Chapter 53: LESS THAN TWO MINUTES

The tailor needed a few hours, so Arch repeated the same instruction before stepping back inside the shop to confirm the fitting time. They were to stay nearby, avoid the lower levels, and preferably not touch anything interesting enough to require an explanation afterward. Sio nodded with complete sincerity while Angle stayed beside him, apparently convinced that his presence alone might prevent trouble.

For almost a full minute, nothing happened. Then the juvenile noticed a tiny six-legged animal dart beneath a food stall with a strip of roasted meat clenched between its teeth, and its head snapped toward the thief before Sio could tighten his grip. "No. You already have food," he warned, but the creature slid down his back and vanished between two shoppers anyway. Sio stared after it for half a second before pushing into the crowd. "I am not losing you inside a black market because you saw somebody else commit theft."

Angle saw Sio disappear around the stall and followed immediately, calling his name just as a loaded cargo platform descended between them. Workers shouted for people to clear the intersection while stacked crates rolled past, and by the time Angle reached the other side, Sio was gone.

Less than a minute later, Arch emerged from the tailor and found the stretch of walkway where both young men had been standing completely empty. He looked toward one bridge, then another, and closed his eyes briefly. "They lasted less than two minutes." The market offered no help; routes shifted around cargo, temporary bridges lifted for oversized loads, and staircases that appeared parallel from above could emerge several streets apart below. Arch chose the direction Sio had vanished and started moving before either of them found a more creative way to make the situation worse.

Sio had already managed that without help. He chased the juvenile down a staircase, across a narrow bridge and around a moving cargo lift before spotting the six-legged thief beneath a row of hanging baskets. "Stop encouraging crime," he called, though by then he was not entirely sure which animal he meant. The smaller creature slipped beneath a sealed doorway and vanished, while the juvenile flattened itself against the gap as if seriously considering whether it could follow.

Sio caught it around the middle and dragged it back. "Absolutely not. You nearly got yourself sold, eaten or adopted by somebody with more money than me." The creature clicked furiously at the door while Sio tucked it beneath one arm and informed it that the entire situation was its fault. When he turned around, three staircases, two bridges and a cargo lift surrounded him, and none looked familiar.

He studied the options long enough to convince himself one staircase probably led upward. "Fine. We go this way and pretend I knew where I was going." A few minutes later the open stalls and workshops had thinned into guarded businesses carved deeper into the canyon walls, which was enough evidence that he had chosen poorly.

Workers carried covered cases between storage rooms, brokers checked stamped papers before allowing goods through certain doors, and buyers spoke in lowered voices instead of shouting prices across the street. Sio watched two guards escort a narrow metal case through a reinforced doorway and decided that even asking directions here somehow felt expensive.

The juvenile clicked from beneath his arm while Sio followed another passage he hoped curved upward. He nearly collided with a man coming around the corner, and both stopped just before impact. The stranger wore a simple coat with no crest, no obvious weapon and nothing Sio could immediately identify as important. What stood out was how little the man seemed affected by the market around him; workers squeezed past his shoulder and buyers crossed in front of him, yet he moved with the patience of someone who never needed to hurry.

"Sorry," Sio said as he stepped aside. The stranger gave him a brief look and continued toward a merchant behind a narrow counter built into the canyon wall, and Sio would have kept walking if the juvenile had not suddenly gone still in his arms. Its attention settled on the man without the excitement it showed around food or weapons, and that alone made Sio slow down.

The stranger placed a small metal token on the counter. Sio could not see whatever was stamped into it, but the merchant could, because his expression changed almost immediately. "I was told an item matching this description entered the canyon yesterday," the stranger said.

The merchant studied the token before shaking his head. "Then whoever told you that gave you bad information. Half the old stock in this market changes records without changing shelves." The stranger asked what had happened yesterday instead, and the merchant hesitated before lowering his voice. "A record surfaced. Something old matched whatever description your people are following. Grand Exchange brokers started pulling unusual inventory for appraisal this morning."

The stranger picked up the token and asked where such an item would be moved. The merchant explained that the auction district handled inspection, registration and appraisal before anything else, though ownership depended on whoever held the object when the brokers found it.

Sio understood almost none of the importance behind the conversation, but he understood enough to recognize that the man had come looking for something he did not intend to leave without. Unfortunately, the stranger turned and caught him watching. His eyes moved first to the purple scar beneath Sio’s right eye and then to the juvenile tucked beneath his arm, showing no recognition beyond mild curiosity.

"Something you need?" the man asked. Sio shook his head and admitted that he merely had the kind of face that made asking questions feel expensive. Something almost resembling amusement touched the stranger’s expression before the juvenile stretched one limb toward his coat and forced Sio to grab it. "No stealing from mysterious people. We already have enough problems."

The man glanced once more at the creature, then continued toward the lower levels without asking Sio’s name or mentioning the bounty hanging over him. Sio watched him leave before adjusting the juvenile against his shoulder. "See? That is how normal people behave. They mind their own business and walk away." The juvenile clicked at him, which Sio considered unfair criticism from something that had chased a meat thief across several levels.

Several levels above, Angle had managed to get lost in an entirely different direction. A movable bridge had rotated to let a cargo crane pass, and by the time it returned, the route he thought Sio had taken was gone. After wandering through two intersections, he unexpectedly recognized the equipment district and then noticed that the glass case in the familiar shop was empty.

Angle entered quickly enough that the merchant looked up from his ledger and immediately understood why he had returned. When Angle asked about the gloves, the man grimaced and explained that they had sold not long after the group left. Angle asked who bought them, and the merchant described a young woman in plain clothes with an expensive chain and a silver crescent-shaped ear cuff. She had paid the asking price without bargaining, which he remembered because almost nobody in the black market behaved that way.

Angle remembered passing her at the doorway. When he asked where the gloves had gone, the merchant explained that the woman had paid to transfer them to a Grand Exchange broker for appraisal and registration. "Could be resale, authentication or something else entirely," he said while closing his ledger. "People with that kind of money rarely explain themselves."

Angle looked toward the empty case and remembered the tiny flame resting calmly above his thumb when he wore one of the gloves. For the first time since the frontier, the heat inside him had not felt like something waiting to escape. There had been no pressure beneath his skin and no struggle to stop a small flame from becoming larger, which changed the gloves from something he merely wanted into something he needed to understand.

He asked where the Grand Exchange was, and the merchant gave him directions toward the auction district while warning that registration did not guarantee a public sale. Angle left with a destination at last, even if he still had no idea why somebody wealthy enough to pay without bargaining wanted the same old gloves.

Arch, meanwhile, had stopped being irritated because the market around him was changing. One merchant pulled expensive equipment inside before finishing a sale, two experienced bounty hunters abandoned their table without collecting their drinks, and a broker closed half his shutters while continuing to watch through the remaining gap. Nobody ran or shouted; they were simply making room.

Arch slowed beside a railing and followed their attention toward one of the main routes below. A man was moving through the crowd without hurry, and people shifted carts, chairs and even conversations out of his path before he reached them. Arch recognized him a moment later, not from having met him, but from reputation.

There were names people in their line of work learned because ignorance could get someone killed. This hunter had stopped taking ordinary work years ago, and the stories attached to him were less about spectacular battles than how quickly experienced Wayfarers learned they had misjudged the distance between themselves and him.

The hunter stopped beside a bounty board, removed Sio’s notice and then Angle’s, and spoke briefly with a nearby merchant. The merchant hesitated before pointing toward the deeper levels. Arch started moving while the hunter was still folding the papers, careful not to take the most obvious route.

Finding Sio and Angle was no longer enough. Arch needed to reach them without becoming the trail that guided this man directly to them, and the market’s layered paths suddenly felt far less amusing than they had from the canyon rim.

Far below, Sio was still trying to determine which staircase actually went upward while Angle headed toward the auction district looking for answers about the gloves. Somewhere between them, the quiet stranger Sio had crossed continued toward that same section of the canyon in search of an item that had apparently been hidden there far longer than anyone had realized.

Arch pushed through the crowd and increased his pace. Losing the two of them had been stupid enough, and letting someone else find them first would be considerably worse.