Chapter 51: CANYON MARKETS

The first thing Sio heard was crackling. At first he thought it belonged to the Impossible City, somewhere beyond those newly opened streets. Then the smell of scorched cloth reached him, faint but unmistakable, and the city around him thinned.

That definitely isn’t from here. Before he could decide whether leaving both creatures inside the Impossible City was a terrible idea, the connection snapped. Buildings blurred, stone vanished beneath him, and cold desert air replaced the city’s stillness.

Sio opened his eyes beneath a sky full of stars and found something glowing several feet away. For half a second he thought the camp had been attacked, until he saw Angle asleep on his side, completely unaware that the sand around him had turned black in a rough circle. The edge of his blanket had burned away, part of his shirt was smoking, and heat shimmered above his skin.

"You have got to be kidding me," Sio muttered as he sat up. Arch was already awake near the remains of the campfire, watching his son with the expression of a man deciding whether waking him would improve the situation or simply make the fire mobile. "It started a few minutes ago," Arch said. "I was about to wake him."

Another dry hiss came from beneath Angle as fresh sand darkened, and Sio reached toward their water. Arch noticed immediately and reminded him that it was most of their drinking supply, but Sio lifted the container anyway. "Preventive firefighting. If he wants the water preserved, he should stop trying to become a campfire."

Sio had barely started to stand when something crawled across his back. A familiar limb hooked over his shoulder, and he froze and turned his head. The juvenile was wrapped comfortably around him in its smaller real-world form, as though he had never left it behind.

"I left you with your mother and your sibling. That was the whole point." He tried pulling one limb away, but the creature only clicked and tightened another around his neck. "You understand ignoring every decision I make is not how children are supposed to behave, right?"

A pleased click answered him, followed by that soft impression brushing through his mind. Papa. Sio looked away before Arch could study his face too closely. "Yeah. Fine. Apparently staying with your actual family was too sensible." Arch noticed the reaction anyway, judging from the faint change around his eyes, but mercifully said nothing.

A moment later, Angle inhaled sharply and sat upright. Heat rolled outward with him, and for one brief second the alarm on Angle’s face was exactly the same as after the frontier fight. His eyes moved from the blackened sand to the ruined blanket and then to Arch and Sio. "Did I hurt—"

"No," Arch said before he could finish. "Nobody was hurt. You scorched the ground and ruined another shirt. That’s all." Some tension left Angle’s shoulders, though he kept staring at the blanket as its edge crumbled beneath his fingers.

Sio had a joke ready and let it die. Yesterday there had been a burned body instead of cloth. Then Angle noticed the water container in Sio’s hands and narrowed his eyes. "Why are you holding that?"

That gave Sio a better idea. He tipped the container over Angle’s head, sending water through his hair and down his ruined shirt while steam rose from his shoulders. Arch turned away with suspicious speed.

Angle sat there dripping and stared at Sio. Sio pointed toward the burned sand and explained that he was protecting the campsite from an active fire hazard. Angle wiped water from his face. "You poured our drinking water on me."

"You were cooking the desert in your sleep. Being unconscious does not improve your defense." The heat around Angle began rising again, so Sio stepped behind Arch and leaned around his shoulder. "See? Active threat. I would like it officially recorded that my concerns were justified."

A short sound escaped Arch before he disguised it as a cough. Angle looked at his father with open betrayal, and Arch straightened his expression while claiming he was merely evaluating the situation. Sio immediately interpreted that as agreement, which Arch denied without much conviction.

Angle shook his head, but some of the fear behind his irritation had eased. Arch waited until the mood settled before crouching beside the scorched blanket and explaining that Angle’s output had changed during yesterday’s fight. While awake, he could contain most of it with concentration, but sleep removed that control. Ordinary clothing clearly was not going to survive him anymore.

Angle flexed his fingers. "So what do we do?" Arch told him there was a market farther north where Wayfarers bought materials designed for Scar and Claim abilities, including cloth that might survive his heat.

Sio’s attention sharpened at the word market, and Arch hesitated just long enough to make the explanation suspicious before admitting it was a black market. Angle turned toward Sio before he could speak. "No." Sio frowned and reminded him that he had not said anything, but Angle claimed he had already made the face. When Sio demanded to know what face he meant, Angle described it as the one Sio made right before something became their problem. Sio looked genuinely offended. "That is incredibly vague."

Arch stood and began packing what remained of their camp while reminding them they were going for clothes, supplies and nothing else. They were not investigating anything, accepting jobs, starting fights or touching merchandise they did not understand. Sio folded the ruined blanket and told him he should stop giving instructions that sounded like challenges, while Arch insisted the problem was Sio’s interpretation rather than his presentation.

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Far to the north, beneath stone walls that had not seen an open horizon in generations, a woman placed a thin stack of transfer records on a metal table. Several entries had been crossed out and rewritten before the trail disappeared into the canyon market.

Another figure remained mostly hidden behind hanging strips of dark fabric while she explained that the item had entered the market the previous day. The record was incomplete, but nobody had officially purchased it yet. The hidden figure stayed silent for a few seconds before telling her to retrieve it before that changed.

The woman closed the folder beneath one arm and asked what should happen if somebody bought the item first. The answer came just as calmly: whoever purchased it would simply become another part of the retrieval. She left without asking what that meant.

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Elsewhere in the same canyon, a man sat alone at a drinking stall with Sio’s bounty notice beside his cup. A messenger reported that three travelers matching the descriptions had survived the frontier settlement and continued north.

The man studied Sio’s face, then Angle’s notice beneath it. When the messenger asked whether they should send hunters toward the southern approaches, he folded both papers and slipped them into his coat. He had already waited this long, and if the reports were accurate, his targets were walking toward him on their own. "So he made it through," he said, reaching for his drink. "Good."

◇ ───────────── ◇

Morning turned the desert pale gold as Sio, Angle and Arch continued north. Angle wore one of Arch’s spare shirts, which fit badly, while the juvenile spent most of the journey trying to steal food from Arch’s pack.

"You are terrible at crime," Sio told it after catching another attempt. "Your whole strategy is reaching toward the thing while I’m looking directly at you." Angle suggested that perhaps the creature simply expected Sio to give up eventually, and Sio replied that parenting did not work that way.

"You’ve known it for days," Angle said. Sio informed him that he already understood sacrifice, only for Arch to point out from several steps ahead that Sio had given the creature half his breakfast. Sio stared at his back. "I thought we had an agreement about exposing weaknesses in front of children."

By midday, the open desert began breaking apart. Stone ridges pushed through the sand before rising into walls high enough to swallow the horizon, and the path narrowed until it finally ended against a massive wall of stone.

Sio stopped beside Angle while Arch continued forward as though there were no problem. "This is it? There is literally a wall." Arch replied that he could see it perfectly well without turning around, which only strengthened Sio’s argument that roads generally ended at walls.

Arch ignored him, reached what Sio had assumed was another broken shelf of stone and motioned them closer. Sio approached while preparing another complaint, then forgot what he had been about to say.

The canyon opened beneath them so suddenly that it looked as though the desert had been split apart. Buildings were carved directly into both walls, stacked level above level until the lowest sections disappeared into shadow. Bridges of wood, metal and rope crossed the gap at different heights while cargo platforms crawled along pulley lines and fabric roofs sheltered rows of stalls along the ledges.

The place moved constantly. Merchants shouted from balconies, buyers crowded inspection tables, handlers guided strange animals through narrow passages, and Wayfarers carrying unfamiliar weapons disappeared into workshops carved directly into the canyon. Smoke from food stalls climbed between bridges and mixed with sharper smells drifting from metalwork and biological shops farther below.

A cargo platform rose past them carrying sealed crates while another descended with several cages hidden beneath dark cloth. Across the canyon, two merchants argued in the middle of a bridge until a guard stepped between them and demanded a fee for blocking traffic. Every time Sio thought he understood the scale, another level appeared behind a bridge or beneath a ledge. Homes sat above warehouses, workshops underneath both, and staircases vanished into openings that looked too small until whole groups walked out of them.

The juvenile lifted its head and clicked excitedly, which made Sio point at it without taking his eyes off the canyon. "Whatever you’re thinking, no. We already established that following random things ends badly."

Angle stepped beside him, and even he looked impressed. Arch adjusted the strap of his pack and reminded them to stay close once they started down. Sio finally looked at him. "You said market."

Arch turned toward the narrow path carved into the canyon wall. "It is." Sio remained at the edge for another moment, taking in the bridges, hanging buildings and crawling lifts below. Despite the bounty on his head, Angle’s new habit of setting things on fire and the creature already trying to escape his shoulder, a grin slowly spread across his face before he followed Arch down.