The thief looked back and saw the narc, then me. He shook his head, swore, and flung himself around the corner onto Arkata tar Rand.

This was the way I usually went to get back to the Towers. Ropes of people twisted between the walls of shelves and bins under the awnings and past the solid stripe of pushcarts down the middle of the street. The space between them was ribbed with tunnels of tents, permanent stores closer to the awnings, day stores closer to the pushcarts. The thief bounced between the islands of pavement around the tentpoles, where there were a few less pedestrians and when he did hit someone he lost less momentum. I charged after him, holding my polearm straight up and down my spine so it wouldn’t get caught.

The narc was hitting on all sixes and closing in. Everyone else got out of his way, where I had to dodge around them, and he was still carrying the chant. 

I couldn’t join in without even more people joining our parade, but the more people I sprinted past in silence, the more people would think I was the thief. Someone stuck out their boot in front of me. I jumped over it. The next person would try harder.

The longer we ran, the farther ahead of us the chant would travel. And I couldn’t cause any serious collateral damage in Porfidu territory.

Tentpoles didn’t stick in the concrete-splattered basalt of the cave floor. The permanent stores screwed them into pallets. The day stores wedged them between sandbags, so that they’d stay upright if they got sideswiped by a pushcart or a dolly but they were easy to pull up when the tent got disassembled at the end of the day.

On my right, salt-stained red canvas sagged to eye level. The PVC pipe holding it up was already leaning toward me.

I yanked it out from between the sandbags and threw it across the road behind me. Several people all swore at the same time. The narc’s chant cut off, and the roar building behind him diffused like a whitecap breaking. The people in front of me stopped and shifted, trying to figure out why. 

I sped up, slalomed between them, and cut another two seconds off the thief’s lead. I could hear him breathing hard through the noise of the crowd. He slid around the corner and looked back. Dread froze his face.

The doorway to the alley behind Arkata tar Rand opened next to him. I glanced at it, panicked, and then tried to look like I hadn’t noticed it. 

Instantly, he darted in. I followed him. 

When the shop owners in North Bank dug out their basements, they saved the rubble and used it to block the alleys behind their stores. Nobody in, nobody out, except through one, narrow door to the main road. The wall at the other end of this alley was almost nine feet tall and garnished with barbed wire. 

I let go of my polearm. The shaft swung out so the grip rested comfortably over my shoulder.

The thief spun around, wild-eyed and gasping. He was younger than I’d thought, fourteen or maybe fifteen, and built like a dried eel. The red cloth tied around his neck was half of a torn-up t-shirt. A Holy Aspen medallion swung back and forth across the words on his crewneck like a ouija board. 

Ouija Board’s eyes ricocheted from my polearm, to the barbed wire, to the slot canyon of chipped cinder block, to the ladder that ran down the wall next to him and ended chained to a platform six feet above his head. It took him less than a second to realize he was trapped. He shook his head, forced himself to swallow, and let himself double over, staring at the ground like he could burn through it with his mind.

I kept moving. Every few yards, pairs of stamped sheet metal doors were set into the cave floor. Store names were painted or chalked on the walls above them. I recognized the logo for a clothes store I’d been to a few times and stopped. 

Ouija Board shrank back against the wall. 

I ignored him. This store’s owners followed Santa Wenza. Today was Wednesday. They’d be closed. 

I dropped to one knee over the doors to the store’s basement and pulled out the ring of skeleton keys Lenna had given me. 

Ouija Board’s eyes widened. 

The first key I tried worked. Ouija Board lunged down the stairs. I followed him and locked the doors behind me.

The basement was pitch-black. Something thudded. Ouija Board swore.

I drew my polearm and flicked the switch on the shaft to its highest setting. Blue light exploded like a firework from both ends, turning the rows of cardboard box-lined shelves that packed the stockroom into crisp shards of radiant blue and pure black. Ouija Board’s medallion shot my polearm’s light straight back into my eyes. I blinked hard. The blaze-orange afterimage fizzed across the backs of my eyelids. 

There was a door behind Ouija Board. I watched him decide I was too close for him to make it. It was probably locked anyway. 

“If you give me everything you stole, I’ll get you out of this.”

He glared at me.

“If you don’t, I’ll turn you in.”

Ouija Board coughed hard and shook his head like a dog shaking off water. “You will let me pass through the door. Then, I will—” 

He talked at half speed and enunciated with excruciating precision. Fresh off the boat. 

“Talk normally. I’ll understand you just fine.”

He dropped into twangy, sanded-down Haddasa dialect. “You can have it after you let me through.”

“Hard pass.”

“Okay. You open it. I’ll start walking. Then, while I’m walking past you—”

“No. Give it to me now. Then I’ll help you.”

Ouija Board almost growled.

“I’m not fucking around.”

He looked like he was going to run.

I reached for my polearm.

Ouija Board sighed viciously and slammed something into my hand. It was a small, square box, tied up in a silky blue cloth.

“Thank—”

“Now what?”

“What is it?”

“Necklace.”

“Could you touch it at the store?”

“What?”

I slowed down and over-enunciated, the way he had when he thought I’d never heard a Haddas talk before. “How tough was the container, and was it wrapped up so you couldn’t touch it?”

“Uh.” Ouija Board looked at my polearm, making sure I knew he wouldn’t have answered the question if I wasn’t threatening him. “Heavy box. Cling wrap. Couldn’t touch it.”

“Swell. Get yourself a change of clothes.” I crouched and set the package in front of me, then put on my gloves. The wrapper was tied in an elegant, complicated knot.

While I fought to untie it with my gloves on, Ouija Board pulled a cardboard box off the shelf next to him and dug through it, slinging rejected items in a pile on the chipped basalt floor. Finally, he draped himself in a jean jacket big enough to wrap around him twice. He peeled a lemon-yellow scarf off the pile and threw it over his shoulders.

“That’s what you’re going with?”

He shrugged mulishly.

The knot was out. I spread the cloth out on the floor in front of me. It was smooth, soft satin that scraped on the floor. 

The box inside was black velvet. I opened it.

The necklace’s pendant was the half-cross of the Bird of Sorrows. The chain was a single unbroken loop that would fall at least halfway down most people’s chests. It was silver, but it shone as brightly as it had the day it was made.

Probably an artifact of the Third City. I carefully retied the cloth and buttoned the package into the inside pocket of my vest. Ouija Board made jagged, restless circuits of the room. Wrath rolled off him like a heat haze. 

I stood. Ouija Board muttered something in Haddasa. 

I’d heard Lenna use the same word plenty of times, although it wasn’t her go-to. “Fuck off,” I said in Ser.

“Asshole.”

“Okay.”

He fiddled with the top button of his jean jacket. He’d unbuttoned and rebuttoned it at least twice. “How long are we going to stay here?”

“I’m going now. You can stay as long as you want.”

He followed me across the room to the door he’d been eyeing before. “Why are you helping me?”

It was locked. I tried my first skeleton key. “I’m really not.”

He shook his head. “You have the necklace now. Why are you helping me get away?”

“Maybe I’ll change my mind.”

“You won’t.”

“Why?”

“If you were going to turn me in, you would have already done it.”

“I might do it now, if you’re rude.”

“You won’t. They would have liked you if you did, but you didn’t.”

I unlocked the door. “You’re confident.”

Ouija Board shrugged and shouldered past me.

The staircase was around the corner, half-covered by a triangular curtain. Ouija Board followed me up to the sixth floor.

While he caught his breath, I pointed to the ladder above us. “The roofs are connected. You can get pretty much anywhere in North Bank from here, but you need to get down to street level the first chance you get. The Porfidu Army doesn’t like civilians on the roofs. Don’t fuck with them. Do you dig?”

Ouija Board shrugged.

I climbed the ladder. He shot past me as soon as I unlocked the trapdoor. By the time I turned off the light on my polearm, he was gone.

I was alone on the roof. The Porfidu logo was painted in the center, in what I was pretty sure was Zamerald’s calligraphy, but a couple of the younger soldiers had started copying him.

I sat cross-legged on the tar and laid my polearm across my knees. The posse’s chant had fractured from a single oceanic voice into a hundred or so staggered shouts. The mass of people was splintering across alleys, rebounding from dead ends, and slowly atomizing into a few dozen people who were all late for work and all praying that, if the artifact melted Ouija Board into hot-pink tar, it didn’t do it anywhere where they’d have to clean it up.

My legs ached from running, I was forty minutes away from my apartment, and the full bottle of oil in my bag was already cutting into my shoulder. I sighed.