Up close, the house was worse, or better, depending on how he wanted to think about it. Two full storeys of pale stone, ivy climbing one corner of the facade in a way that looked deliberate rather than neglected, windows tall enough that he could see clean through several of the ground-floor rooms from the path. The whole place could have swallowed the block he'd slept rough against for three years and had room left over.
"This is yours," he said. Barely a question.
"My parents'." Maren was already moving up the path toward the entrance, giving the house no time to land on him the way it clearly had a long time ago on her. "Though as I mentioned earlier, they're rarely here. Research trips, they're both attached to expeditions that keep them away for months at a stretch."
"So you live here. Alone. In this."
"When you say it like that it sounds worse than it is." A short laugh, more breath than sound. "Mostly I just use the lab and one bedroom and pretend the rest of the house isn't happening."
"Doesn't it get quiet."
"Constantly." She said it lightly, but the words came out a half-beat slower than the rest of the sentence, the question clearly landing somewhere she didn't usually let people reach. "I don't mind it most days. Work fills the space well enough. Some days it's more than I'd like, but that's true of most things, isn't it."
She didn't wait for an answer to that one, which told him it hadn't really been a question.
Big den for one animal, Mahkir observed, dry.
Ant nearly said it out loud before he caught himself.
She led him through the entrance and down a hallway wide enough that his footsteps echoed in a way he wasn't used to hearing indoors, past a study lined with shelving, past a dining room clearly built for more people than currently used it, all of it clean, all of it untouched, the quiet of rooms waiting for people who weren't home. The air smelled faintly of polish and old paper, nothing like the district, nothing like anywhere he'd ever slept.
No one has fought in this house, Mahkir said, and the words came out almost baffled, clearly unsettled by the idea itself. Ever. I would smell it. Even old blood leaves something behind.
Some people get to live like that.
Strange life. Quiet. I doubt I would enjoy it for long.
"It's late," Maren said, glancing toward the windows where the light outside had gone properly dim. "I'd suggest a good night's rest, and starting fresh in the morning."
Ant hadn't realised how tired he was until she said it. The wasteland, the fight, the walk here, all of it settling on him at once now that there was nothing left to do but notice it. It had been a full day.
He didn't argue, and Maren took that as answer enough, leading him to one of the bedrooms.
Like everything else in the house, it was bigger than any place he'd ever slept. He jumped onto the bed, and unlike the pavement he was used to, this one gave way beneath him, letting him melt into it entirely. Mahkir settled at his feet, a small weight against the blankets. Ant didn't make it to ten before his eyes closed.
He woke mid-morning, Mahkir already up and pacing at the foot of the bed, clearly eager for whatever the day had in store. Somehow, Maren had managed to wash his clothes overnight; they sat neatly folded on the dresser, waiting for him. He dressed and made his way to the door, where Maren was already impatiently waiting for him.
Maren led him to the other side of the house without slowing, familiar with every turn, and toward a door set into one of the house's wings.
She opened it and stepped through without ceremony.
Ant followed her in and stopped just past the threshold.
He'd never seen anything like the room in front of him.
Screens lined one wall, he counted without meaning to, lost track past twelve. Columns of data scrolling too fast to read. Something rotating slowly in blue light, layered and complex. Diagrams with no framework he could hang them on, cross-sections of what might have been muscle, or bone, or neither, annotated in shorthand he couldn't make sense of. The screens hummed, low and collective, filling the room the same way silence usually did.
Interesting, Mahkir said, and Ant felt him lift his head against his side, actually looking. Loud room. Nothing in it is dangerous, though. I checked.
You checked.
Someone should.
To one side, a bench held glass apparatus he half-recognised from description rather than experience, tubing, vessels, liquid moving through them in some slow deliberate process, something bubbling faintly at one station in a colour he couldn't name. Shelves above held rows of labelled containers, more than he bothered counting.
The table drew his attention and held it.
Set against the far wall, angled, fitted with restraints along the sides that had clearly been built for exactly the purpose he suspected. He'd seen one like it before. Once, at seventeen, at the edge of the ceremony circle, watching the calibration tables get prepared for anyone whose bonding needed the more delicate follow-up work. He'd never gotten that far. But he remembered it well enough, clinical, still, built to keep a person motionless while something was done to their head.
The ache found his throat before he could stop it.
Maren crossed to a bench without noticing, pulling a drawer open with the economy of someone who'd done this often enough it no longer required thought. She retrieved a small case, checked the contents, set it on a tray beside the table.
"This'll take a minute to prepare properly." She didn't look up. "While I do, I should probably explain what's about to happen to you. Most people go into this with at least some idea."
"I don't have any idea."
"Right. Well." She glanced at him, the corner of her mouth pulling. "The chip does several things at once, once it's calibrated. First, it reads a signature specific to you, nothing anyone else could reproduce, and checks it against the registry. If you're already logged somewhere, clanned or otherwise, it links straight to that record. Name, family line, everything already on file. It's guessing nothing. It's matching."
"And if there's nothing to cross-reference. No family records anywhere."
"Then it logs what it can verify directly and leaves the rest blank." She said it without making anything of it, though he caught the half-second pause before the sentence, some understanding passing behind her eyes about what he was leaving out, which she chose to let sit. "It happens more than you'd think. It just means your profile starts a little thinner than most people's."
Ant let that sit without confirming or denying anything about it.
"And the stats."
"That's the interesting part." She actually looked pleased at the question, lit up the way people get discussing a subject they love. "Bonding changes the body. Subtly, nothing you'd catch in a mirror, but structurally. Muscle density shifts. Bone composition adjusts. Neural pathways reorganise around the bond in ways you can measure if you know where to look. The chip reads all of it against a baseline, what your body looked like before the bond, matched against whatever record already exists for you, and calculates the difference. That difference becomes your stats."
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"So it needs to know what I looked like before. Before Mahkir."
"Ideally, yes." Her mouth tightened for half a second, gone almost before he'd registered it. "Most people have that on record from childhood scans, or from an early registry entry. I'd guess you don't have either, given everything else, which means the chip's probably going to be estimating your baseline from population averages instead of your actual history. It'll be close. It won't be exact."
"How close."
"Close enough to be useful. I wouldn't bet money on the first number it gives you, though." She said it without apology, which he appreciated more than he expected to. "I'll tell you if something looks wrong. I'm not going to let you walk out of here trusting a number I don't trust myself."
Ant turned that over. Five years wondering what everyone else could see. She talked about it in the same steady, matter-of-fact tone she used for everything else.
"What about him," Maren asked, glancing toward the weight settled against Ant's side beneath the coat. "Does he have a name? Feels wrong to keep gesturing at your coat."
He hesitated. It felt strange, handing over something that personal in a room full of screens and instruments, but there wasn't much reason left to withhold it. She already knew more about him than anyone else alive.
"Mahkir."
You said it correctly, Mahkir noted, faintly surprised.
Should I have gotten it wrong.
No. Continue.
"Mahkir." She tried the sound of it once, testing how it fit in her mouth. "Alright. For him it's similar, but less exact. The chip scans his structure and compares it against known Kithren types. Skills get matched the same way, against catalogued abilities in comparable creatures. Attributes are trickier, baselines vary too much between individuals for an immediate exact reading. It gives a range and narrows it over time, as it gathers more from observation."
"So it could get things wrong. About him."
"It could get things wrong about both of you." She said it plainly, no softening, which he'd already noticed was her default when she could have chosen otherwise. "Especially given how unusual his profile already looks. I won't pretend I know what the chip's going to make of him."
"And if it can't make anything of him. If it just fails."
"Then it fails, and we start over with a different approach." She shrugged, though it didn't quite land as casually as she seemed to want it to. "That's happened exactly never, as far as I know. But I'd rather tell you the honest range of outcomes than promise you a clean result I can't actually guarantee."
I'd like to see it try, Mahkir said, and there was only certainty in it, the confidence of a creature that had never once considered losing.
That eased the ache in Ant's throat, more than he expected.
She gestured at the table. "You'll want to sit. This part's straightforward. Small incision, precisely placed, chip barely bigger than a grain of rice. Most people find the anticipation worse than the actual thing."
For a moment the recitation dropped out of her voice, her hands stilling over the tray, focused, careful, before she caught herself and kept moving. "I'll be right here the whole time. I don't do this halfway."
Ant looked at the table for a long moment.
He thought about turning around, walking back through the hallway, past the empty formal rooms, out into the grounds and down the path toward whatever he'd been doing with his life before any of this. Before Mahkir. Before the wasteland. Before a stranger's lab and a table built for exactly this. The ceremony hall came back to him again, uninvited, surfacing anywhere the space echoed it. He'd stood at the edge of that circle once, waiting for something that never came, seventeen years old and already learning what it felt like to be passed over. Now he was about to sit down for something he'd actually chosen, in a room built by someone who knew precisely what she was doing. The contrast sat with him for a second. He let it pass.
You are stalling, Mahkir said, almost gentle about it.
I'm thinking.
You have been thinking since the path. Sit down.
He sat.
Maren pulled on a pair of thin gloves, working her fingers into them with the brisk efficiency of habit, then wiped the skin behind his ear with something that stung faintly and smelled sharp enough to cut through everything else in the room.
She lifted the injector, checked it, set it down, and checked it again.
"You check twice," Ant said.
"I check twice on everyone. Same as anyone else." She didn't look up from it. "The one time someone skips it is the time it matters. I'd rather waste thirty seconds than explain to a patient afterward why I didn't."
She connected a thin cable from the injector to the terminal at the edge of the bench. One of the smaller screens lit with a line of text he couldn't read from where he sat, followed by a soft chime.
"Ready," she said, mostly to herself. Then, straightening, she looked at him properly. "Last chance. Say the word and we stop here, no chip, no debt, nothing owed either way. I'd rather you leave uncertain than leave regretting it."
Mahkir went quiet against his side, loose rather than tense, ears up and tracking, the same readiness he carried into every fight he'd ever walked into with his eyes wide open.
"Do it," Ant said.
The surface was cooler than expected, firm, unyielding in a way that made him more aware of his own body than he'd been a moment before. Maren adjusted something at his shoulder with quick, practiced hands before moving to stand behind his head, her movements sure in a way that told him this was routine to her even if it was anything but routine to him. Mahkir pressed closer against his side, claws flexing once against the fabric of his coat, focus rather than fear, the same sharp readiness he carried right before a fight, before Maren's hand settled behind Ant's ear, angling his head slightly, her fingers finding the spot with the ease of long familiarity.
"Stay still. This'll only take a moment."
He felt the cold press of something antiseptic against his skin first, sharp-smelling and clinical, followed almost immediately by a brief, precise pressure behind his ear, sharp, smaller than he'd braced for, gone before his body had fully registered it as pain.
Then something smaller still. Cold. Foreign. Sliding into the incision with a sensation he had no comparison for, somewhere between pain and pressure without being either, a feeling that sat just beneath conscious thought and stayed there.
That looks unpleasant, Mahkir said, distant and strange, the words arriving slower than they should have.
The chip was in.
Maren straightened, already reaching for a pair of reader glasses from the tray, sliding them on as she stepped back to face him properly. "How do you feel?"
Ant took stock before answering. A small ache behind his ear, sharper than the incision itself. Nothing beyond that.
"Fine. Sore. Nothing else."
"Good sign." A faint shimmer crossed the lenses as she looked at him, the same automatic scan he'd watched sweep across a hundred sets of borrowed glasses over five years, always coming back empty. He held his breath without deciding to.
Maren's glasses tilted slightly toward him, her focus sharpening all at once. "That's odd." She said it half to herself, already leaning in closer. "It's barely been a minute, this shouldn't resolve for hours yet, but it's already got something. Data from somewhere."
"I haven't even plugged in your family information, your DNA, but there you are," she said, real relief mixed with confusion in her voice. "Level three."
Reasonable. He'd already known that part.
"Strength, nine. Endurance, four. Agility, eleven."
Still ordinary. His own numbers, finally sitting somewhere other than inside his own skull.
Then she stopped talking.
Her eyes didn't move for a long moment, fixed on one spot instead of continuing down the readout. She leaned in slightly, pushed the glasses further up her nose with one knuckle, and looked again. Blinked. Looked a third time. Pulled the display closed entirely, held it closed for a second, then opened it fresh, checking whether the number was a rendering error rather than a real result.
It hadn't changed.
"...That's impossible."
"What?"
She didn't answer right away, which was somehow worse than anything she could have said.
"Humans don't have a Magic stat." She said it slowly, choosing each word with visible care. "It exists as a category on every readout, it has to, the interface accounts for it, but it sits at zero. Every human ever scanned. Every single one, as far as anyone's recorded."
"And mine doesn't."
"Yours is five."
The number didn't surprise Ant. It matched exactly what his own screen had told him days ago, tucked behind a display only he could see, delivered with none of the ceremony Maren was giving it now.
Maren's reaction did.
She didn't offer a theory. Didn't explain further. For a long moment she just stood there with one hand still half-raised toward the glasses, her attention fixed entirely on him rather than the readout. The machine, rather than the number, seemed to be what needed explaining.
"We'll come back to that," she said finally, setting it aside by visible effort rather than choice. "Later. Properly. Right now," she exhaled, some of the colour returning to how she held herself, "right now, let's see Mahkir."
Mahkir climbed free of the coat without being asked, settling onto the edge of the table beside Ant. He didn't flinch when Maren's gloved hand came near his skull, didn't tense at the pressure of the injector against the base of his skull, but his ears stayed up, swivelling toward every sound in the room, amber eyes tracking her every movement with open, active interest.
"He's watching everything you do," Ant said.
"Good. I'd rather he trusted his own judgment than mine." Maren worked with quick, careful movements, her focus entirely on the small incision at the base of his skull. "Most Kithren tense up regardless of temperament. He hasn't."
"He's paying attention. That's different from tense."
The insertion took less time than Ant's own had. Mahkir showed no discomfort at all, ears flicking once at the moment of contact and nothing more.
Maren straightened, reached for her glasses again, and directed the scan toward him.
The progress line on the nearest monitor crawled forward, slower than it had for Ant, and kept crawling long after it should have finished.
Her expression changed before she said anything.
"...That's odd."
Ant looked over. "What?"
She didn't answer. Her eyes stayed fixed on the screen, glasses tilted slightly, one hand drifting up to adjust something at the frame without seeming to notice she was doing it.
The monitor finished loading.
Three words sat on the screen, and nothing else.
No data collected.