The PATH corridor that Cassiel led them to was not on any map that was currently in circulation.
Toronto's PATH system—the underground pedestrian network connecting the financial district's office towers, shopping concourses, and transit hubs—was officially the largest underground walkway system in the world, which was a fact that appeared on tourist websites and was only approximately relevant to Wei's situation, because the section Cassiel navigated him to was not in the official documents. It sat between two adjacent sections of the network, in the gap between jurisdictions, the overlap between an older tunnel and a newer one where the connecting passage had been sealed off but not quite destroyed—a thirty-foot corridor of bare concrete and fluorescent lighting that ran at a slight angle and ended in a wall that was not quite solid.
"Between jurisdictions," Cassiel said. "Unclaimed space. No faction maintains it. No faction can claim anyone sheltering in it." She paused. "In theory."
"How do you know about it?" Wei asked.
"I memorized the jurisdictional maps when I was assigned to Toronto. Looking for gaps."
"You were looking for gaps in the celestial jurisdiction to exploit?"
"I was looking for gaps in case I needed to hide something." A pause. "Or someone."
Wei looked at her. She did not elaborate.
He sat on the floor—concrete floor, underground, the smell of old transit smell, that specific Toronto underground scent of recycled air and something slightly sweet that might have been cleaning solution or might have been decades of compressed commuter activity. The fluorescent lights above him flickered at intervals that seemed unrelated to any electrical logic.
Huang Qilin stood near the sealed end of the corridor in the manner of someone who had decided to be a wall. Granduncle Bo occupied a middle distance in the way ghosts did when they weren't quite present.
Cassiel sat—unusual, for her, she generally maintained a standing posture that Wei had started reading as a professional habit—a few feet away, her gray coat gathered around her, her wings folded tight enough to disappear nearly completely into the silhouette of a very tall person with a coat that fit badly at the shoulders.
Wei looked at his hands.
Fully solid again, mostly. The coherence had come back over the two-block walk, Cassiel's grip doing something that was probably more than just physical guidance. But something was wrong in a way that had nothing to do with translucency.
He was trying to think about his mother's text and it was—not difficult. That was the wrong word. It was muted. The text was still there in his memory, he could recall it perfectly, but the feeling it generated was quiet in a way it hadn't been thirty minutes ago. When he thought about Lily Chen standing in her Scarborough apartment texting a phone at the bottom of the harbour, the thing that happened in his chest was smaller.
He tested it deliberately, the way you pressed a bruise to check if it still hurt. He thought about Madam Zhao and the seven people who burned incense for him, and the warmth was there but lower—like a room-temperature thing that had been warm an hour ago.
Granduncle Bo said: There it is.
"I know," Wei said.
Cassiel looked over.
"Breath Drain," Wei said. He was explaining it to himself as much as her. "From the mercenary dead. I pulled their qi."
"I know," Cassiel said. Not unkindly.
"Bo said it was the beginning of corpse qi contamination."
"Your granduncle is right," she said. "Corpse qi is stabilizing but corrosive. It fills the same space as your natural qi but it doesn't behave the same way." She considered how to say the next part. "A ghost retains its character. The things that made a person human persist after death—feeling, attachment, memory, preference. Corpse qi displaces character gradually and replaces it with function."
Wei thought about the six mercenary dead standing in a Yorkville alley in response to a word from Huang Qilin, waiting for a directive that might never come. He thought about the operational stillness in their faces.
"The proprietary dead don't feel anything," he said.
"The proprietary dead are very far along the other end of that spectrum."
"I'm at the beginning."
"Yes."
He sat with this for a while.
"How do I stop it?" he said.
"Incense," she said. "Belief. The natural qi that comes from being recognized and remembered by the living. It counteracts the contamination but it also—" She stopped.
"Makes me visible," Wei said. "I know. More incense means more believers means more factions know exactly where I am."
"Yes."
"So my two main power sources are one that makes me colder and one that makes me a target."
"That is an accurate summary of the situation."
Wei looked at the flickering fluorescent light for a while. "That's a terrible power system."
"Most power systems are terrible," Cassiel said. "That's how you know they're real."
They sat in the corridor with the gap-space doing whatever gap-space did around them, which seemed to be mostly nothing in a way that was almost comfortable. Huang Qilin at the wall. Granduncle Bo in his middle distance. The fluorescent lights.
After a while, Wei said: "Do you ever disagree with your orders?"
He hadn't planned to ask it. It came out of the silence the way things came out of silence—not thought up, just arrived.
Cassiel was quiet. Long enough that he thought she wasn't going to answer. She was looking at the wall in front of her, her hands folded very still in her lap, her wings making the slightest sound when she breathed—a sound like a folded umbrella in a light wind.
"Yes," she said.
Just that. One word. Clean as the ceiling.
Wei didn't push. He didn't ask which orders, or what she'd done about it, or whether she'd been punished for it, or whether she was disagreeing with them now, presently, in this corridor, by sitting here instead of wherever the Celestial Court expected her to be.
He didn't need to ask. The answer was in the sitting.
They stayed there, in the unclaimed space, for the rest of the night.