It was not the recognition of a Record-native entity, not the warmth of the citadel or the formation field. It was something colder. The recognition of something that shared design with what he was, without being what he was.
'Yuna,' he said.
'I see them,' she said. 'I can't read the class. My spatial sense slides off it. Whatever they are, the standard classification system doesn't have a category for it.'
The person at the corner looked at Cael with the assessment of someone who had come a long way to look at him and was taking their time with it.
Then the two A-ranks arrived.
A-rank presence landing in the middle of an already active engagement was a different experience from A-rank presence in isolation.
He'd felt it in the perimeter road incident with the apex creature, the way
