Blind Hour

"Say that part again," Sarqon said. "The part about the clinic."

Yadri Kessim didn't look up from the strip of paper he was smoothing flat against the waystation's workbench, a torn corner of duty-roster that had clearly started its life somewhere it wasn't supposed to leave. "Third bell, every day he's on post. Qedem signs the gate over to his deputy — a woman named Duqat, if you care — and walks east into Tier Two. Nobody's followed him past the stair."

"You didn't follow him."

"I'm an old man who runs a waystation, Nashaq. I don't follow Compact Inspectors. I ask people who get paid worse than me to do it, and I believe what they tell me until it costs me something to keep believing it."

"And what does it cost me to believe you?"

"More than it used to. Inflation isn't only a problem for grain." Yadri set a second scrap beside the first — a different hand, cramped and official. "Clinic admission log. Tier Two, the one on Founder's Row that still takes walk-ins. A girl's name on it most days he's handed the gate off, same rough pattern. Nine years old. Lung trouble — the kind that gets worse when a district's filtration runs thin, which his does, same as yours."

Sarqon felt the shape of it settle before Yadri finished saying it. "His."

"Daughter. Or niece — the clerk who copied it for me wasn't sure, and I didn't pay her enough to be sure." Yadri finally looked up, and there was nothing cagey in it, which was worse than if there had been. "Man enforces a quota all day and comes home to a kid wheezing on half of it. You want to sit with that a minute, or you want me to tell you the part you actually came here for."

"Both."

"Fine." Yadri tapped the second scrap. "You lean on this, you've got him. Not bribed — owned. A man like Qedem doesn't bend for money, I told you that two days back. He'll bend for her. One quiet word that the girl's name is known somewhere it shouldn't be, and he looks the other way on whatever hour you need looked away from."

The offer sat on the table between them, plain as the two scraps of paper, and Sarqon didn't reach for it.

"No."

Yadri didn't argue. He folded the clinic scrap in half, unhurried, like he'd expected the answer and was only confirming the shape of it. "Second time today, if what's going round about the Hollow sickroom is true. Man could start a collection."

"I had a brother," Sarqon said, which was more than he meant to say, and left it there, because Yadri was the kind of man who filled in the rest of a sentence better than most people finished one.

"I know you did." Yadri didn't ask. That was the whole of his kindness, most days — knowing when not to ask. "All right. We do it the hard way, then. Hard way's slower, but it's yours, not his daughter's. Sit."

Sarqon sat. Yadri turned the duty-roster fragment around so it faced him, and set beside it a third scrap — this one in Yadri's own blocky hand, dates and hours copied from whoever he'd paid to remember them.

"Walk me through it," Sarqon said. "What do we actually have."

"Six days of gate logs, patchy. Qedem's hours when he's on the post, when he's off it, when he hands to Duqat. And the clinic admissions, which line up with three of the six handoffs we've got logged — not all six, because nobody was watching the other three closely enough to write it down."

Sarqon laid the two timelines side by side in his head the way he'd lay out a delivery route — not trusting the first pattern that looked clean, because the first clean pattern was usually the wrong one wearing a convincing coat. "The three that line up. Same length, every time?"

"Near enough. An hour, little under."

"And on those days, is Duqat running the gate alone, or does Qedem leave extra watch behind him?"

Yadri's mouth twitched, the closest he came to approval. "Now you're asking the right question instead of the obvious one. No. On clinic days the post runs thin — Duqat and whoever's rostered, nothing added. If he were worried about being short-handed while he's gone, he'd have pulled someone in to cover. He doesn't. Either he doesn't think it's a risk, or he doesn't want anyone noticing the pattern enough to ask where he goes." He sat back, satisfied with himself in the specific way of a man who has just proven he's still smarter than the people half his age paying him. "Took you three questions to get there. I'll have you doing my job by Draw's end, and then where does that leave an old man's retirement."

"So it's not him padding the watch." Sarqon turned that over, and the shape under it was the one that mattered. "Then the guard in the corridor this afternoon. The one who caught us. He wasn't pulled for a clinic day—"

"He wasn't." Yadri was already shaking his head before Sarqon finished, which meant he'd checked it before Sarqon ever sat down, which meant he'd known this was coming and made Sarqon walk the easy ground first so the hard ground would land harder. "I pulled the date. Not a clinic day. Not a day Qedem was short a man for any reason I can find written down. Whoever put that guard in the tanners' row corridor, they didn't do it out of Qedem's gate roster. There's no requisition for it. No order with his mark on it, not one I could buy a look at."

"Then who ordered it."

"That's the question I don't have an answer sized to fit in your pocket, Nashaq." Yadri said it flatly, and something in his face had gone careful in a way Sarqon hadn't seen on him before — not fear exactly, but the look of a man recalculating how much of a conversation he wanted to be having out loud. "Somebody above a district Inspector moved a man into a corridor that isn't on any map the Compact prints. That's not quota enforcement. That's somebody watching the Hollow route itself, and watching it closely enough to know it exists before you ever walked it."

Sarqon looked at the three scraps of paper — the clinic log, the duty roster, Yadri's own blocky hand stitching them together — and felt two different things settle into place at once: a plan, and a worry the plan didn't come close to covering. He had his hour now. Third bell, Duqat alone at the gate and Qedem walking east to sit with a sick kid he couldn't fully keep fed. That part was clean. The guard in the corridor wasn't.

"Keep asking," he said. "Quietly. I want a name before I need one."

Yadri folded the roster fragment into his coat, slow, like he was weighing how much of the next sentence he actually wanted to say out loud. "I'll ask. And I'll tell you now what twenty years of asking taught me, free of charge, seeing as you've been so stingy about letting me earn an honest wage off you lately." He looked up, and whatever caution had been in his face a moment ago had set into something flatter, harder to read as kindness. "Nobody spends a man that quietly on a corridor that doesn't officially exist unless they already know what's walking through it. Somebody up the ladder isn't watching the Hollow, Nashaq. Somebody up the ladder is watching you."