Chapter 10: The Index, Fragmented

The message came through Drift's channel, which meant it was not a message in any form SEREN would recognize as one.

It was a chalk mark on the second support pillar of the Verek Street transit underpass — a short horizontal scratch at shoulder height, the kind that could have been made by a thousand different things dragging against concrete over thirty years of use. But this pillar had been clean yesterday. I knew because I had looked, on the way back from Teel's empty apartment, out of habit and the particular species of professional paranoia that Drift had spent two years cultivating in me without ever naming what he was doing.

One horizontal scratch. We had agreed on the codes fourteen months ago, in the eastern sump corridor, with a water rat investigating my boot while Drift explained the system with the patient economy of someone who had invented it for his own use first and was now generously reducing himself to a version simple enough for registered personnel.