The moneylenders' office occupied the ground floor of a former dye works. As a child, I had passed it every day and always quickened my pace. Behind its murky windows sat people who knew how much every family on the street owed.
Now the guard saw Styx and opened the door himself.
The owner of the office was waiting in his study. A gaunt old man with silver teeth had my contract on the desk and pretended not to hear the sirens outside.
"Rex Wang. You've become famous."
"Settle the debt."
I placed the dark core of a shadow leopard and a plate from the titanic lizard in front of him. Even at the lowest valuation, they were enough.
The old man did not touch the spoils.
"Three million is only the service fee."
He turned the contract around. Beneath the ordinary lines was a second layer of the seal, visible only after the heir awakened. My blood in the dead end had activated more than the egg.
"The property of the deceased Mr and Mrs Wang shall be held until their heir comes of age," Lily read. "Expenses shall be reimbursed in money or with the first awakened beast of suitable value."
Beneath the text were the Guild's seal and the Li family mark.
The debt had never been meant to be repaid. While the egg was believed dead, the moneylenders could torment me with interest. If a strong beast awakened, the contract transferred it to the creditor.
"Who drew this up?" Cole asked.
The old man looked at the red seal of my wanted notice in the window.
"I'm only the custodian. The contract was brought here eighteen years ago with a baby and a grey egg."
"Who brought them?"
He opened his mouth.
A window shattered outside.
A glass capsule flew into the room, and Cole managed to cover it with a metal shield before it exploded. Incendiary gel spread across the floor.
Red flames crawled up the walls.
Men in sealed masks burst through the main entrance, accompanied by three fire hounds. Their collars bore the mark of a Li family contractor.
They did not need to detain me. They had come to burn the archive and everyone who could read the contract.
"Lily, the documents! Cole, get the people out!"
I broke through the window into the neighbouring workshop. Dyers worked beyond the wall, their families lived there, and the children of the night shift slept there. The fire was already climbing through the old wooden floors.
The swarm captains received three commands: extinguish the fuses, blind the hounds, find the people in the smoke.
The soldiers could not put out the flames, but they clogged the nozzles of the new capsules with their bodies. Explosive pincers broke the locks on the windows. Styx passed through the wall and used weak discharges to mark where people were still alive beneath the smoke.
One of the hounds lunged at the old man. I caught it with a curtain chain and dragged it aside, and the swarm struck inside its jaws. The beast wheezed and fell.
Evolution points flashed on the panel.
I did not look at the number.
Kane's men gathered up crates of contracts and headed for the rear exit. I could have caught them. Only one corridor lay between us.
A child screamed upstairs.
I stopped.
The floor beneath my feet was already burning. On the first floor, a girl of about ten pressed herself against a window, but the bars trapped her inside. Her mother was trying to reach her by the stairs and choking in the smoke.
"Styx, upstairs."
The archive crates vanished through the door.
Styx passed through the lock, discharged and knocked out the mechanism. The soldiers stretched themselves into a living dark ribbon along the window. It could not bear a person's weight, but it showed Cole a safe route along the ledge.
The sergeant climbed up, wrenched off the bars with a lever and passed the girl to her mother.
Meanwhile, Lily pulled several charred pages and the original of my contract from the study. The owner of the office crawled after her, covering his face with his sleeve.
We got the people out through the dye yard before the roof collapsed.
The attackers escaped with most of the archive. I lost the chance to learn at once the name of the person who had brought me to the office. But the same city Guild vault number appeared on both pages Lily had saved.
The old man sat on the wet paving stones and watched his building burn.
"Your parents never borrowed money from us," he said. "The Li family paid us to keep the debt open. Brutus was meant to watch for the egg awakening."
The neighbours heard him.
Kane wanted the slums to see me as a murderer and the cause of the fire. Instead, the people saw the Li mark on the hounds' collars and the swarm leading children out of the smoke.
The girl rescued from the upper floor took a copper whistle from around her neck and held it out to me.
"So you can call us if there's another fire."
I did not know how to answer things like that. I took the whistle and put it in my pocket beside the core.
Styx settled on my shoulder. Other people's coughs, heat and relief came through the bond. The swarm was touching dozens of people, but for the first time it was not there to feed.
On the city screen above the street, Kane declared the fire evidence of an attack by the Demon Cult.
No one in the yard believed him.
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