Jett took another long bath after her encounter with Bronco, paranoia gnawing at her from the moment he walked away. He was a watchguard. The enforcers wanted her. She wouldn't have been shocked if he'd turned her over as soon as he made it back home.

But hours passed, no wolfkin came hammering down her door, no watchguards arrived to drag her away, and life outside the warrenary trundled along as normal. For the moment, it seemed she'd found someone she could trust.

With the sun beginning to set, she settled into her chair once more, clad in a loose-fitting body wrap of dark green, cinched at the waist with a copper-coloured rope above her asymmetric black-red kilt. Her rig rumbled to life, the green text filling her with a sense of confidence and familiarity. Here, in the world underpinning a world, was where she truly thrived.

Images of her family flashed in the front of her mind, and a kernel of defiant anger smouldered in her gut. The scene that had so nearly broken her was now the one thing driving her onward. She knew in her marrow that she would do whatever it took to stay alive and get the justice Tyr and the others deserved. Jett had never killed anyone before, but she felt more than capable of doing so right now.

So no more hiding.

She needed to get to the bottom of whatever swamp she'd plunged into, and fast. While she'd managed to keep her location under wraps, she now knew for certain the wolfkin search had expanded beyond Palharr District. They had to know she was moving around the city, and she was under no illusions. The net would be tightening on her soon.

So it was time to get close to Fisker, the anomalously high-ranked foxkin designate.

With the ID print cloner, she needed to forge a fresh identity, one that would get her access to the confines of the Conclave and right into the jaws of wolfkin power. She was willing to take that risk. Joining the dots, Fisker had to be involved in whatever had ended up getting his felkin colleague killed. Jett simply didn't believe in coincidences that big.

She trawled around in the Conclave's employment database, scrolling through lists and lists of admin, tech, and support staff who kept the political machine running smoothly. Turnover in such a place would run high, so all she needed was to find an opening for a menial enough position and slot herself in with a fake name.

Easy.

A dizzying number of names rolled down her screen in emerald green, along with department quotas, shortfalls, vacancies, and every other analytic vector that would supposedly keep the seat of government running correctly. She rattled through a series of lists, looking for the staffers in Fisker's department—Housing and Resettlement. It didn't take long for her to find vacancies and slot herself into the system with a few well-placed lines of code.

In a matter of minutes, a brand-new employee named Alayo had found herself a job as a junior admin worker in the body of Fisker's team. Now all they needed was a capture for the records.

Jett slid the ID cloner across the table towards her and thumbed the fat square activation switch on the side. The small screen in the centre of the blocky rectangular machine blinked into life, along with the small camera built above it. A pinprick of blue shone just above the lens, and she pointed it at her forehead, standing up and finding herself a suitably bland section of wall to stand in front of to take the shot.

The machine fizzed when she clicked the capture button, and an image of her appeared on the small screen, pixelated in black and white but still definitely her. Satisfied, she returned to the desk, punching in the necessary specifications and personal information that a valid identity lanyard required.

A few seconds later, the scent of hot plastic filled her nostrils as the cloner printed the ID, depositing a shining, laminated card on the desk. Alayo officially existed as far as the Conclave database knew. Jett picked the ID up, examining it from all angles for any obvious defects before nodding to herself.

It was time to go to work.

***

Wildhearth's centre—the Silk—reminded her of a thick clump of trees, its buildings packed together and climbing far higher than anything in her home. Where dwellings in the outer spirals radiated warm oranges, reds, and browns from their wood and ceramic walls, these behemoths spilled light from vast glass panes, skeletons of metal winding skyward. Gleaming varnished panels armoured their walls, reinforced with inlays of steel and decorated with elaborately carved murals, many of them connected by great, swooping bridges at dizzying heights.

Jett stepped off the tram carrier into a world that was a million sights, scents, and sounds away from her own. Even the air felt different, infused with a too-clean, antiseptic tang that made her snout twitch uncomfortably. A surge of wildly dressed kin flooded down the platform around her and onto the crisply paved streets. Unlike the tightly packed hard mud of the spirals, the ground beneath her paws was sheathed in warm slabs of clay, fired in massive kilns to form a surface resistant to all the weathers of the world.

It felt too solid under paw, with not even the slight sponginess of the streets she used to travel. Jett forced down her discomfort and joined the flow, doing her best to look like she belonged. At a clothing bazaar not far from the centre, she'd switched her dress for attire more befitting of a government administrator.

She had appropriated a sleeveless robe of aquamarine silk that hung open, revealing a black body wrap with a high collar that cupped her neck. Jett found herself constantly twitching at the unfamiliar sensation, feeling like she couldn't turn her head properly. The collars were, as far as she was concerned, an eccentricity of the Silk that you seldom saw in any other part of the city. Beneath the formal body wrap, she walked awkwardly in the confines of a crisp grey kilt, this one more tightly fitted than those she was used to, right down to the knees and cut with a slit that allowed her tail to swish free. A jangle of bracelets hung from her wrists in a mix of pearl, onyx, and quartz, adding a flash of decadence to her outfit.

She bore little resemblance to the happy-go-lucky hacker who dragged herself from the canal just a few days ago.

Following the route she'd memorised, Jett kept her head held high and her steps measured as she walked, a totally vestigial folder tucked in the crook of her elbow and a single strapped bag slung diagonally across her back where it bumped lightly above her tail. The feeling of awkwardness stayed with her as she forced herself to move as if this was the most natural thing in the world, consoling herself with the reassuring solidness of the longclaw strapped to her thigh.

Broad streets bisected the thick clumps of buildings, allowing generous space for walkers and those utilising the series of smaller tram carriers that crossed from one side of the Silk to the other in a star-like arrangement. Unused to this fresh obstacle, Jett mirrored the locals when picking her moments to cross, working her way street by street towards the centre and the Conclave.

Buildings seemed to cluster to even more impossible heights as she followed the citizens of the Silk through the streets, but suddenly, the urban mass simply fell away. With startling abruptness, the roads fed into a massive circular clearing several hundred feet across, in the centre of which towered the Conclave of Accord.

Jett stopped, head rocking back as she took in the scale of the thing. A baroque spire of interlocked towers, the seat of Wildhearth's government loomed like some ancient, primitive temple. The lower levels were the oldest parts of the structure—great slabs of fire-hardened darkwood rumoured to have been laid down at the founding of the Great Peace—but the Conclave's very bones were infused with Wildhearth's history. The middle levels made use of the stronger, cheaper ceramics, treated and dyed to blend with the darkwood and etched with vast, swirling murals. Secondary and tertiary towers glinted with the modernity and eye-watering expense of metal and stone; walls festooned with walkways arrogantly speared across the gulfs of empty space to connect with the central tower.

Kin of all denominations flowed in and out, and the surrounding clearing was lined with symmetrical rows of soaring pine trees. Tiny canals followed the lines of trees, water flowing like lifeblood away from the building and into the city.

Shaking off the apprehension, Jett forced herself back into motion, making a beeline for the nearest entrance. Gleaming modern doors of smoky glass were built into the ancient darkwood walls, incongruous to her eye but something the regular comers didn't even notice anymore.

Squaring her shoulders, she put on as breezy a walk as she could manage as she approached the door, tucking into a queue that filed through a series of checkpoints with inbuilt sensorclaws—hemispherical scanners that would read the identity cards of the entrants. A jolt of fear rattled through her bones at the sight of a vulkin guard in the crimson livery of Conclave security standing off to one side, keeping an eye on proceedings.

You belong here, she told herself. Just scan your card and keep walking.

Not sparing the guard another glance, she waited for her turn, then slid her ID card through the sensorclaw. It hummed for a second, then pulsed blue. Her chest heaved with a suppressed sigh of relief, and Jett walked on.

Her mind now flickered back to the floor plans she'd memorised. She couldn't exactly stop and ask for directions—not if she wanted to look like she belonged. Taking a moment to gather herself, she padded off in the direction of the elevators. Settlement and Residential Affairs Department—Level 21, Oak Quarter. Jett held that place in the front of her mind as she slipped into the spacious rectangular lift along with a dozen other crisply attired kin. A female quillkin alongside her, clad in a form-fitting black robe and grey-collared body wrap, flicked her a buck-toothed smile, one hand fidgeting behind her back with the plush mass of her tail. Jett returned the gesture but quickly turned her eyes back to the front. An ID badge was one thing; holding a conversation with these people was quite another.

At last, the elevator opened at level twenty-one, and Jett gratefully made her escape from the rising tide of small talk that threatened to engulf her. The upper halls of the main structure ran in huge sweeping arcs, branching off into room after room, with broad doorways constantly swinging open and shut with movement. The Oak Quarter that housed the Settlement and Residential Affairs workforce, however, was in one of the subsidiary spires, bolted onto the outside of the main building like an architectural afterthought.

Accordingly, a few minutes later, Jett found herself holding her breath as she crossed one of the gangways suspended high above the ground, windows on either side allowing light to spill in over the flow of administrative workers that shuttled back and forth. Most of them didn't seem to register how high up they really were—another thing one got used to working here, she supposed.

Bottling up her sense of vertigo, she kept her head down and powered her way to the end of the hall into the adjoining spire. Above the entrance, a bold printed sign told her she was in the right place.

The Residential Affairs department was a tightly packed arrangement of cubicles radiating out from a central hub where the senior staff worked. Dozens of black-shelled, square-bodied computer rigs squatted on broad metal desks arranged in concentric rings, with crisply dressed workers rattling away at their tasks, cogs in Wildhearth's machinery. The air was thick with the smell of muskbrew and the electric tang of the computer processors at work, a faint haze of steam lingering above the workers.

Jett kept her face neutral as she walked into the hive of activity, quickly finding an empty desk and settling in, opening her folder beside her to maintain the illusion that she actually belonged there. She booted up the rig and punched in her forged password.

Just like that, she was into the department's system, and she had to stifle a laugh at how easy this stage of the process was. Work orders, census data, project management, building progress reports—this little corner of the Conclave was dedicated to tracking and utilising the population of the city to its fullest.

Now she just needed to track down Fisker and see just what he'd gotten his grubby paws into. With an effort, she kept her eyes to the front, doing her utmost to ignore the figures passing in the corners of her vision as other workers ebbed in and out of the room. First, she started small, with things easily and legally accessible from this terminal.

The department's day-to-day business cut at her with claws of boredom, and it took a concerted effort for her to truly focus as she scrolled through log after log detailing housing projects, refurbishment work orders, repairs, district censuses and polling, and resettlement orders. Not until she waded through a score of the last list did she find some sense of correlation.

Fisker's name had been stamped to several of the resettlement orders in districts of the city she knew had large foxkin populations. Her brow furrowed, and she dug a little deeper. Resettlement orders weren't out of the norm in Wildhearth. Industrial accidents, gang warfare, localised economic collapse, and numerous other incidents ensured that the outer districts of the city remained in a slow but constant state of flux. Dwindling populations were uprooted, and the districts they left behind were repurposed, sometimes levelled and rebuilt from the ground up. It had even happened to her once, but this many so close together struck her as decidedly odd. Looking at the specifics, she found whole communities—thriving communities—had been expunged.

"Why, why, why?" she muttered under her breath, leaning closer to the screen. There didn't seem to be any particular pattern to the movements, but they followed one after the other, each with Fisker's name authorising them.

A thought occurred to her, and she searched for another name among the authorisations.

Sure enough, next to six other resettlement orders, she discovered the name of the ill-fated felkin, Zanzihar. Jett folded her arms and leaned back, frowning at the display. Two individuals were promoted into unusual positions of authority within the wolfkin-dominated government, and both authorised an unprecedented rise in forced relocations.

But what in the Great Peace did that add up to?

Time to speak to someone who might have some real answers. Abandoning the legal part of the rig's access, Jett set to work hacking a backdoor access port into the personal files of the department head. Where exactly he was remained a mystery to her—there didn't seem to be any kind of closed-off office.

She soon discovered that the department heads had their own suite of offices several levels higher up. Sighing, she flicked a stray loop of headfur out of her eyes and kept at it. The data flowed both ways from Fisker's computer somewhere in the upper reaches, ensuring he could keep tabs on what his minions were doing. She used that same access to sidle her way into his system and hunt out an itinerary.

"Okay, Mr. Fisker," she murmured. "Where does today take you, eh?"

The electronic diary opened for her with surprising ease, and just like that, she found herself looking at his movements for the rest of the week. It was almost too easy. The apprehension that had been gnawing at her since she set foot in the building began to fade away as she ran her eyes down his plans. A whole host of meetings, back-to-back, hour-on-hour, filled up his time in departments all over the Conclave, including a full cabinet session at noontwo. His last appointment took him all the way to darkone, several hours from now. Then he would be free.

And she would be free to follow.

***

Jett waited out the day, blending her way around the Conclave and shadowing Fisker's every move. Meetings came and went, some with small groups of maybe half a dozen workers, others made up of large committees chaired by the intimidating wolfkin. She could see the unease in her quarry as he left those larger gatherings, his spindly frame hunched and tense, constantly fidgeting with his scrappy mass of dark headfur.

He cut a rather slipshod figure as he scampered from room to room, the white collar of his body wrap a little skewed, a too-big tan greatcoat swishing around him with every motion. On more than one occasion, she caught him venting his obvious stress on underlings from the other kin—deerkin, quillkin, otterkin; even other foxkin found themselves on the receiving end of his ire.

Only after his final meeting, with darkness descending on the city, did he spare the Resettlement Department a passing visit, sweeping through it like an impotent storm to bark more orders, demanding a handful of supposedly urgent reports which swiftly disappeared into a tattered holdall that stayed always clamped in one bony paw. After collecting what he needed, he was off again, striding straight past her as she feigned interest in a census chart.

Then she fell back into step behind him, following him straight into the elevator along with a few other workers. She caught his eye as the machine started to descend, and smiled. His face barely flickered with acknowledgement before his gaze turned to the front.

By the time they reached the building's cavernous foyer, rain had started to batter down, fat droplets exploding off the pine trees and hardened clay of the plaza. She deliberately allowed Fisker to pull away from her as they headed for the doors, his furious pace letting him open the gap with ease. He burst out into the city, heedless of the rain that almost instantly drenched him. Jett found herself wondering what had ignited such a sudden sense of purpose in him after what appeared to have been a very taxing day.

She found out soon enough.

As she exited the building, it took a moment for her to locate Fisker's diminutive frame in the downpour, but when she spotted him, she realised he wasn't alone. A tall, lithe-limbed figure stood in the shade of one of the towering pines, talking animatedly with him. A crack of lightning revealed a female wolfkin for a fraction of a second, and in that instant, Jett froze.

She knew that wolfkin all too well. It was the female leader of the pack that had killed Tyr.

Terror violently surged in her chest, and Jett recoiled back into the shadow of the Conclave, holding her breath on instinct as the pair spoke. Too far away to hear, all she could do was intuit from body language what they might have been saying. By that metric, Fisker was having a very bad day as he spread his paws pleadingly, shaking his head in a despondent manner. Whatever explanation he was offering, the wolfkin wasn't buying it, and she made a furious gesture out towards the city. Jett's ears pricked at the sound of a sharp snarl cutting through the rain.

Her eyes widened when the wolfkin suddenly grabbed Fisker and spun him around, slamming him into the tree trunk. In doing so, she placed herself in the rain, and Jett had no doubt that this was the same enforcer that had tried to kill her—the same sleek armour and massive swoop of black headfur coupled with a sinewy muscled frame that loomed over Fisker. Jett knew the wolfkin could kill him in the blink of an eye if she so chose.

It seemed that tonight was not Fisker's night to die, however. The wolfkin released her hold and stalked away, leaving a trembling Fisker leaning against the pine tree. He waited there for a moment before gathering his greatcoat around him and shuffling off in the opposite direction, head bowed against the elements.

Jett exhaled a shuddering sigh of relief as the enforcer disappeared into the night. Taking a moment to calm her thundering heart, she squared her shoulders, swept up the hood of her flimsy robe, and stepped out into the pounding rain, her eyes fixed on the dim, receding form of Fisker.