. The engine hummed through the handle, low and layered, the same unclassifiable frequency it had been producing since he'd first touched it in the trailer. It hadn't changed character since they'd left the hollow. He wasn't sure if that was reassuring or not.
Standard W-engines stop cycling when they leave hollow space. The field collapses. The charge stabilises into a holding state.
This one hadn't done that.
He looked at the case. Then at the boundary markers, blinking their patient amber at the cordon line. Then, in the case again.
"HMB," Paz said.
"What about them?"
"They knew the vehicle was there. They knew the engine was there. They wanted the engine."
"Well, we have it now."
"Yeah, but something feels off about this..."
The wind moved through the cordon line. Somewhere in the district, a generator was running its afternoon cycle. Ordinary sounds. The outer ring's unaware background noise, completely indifferent to the fact that two people were standing on its boundary wall trying to work out what they'd just carried out of it.
"And the modifications to the engine," Paz said. "That's not standard hollow exposure. Something was done to it deliberately before the courier ever brought it into that sector. The containment units in the trailer. The monitoring equipment. Someone was running tests on an S-rank W-engine in a lorry parked inside a hollow, which means either they needed the hollow's Ethereal field for the process or they needed somewhere the HMB's sensors couldn't reach. Or both."
"Paz."
"And the client. The Fixer's client. The client came to the Fixer instead, which is the outer ring's way of saying you want something done quietly by someone who won't ask the right questions—"
"Paz."
"—and she sent us both in separately, which means she knew one person wasn't enough and she couldn't just ask two people to work together because one of them would have declined when they heard the other was involved, which means she's been managing us the same way someone manages a resource they can't afford to lose—"
"Paz!"
She stopped.
"We have the commission," he said. "We have the engine. We've agreed on the split. That is what this was. We're done. "
"We're not done. We don't know what we carried out."
"We know it's an S-rank W-engine that someone wants badly enough to send the HMB into a third-sector hollow. That's all we need to know."
"That's not—"
"Let it go. We got a prize to split. Stand down, soldier."
The words landed with the flat authority of someone who had said them to themselves enough times that saying them to someone else was just the same instruction with a different audience.
Cael looked at the case in his hand.
He looked at her.
He reached up and unclipped the respirator.
The outer ring air hit him, and he held the respirator at his side and breathed it in without filtering it because sometimes the point was just to breathe air that wasn't recycled. The dry warmth of the outer ring air in a district without enough shade
Then he pulled the goggles up to his forehead.
His hair had not benefited from several hours inside a hollow. It had been unkempt before the hollow, which was its natural state, and the hollow had added its own commentary: the silver-white of it was slightly damp at the roots, the orange-dyed tips pushed roughly in whatever direction the respirator had arranged them, the whole thing falling loosely into his face and around his ears in the way it always did when he stopped actively ignoring it. He pushed a section of it back from his eyes. It stayed for approximately three seconds and then returned to its previous position.
He left it.
"Never thought I'd be seeing your face," Paz said.
"What? Does this ugly face scar you?"
"No, you're younger than expected."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
She made the sound he was starting to associate with something between exasperation and amusement. He looked at her, which was when he noticed she was also taking off her own mask.
He looked away, on reflex. Then looked back because the reflex had been too obvious, and he wasn't going to compound it by being theatrical about it.
She had the mask off and was running a thumb across the inside seal with the habitual gesture of someone checking for moisture damage, not paying attention to him, and for a moment before either of them acknowledged the other looking, he had the unguarded second that a person gets when they're watching someone who doesn't know they're being watched.
White hair, long, falling straight to her upper back in the kind of uncomplicated way that suggested it grew like that and she'd simply let it. Her complexion was pale in the way that outdoor work in a haze district tended not to leave things, almost like she hadn't spent enough time in direct sun, or the sun disagreed with her, or she was simply built that way.
Her ears, which were not quite human ears but wolf ears, white-furred and set just slightly off the expected position, turned once toward the sound of a generator in the middle distance before settling. Her face had the particular quality of things that were put together well without being aware of it: the structure of it was clean, the expression on it was completely undefended because she thought no one was paying attention.
'She a damn model… Wait? What am I thinking?'
Her eyes, when she glanced up and found him looking, were a deep gold that the afternoon light caught and made briefly, uncomfortably direct. Not to mention, with all of that look matches the rest of her body, especially the… soft parts.
Cael she shook off the intrusive thoughts but still looked at the middle distance with the practised blankness of someone who had not just been caught doing anything.
He blushed.
She's young. Younger than she moves. The hollow work adds five years to the way a person carries themselves, and she still reads as not young, but not older than him. Maybe the same age. Maybe slightly less.
He was not going to think about the rest of it.
He was especially not going to think about the rest of it, standing on a boundary wall ten minutes after she'd had a sword at his throat.
He cleared his throat. Looked back at the cordon line.
"We should move," he said, with the specific flatness of someone returning to a professional register by force of will.
"Yes," Paz agreed.