Days followed days, and before long, nearly two weeks had passed since Lain first took Jewel in.

  For all that only a year or two stood between the two women, it felt like a lifetime given Jewel’s obvious lack of experience on the street. Still, the girl had done her best to make herself useful, proving herself a quick and eager student, absorbing everything Lain imparted to her with little need for any repetition.

  Once it had become clear that Jewel was going to stay with Lain for a little while, a decision neither voiced but seemed to reach in silent accord, the thief started to help her get settled. First, a trip to Sullivan, Lain’s preferred coin-counter, exchanged the girl’s unwieldy (and frankly dangerous) coins for lighter, more efficient trade coins, as well as what Jewel referred to as a few “investments.”

  They then paid visits to a few fripper’s carts. While the clothing Jewel had worn on that first night was far from the fine raiments preferred uphill, both the dress and cloak were still fairly new garments. The worn, oft-patched clothing sold at a markdown by frippers was a much better match to that favored by most Lowrunners, and helped Jewel better blend in.

  Around that same time, Lain began to take note of an increased warden presence on the streets. Curiously, the powerful battle-gifted, the joint military-police force of Emeston, didn’t seem to be doing anything to actually crack down on crime. While the sight of them was becoming increasingly common, they only appeared in groups of two or three, or sometimes entirely alone.

  Those weren’t crackdown numbers. As the days passed, Lain became increasingly convinced that there was a quiet manhunt happening under her nose. She nurtured some suspicions, even, about just who the wardens were looking for–but she decided to keep those reservations to herself, rather than voice them to Jewel.

  #

  “I’m not so sure about this, Lain,” Bors said. “It seems… risky.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Lain said easily, taking a sip of thick, bitter tea. It was early still, but with each sip from her mug, she felt herself slowly starting to wake up.

  “You say that,” Bors said, casting an uncertain look over his shoulder. “But having someone else going through my books…”

  “She’s not a warden auditor,” Lain said. “She doesn’t care about how you make your money, just how you’re tracking it.”

  “That’s the problem, Lain! I don’t know if this idea of yours is as great as you think! Plenty of Lowrun businesses ain’t gonna want unknown eyes looking over their b-”

  Lain lifted a finger, and Bors hurriedly cut himself off with a grimace. A moment later, Jewel emerged from the backroom, her face furrowed with thought. In one hand, she held a hardback board with a thick stack of parchment sheets bound to it, in the other, an inked pen. They had shorn off a few stray inches of her thick, curling hair, and what remained was bound up in a high tail. She was chewing her bottom lip in a distracted way, and her once fine gown had finally begun to pick up the ink and dirt stains of a woman making a real living.

  “Could you explain this for me?” Jewel asked, pointing her pen at one particular line.

  Bors grunted, squinting a little as he leaned over to look at whatever Jewel was indicating. Lain took another sip of tea and watched, intrigued.

  “That’s for the bottles of gloam,” Bors explained. Gloam whiskey was a common stock for any Lowrun bar–cheap swill, with an assortment of vaguely magical reagents steeped in it long enough to give it a magical kick, enough so that even those with boons that would normally make alcohol ineffective would get a buzz off of it.

  “No, I see that,” Jewel said, her tone diffident yet professional. Lain smiled to herself, impressed. There wasn’t a hint of Jewel’s usual halting discomfort in her words. “But your estimates for how many glasses you’ll get from a single bottle seem… high.”

  “I water it down,” Bors said gruffly. “One part gloam to one or two parts water. Stays potent enough to punch through resilience boons, but weak enough that I don’t have dumb kids tripping over themselves after a shot.”

  Jewel blinked, and chewed her lip another moment before she nodded. “Sensible. Alright, thank you.”

  Without another word, she turned and went back into the bar’s storeroom, her pen already tracing down to another line, soft scritches left behind her until the storeroom door closed.

  “She knows her stuff,” Lain said, picking up the conversation from before Jewel had interrupted. “And once you vouch for her, she won’t be an unknown anymore. She’ll be a freehand scribe, with two respected voices speaking for her.”

  “Two?” Bors asked. “You tried this with someone else.”

  “Me, Bors. I’m the other respected voice.”

  He grunted, the sound somehow skeptical, and Lain rolled her eyes at him.

  “Say what you want, but I had her speak to my coincounter.”

  “You introduced her to Sullivan?” Bors asked, his bushy eyebrows climbing.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “She insisted. And she got a chunk of my savings invested in some trading ships–’underwriting conservative, routine routes,’ she called it. Supposed to make me some money in a month or two.”

  Bors grunted again, the sound more intrigued now. “Highwalk goldshit money magic,” he muttered.

  “If it works for them, there’s no reason to not take advantage of it ourselves.”

  Bors grunted, this one a sound of acquiescence, and he poured himself a fresh mug of tea. The two sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, drinking their tea and letting it do its job. It was early yet, and the Claw was otherwise empty. The sounds of the crowds on the street were distant.

  When Lain was a little younger–as if her twenty-two years made her old–she preferred to sleep the mornings away and stay up late into the night. Her habits had changed since. The Lowrun of seventh bell was a different place than the slums after midnight. Neither more quiet nor more calm, but more peaceful, the city’s sounds those of industry and productivity rather than bawdy revelry and screaming violence. The early hours of the morning were some of the few that gave Lain any real contentment.

  Bors broke the quiet after a few minutes. “Mind if I ask you something?”

  Lain took a sip, swished the tea in her mouth. It was bitter and increasingly lukewarm, but Lain had come up drinking it black, and even though she could easily afford honey and cream and sugar in it, she continued drinking it straight by force of habit. “You know you can.”

  Bors eyed Lain a moment, honest curiosity in his dark, direct eyes, before asking, “What’s your interest with this girl?”

  Lain arched an eyebrow. “She paid me. I’m her Lowrun consultant, or guide, or whatever.”

  Bors just snorted. “First tongue is tellin’ a lie,” he said dismissively. “Got a second?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lain darted a look at the door to the backroom, and Bors did the same, lowering his voice and coming a couple steps closer to Lain.

  “You’re probably the best thief in this damn city, Lain. I know it firsthand. You don’t need whatever pittance she’s giving you to be her ‘consultant’ or whatever you want to call it. Cross it, you haven’t even asked me for a job since she came downhill. So what’s your actual interest?”

  Lain frowned down at her mug, pondering its contents and the bartender’s question.

  He was right, of course. Jewel had offered to pay Lain three mantles–an absurd amount, really. Lain had no plans to accept the payment, and deflected every time it was brought up.

  But she had still been giving hours, and even days, of her life over the past weeks to Jewel. To showing her around Lowrun, to teaching her the tricks of the city and its moods, to guiding her around the landmarks and bars to know, to getting a foot in the door with some trade-gifted like Bors that owed her a favor…

  “She’s new,” Lain finally said. “Different.”

  Bors replied with another all-purpose grunt.

  “It’s easy to lose track of… well, of everything, living down here. Get through each day, each week, each month… It all loses meaning after a while. You’ve gotta know what I mean, right?”

  Another grunt, this one vaguely confused. “The point is staying alive, Lain.”

  Lain found herself shaking her head. “That’s the problem, maybe. Survival is a means, not an end.”

  “And what? You think this girl is an end worth pursuing?”

  Lain considered that–and then threw back the rest of her tea, leaving behind only the thick black sludge of steeped herbs at the bottom of her mug. “Maybe,” she finally said. “I’ll tell you when I get there.”

  Bors grunted. Because of course he did.

  A few quiet minutes later, Jewel emerged from the backroom, holding a loose page in one hand.

  “You’re getting ripped off by your wine merchant!” she proclaimed, waving the sheet around.

  Bors’s great, furry brow came together, and he snatched the parchment out of her hands, looking it over for himself while Lain shot an eye at the little, half-empty keg sitting to one side of the bar. “That’s impossible,” he said. “Buying those little kegs is much cheaper than the bottles!”

  “They are,” Jewel agreed hurriedly, already flipping through paper on her hardback. “But these travel kegs aren’t airtight–they’re not sealed the same way bottles are, so they go sour.” She turned the portfolio around, gesturing at another line item.

  Lain watched the exchange, both faintly amused and honestly intrigued. “Is she right, Bors?”

  “I am!” Jewel insisted. “Look, you buy six kegs at a time–but your patrons only drink through three or four before the others go bad!”

  “Nature of the business,” Bors said, his tone distracted as he continued looking over the complex ledgers. “Gotta be ready for rushes, even if it means some spoilage.”

  “But!!” Jewel snatched her portfolio back, flicked through another few pages, her eyes almost frantic. “If you bought the same volume in bottles instead of kegs, you’d make back the difference easily in savings as those bottles stay good!”

  Bors blinked and looked over another sheet that Jewel shoved in his face, a frown wrinkling his face. “Well… I suppose that’s… huh.”

  “Is she right, Bors?” Lain repeated in exactly the same tone.

  Behind his bristling beard, Lain could swear she saw the big man’s face redden. “I… Well, I’ll have to review myself, but… Maybe. She might be.”

  “Who have you been buying your drinks from?” Lain asked. “That doesn’t seem like something Ennev would do.”

  Bors lifted a hand, running it over his balding pate. “Ennev got bought out by this new syndicate a few months back. That’s when they started pitching these bar kegs to me…”

  “Goldshits,” Lain muttered.

  “It’s a good catch,” Bors admitted.

  Jewel spun around, her hair a red bouquet trailing her movements, and she gave Lain a smile that the thief felt from her head all the way down to her toes.

  It was, Lain thought, possibly the most honest, genuine smile she had ever seen from another person.

  “Well,” Lain drawled, “I think we just might be in business after all.”