The room where Bone Notary conducted his business was in the lower level of a building in the Middle Ring transition zone — a building that appeared, from the street, to be a storage facility for a textile wholesale operation, which it also was. The wholesale operation occupied the upper two floors and conducted legitimate commerce. The lower level, accessible through a service entrance that was not on the building's official plans, conducted a different kind of business.

Cassian had been to this room six times since the original transaction. Each time, the room looked the same: stone walls, a single lamp, a table with two chairs, and Bone Notary in one of the chairs, looking as though he had been sitting there for exactly the right amount of time before Cassian arrived.

Bone Notary was a small man, precise in his movements, with the specific quality of attention that came from years of professional focus on details. He wore grey, always grey, the same shade as the stone walls — whether this was a deliberate choice or a long-developed habit was unclear and Cassian had decided it did not matter. What mattered was what the man knew, which was a great deal, and what he wanted, which was information and the specific kinds of leverage that information provided.

Cassian sat across from him and put his wrist on the table.

The examination took a few minutes. Bone Notary used a small instrument — something between a lens and a mirror, housed in a brass frame — to examine the mark's surface and subsurface activity. He made observations in a small book. He did not share these observations.

“The anchoring is stable,” he said, returning the instrument to its case. “The instability you experienced at the Boundary gate was environmental. The gate mechanism was running a deep verification cycle — it happens at intervals as part of maintenance. A Graftmark in proximity to a deep verification reads as anomalous. The gate tried to examine it more closely than usual. The mark resisted.”

“It hurt,” Cassian said.

“Yes,” Bone Notary agreed. “Resistance is not a comfortable process.”

Cassian looked at his wrist. The mark appeared the same as always — the rounded form, the deliberate linework, the slight wrongness that he had learned to stop noticing in his daily life and that he noticed now with the fresh attention of the examination room.

“I heard something,” he said. “At the last assembly. When the Cantor was working.”

Bone Notary was writing something in his small book. He did not look up. “The Cantor works with resonance. Names carry resonance. Sometimes resonance crosses.”

“I heard a specific sound,” Cassian said. “A specific syllable. Not a full name. The beginning of one.”

Bone Notary continued writing.

“Is the anchoring name part of what I hear when the mark is active?” Cassian said. “Is that a function of the mark or is it something else?”

Bone Notary closed the book and looked at him. His expression was the same as it always was — attentive, unrevealing, the expression of someone who had decided long ago that expressions were information and had chosen to manage his information carefully.

“What do you want the answer to that question to be?” he said.

“I want the true answer.”

“You want the answer that lets you continue doing what you've been doing,” Bone Notary said. “Those are sometimes the same thing and sometimes not.” He paused. “The anchoring name is not typically audible to the carrier. If you are hearing something, it is more likely the result of your own attention than of the mark's function. The mark responds to what you bring to it. If you bring the question, it finds the resonance.”

Cassian considered this. It was an answer that was technically responsive to his question and that told him nothing useful, which was a characteristic of Bone Notary's answers that he had learned to expect.

He thought about the sound he had heard. The first syllable of a name he had known for most of his life.

“I want to ask you something directly,” he said.

“You can ask.”

“The name the mark is anchored to. What is it?”

Bone Notary looked at him for a long moment. Then he said: “You know that Graftmarks require an anchor — a name with sufficient weight to sustain the binding. You knew this when you agreed to the transaction. The specific name used is part of the binding's architecture. It is not typically disclosed to the carrier because carriers who know the anchor name have a tendency to develop complicated relationships with that information.”

“Tell me.”

“No,” Bone Notary said. Simply, without elaboration.

Cassian looked at his hands on the table.

He had been sitting outside a building in Middle Ring earlier that afternoon, watching Seren and Alden come out through a service entrance together. He had watched them walk side by side for half a block before he had made himself look away. He had been looking away from that particular sight for weeks now, and the looking-away was becoming harder rather than easier, which he did not like to think about.

He had come to Bone Notary's room directly from that afternoon, because he needed to be somewhere that was about something other than the specific thing that afternoon had been about.

“The mark is stable,” Bone Notary said, returning to business. “Your access continues as before. The next maintenance contact will be in two cycles.” He paused. “I should tell you that the matter we discussed previously — the anomalous mark activity in the Lower Rings — has attracted attention at a level above the usual channels. If you have additional information relevant to that matter, now is the appropriate time to share it.”

Cassian looked up.

“What kind of attention?” he asked.

“The kind that moves things forward,” Bone Notary said. “The kind that prefers to move them with complete information.”

Cassian thought about this. He thought about Alden, who had a mark on his shoulder that opened doors it shouldn't be able to open, and about Seren, who had been building a picture of everything connected to that mark for weeks, and about the way they had been walking together that afternoon with the ease of people who had learned each other's rhythms.

He thought about what he knew and what it was worth and who he would be telling it to.

“I'll have more information in a few days,” he said.

Bone Notary made a note.

Cassian left the way he had come.