After Grant confirmed that he was indeed catching the first train back to Concord, General Amon readily approved Kilian’s request to stay longer in Isosceles. He expressed again that he felt that Kilian was on the verge of psychological burnout and pressed him to seek out Hector for advice.

Once Grant left, Kilian was left alone in a spartan room at a Dyadic boarding house in the guard complex. He remained steadfast on his mission and his instinct to avoid his so-called father.

And for a while that morning, he was truly alone. He’d left the room at one point and had wandered down to the shared sitting room. He walked circles between the plastic chairs, trying to figure out his next move. Everything that he’d been able to glean from his contacts, from the aether itself, cast a very jaundiced eye at their supposed representative on the King’s council, the honorable Mr. Lane.

He rued that it was so. He was distressed that so much of his future depended on politics and that he seemed entirely ill-equipped to engage. His life may be happening up in Concord but everything that happened there was influenced by what happened in Isosceles, and in these streets he was a stranger, he was passed over. It didn’t matter how similar his face was to the most powerful general in the Kingdom.

Not only did he seemingly gain no advantage from being Hector Malloy’s son, it seemed to hold him at a disadvantage — as if the powers that be were keeping him in Concord, out of his father’s way.

After some time ruminating, he rose from a seat in the empty sitting room and decided to rummage around the kitchen. He felt a headache coming on as he considered his next steps and supposed that any Dyadic establishment would have a first aid kit and headache salts available.

He put the kettle on to boil and began searching the cabinets for medicine, for some sort of suitable food, for liquor, for anything to draw him out of his current state. He had to gain some sort of perspective — to come at the problem a different way. Maybe there was something in the code he could exploit for his own gain. If they didn’t want to hear his warning, perhaps he’d find something else to make them listen.

He found the first aid kit in the cupboard above the range and inside it was a wealth of different concoctions — headache salts, diuretics, vitamins, electrolytes. He laid a packet out on the counter and tried to relax into his thoughts, into his memory of the code.

The code itself was much the same as any machine code discovered in the wilds, a seemingly indecipherable dance of silence and noise. It could be put into any voice, any key, and remain the same. The meaning was in the syncopation, encoded deep into the rhythm and subrhythms. It pulsed against his synapses and filled him with images, with words, with a metallic taste like blood but heavier, thicker, he could feel it as a globule on his tongue and then it proliferated, it seemed to pour down his throat. He drew back.

The kettle whistled and Kilian blinked, momentarily confused by the intensity of his fear. He reached over and switched off the burner. He tried to empty his mind as he pulled the vessel to fill his mug. His stomach continued to quiver with the code even as he tried to forget it.

He felt his throat tighten against the effort. He had to find a way to think of nothing.

“No thing, no thing, nothing,” He muttered to himself, tearing open a packet and dumping it into the mug. He watched the grains dissolve and tried to imagine the heaviness that had come over him going along with it, the beats of the code disintegrating, diluted by the steaming water.

He shook his head. He’d not considered that whenever he’d come back to the code, he’d been with Bramlet. To the code-reader it was nothing but that — a code, an indeciperable one — until Kilian came in. He’d always taken the signal, parsed down by Grant and had wound it through his mind in its truncated version.

The full body of the code was almost too much for him to bear — too dense in information. Every microsecond of the signal was as dense as the whole signal itself. Even considering the smallest part of it on its own threatened to overheat him, wreck his mind.

Not that he’d ever admit that to anyone else.

He chugged down the mug of hot medicine, diverting his mental energy to slowing the heated atoms of the drink, cooling it before it hit his tongue.

As he counted his breaths, something like a wave of calm rushed over him. The door to the boarding house opened and slammed shut. Heavy footfalls sounded in the entry hall as Kilian swallowed the last mouthful.

The energy was vaguely familiar. There was a maturity to it, an adeptness that reminded him of the even-handed General Amon in the aether. The presence was unmistakably that of a Mystic and as far as he knew there would only be a handful of those in town.

He heard the recording chime activate on the com and a deep voice speak into it. “Bancroft, this is General Malloy. I’m sorry to have missed you but I have some other business to attend to this afternoon. You are welcome to file a report on the case you attended this morning. However, Ms. Greenblade’s case has already been settled. Take the rest of the day off and tomorrow you’ll return to guard duty at the train station in the northern district. I daresay we’ve had enough intake drama to last us some time and we need to get back to the very serious business of keeping the city safe.” The final chime sounded, indicating that he’d finished the recording, had taken his finger off the button. A moment later, the door opened and shut again and Kilian felt his energy withdraw.

Hector’s final words stuck with him — “the very serious business of keeping the city safe” — and yet Kilian steeled against the urge to run after him. No, there's a chain of command at play and I am a man of honor. It was something like that anyway.

And if Councilman Charles Lane had no honor, perhaps it was Kilian’s responsibility to teach him.