TLEIA

Early release from prison is supposedly a good thing. Since I'm certain my release is an execution, I'm minded that this is an example of too much of a good thing. I need muscle to survive, especially if Lord Seacliff of Pike Street is hunting me, but what I have is wits.

Gethen, where are you?

But Gethen is an Orc warrior, not a Fae Lord, and no matter how I throw my thoughts into the atmosphere, he won't hear them. If he's still alive.

“Here.” Neteen, the guard I cultivated during my three-year prison sentence, shoves a small pack of supplies at me as she lets me out of my cell. She watches everything with that mile long stare of jaded prison guards everywhere, a faint perpetual scowl between her bronze brows. I suppress the continuous urge to look over my shoulder; a nervous twitch is a glaring sign of guilt to anyone who knows what to look for. “That's all I could get.”

“It will do.”

We begin to walk, though I'm limping—I haven’t healed from last week’s prison yard fight. Cracked ribs, a few sprained fingers, a mild concussion. I got off light, since I hadn’t started the fight. If the Warden ordered me into solitary. . .I can’t think about that.

It’s well past lights out and everyone is sleeping, or pretending to. The women’s prison is cold; inmates hunker under thin blankets in an effort to keep warm through breath and body heat. Incentive to keep their heads down and out of my current business. If that’s not incentive enough, Neteen has a baton and a matching temper. She wields both generously.

“The package was delivered safely to its holder?” I can't help the ache of tension in my jaw or at the back of my neck as I think about the fragility of that package.

“I followed your instructions,” Neteen says. “Can't guarantee what happened after the package left my hands.”

“I'm in your debt then.” My voice is a bit terse because it's true—and I loathe debt. It always rears its venomous fangs and sinks them into your throat at the worst possible moment.

But I force myself not to think about that package, or else I won't be able to focus on the here and now, and I'll make a mistake. On Coho Street, we learn young not to flinch, and not to look back. Not to worry about loved ones you leave behind to torture and death because sometimes the best help you can give them is to survive, and circle back later. Stronger.

It’s harder to cling to that lesson than I’d thought. I’ve left behind more than family, more than blood.

I can’t think about that either, not without loathing myself. Without starting to sink into that spiral of desperation, flinging enraged pleas into a night at a Human god who never heard them in the first place.

Or maybe a god had; I’d been imprisoned for debt, not murder, after all. Still, I should have listened to Gethen and switched my allegiance to Uthsha, his goddess of war.

“Get to the Sorting,” Neteen says. “Get settled. Then pay me back.”

Sorting is an interesting word. It’s Gaithean, but when spoken in the Fae language has a cold, sinister inflection. The Orcish word has more pragmatic connotations since their version of servitude slavery is more benign.

Neither the Fae—Aeddannari, they call themselves—the Icarian Gargoyles or the Uthilsen Orcs with their incomprehensible guttural language, are native to my planet.

Despite not being its original occupants, the immortals now rule. Their wars, after their dreadnought crashed on our planet, nearly wiped out civilization as Gaithean Humans knew it. But despite the power of the survivors, what they don't have is numbers. Fortunately for them, Humans make good labor and breeding stock, especially the humans whose DNA has mutated enough to carry actual magic.

There are four Sortings a year, one each season, where Humans can offer themselves up for auction.

As I'm about to do, because the best protection from one immortal is another. I could try to buy protection, but then I’d be broke.

“You know I'm good for it,” I say. “Have I ever failed a bargain?”

“No.” We share a swift look loaded with history.

We both come from Coho Street, a wharfside neighborhood mired in the stench of poverty, desperation, and fish. We chose different paths but somehow ended up at the exact same point, at the exact same time.

Except on different sides of the bars. I can’t quire decide if this irony is another subtle mark of some god’s disfavor.

“Move fast, Tleia,” my childhood ally says as we navigate the halls toward a discreet side gate, pausing now and again to avoid detection. “Don’t know how many bounty hunters ya got on your heels, but the Warden was aiming for a payday.” She shakes her head. “I still can’t believe ya pissed off Coho and Pike Street dealers. You were always smart’n that.”

“It was not I pissing on behemoths, but my dear deceased husband. I was a good little wife. Best acting I ever done. Good work ain’t never rewarded.” I'd made a miscalculation and I'd paid for it. I would continue to pay for it if I didn't get out of town by dawn.

Neteen grabs my arm and draws me into a utility closet as we listen to two guards approach, chatting.

“That idiocy why you killed ‘im?” She speaks under her breath, her dark-eyed gaze alight with curiosity. “Dabblin’ with the Fae dark market trade?”

She’s still trying to get me to admit to murder—she probably has money riding on the answer.

I shrug. “If I had, theoretically, it wouldn’t be the main reason, but it would, hypothetically, have weighed in my decision to end his miserable existence.”

The problem is my timing had been spurred more by a strong preference not to be gifted to another dear friend for the night for the sake of networking, and less by discrete strategy.

Discretion is everything to these high-class monsters. They’ll sell their wives and daughters, trade in dark market goods, fuck hellhounds and make deals with the hounds’ masters. . .but appearances must be kept. I’d been punished for breaking that wall of silence. I hadn’t wanted to go to jail, so I’d taken my story to the papers to try and change the laws that held widows responsible for their spouses’ debt. It had unveiled a slimy layer of Seanna City’s Human upper-class society, and their financial dealings with Coho and Pike Street.

“Too bad,” she says. “Ya had a good con going.”

“It was comfortable, yes.” In certain ways. In others, it was hells.

Neteen grins. “Ya still talk like ‘em too, though ya been in the joint for three years. Don’t sound like a Coho gal at all.”

“Appearances must be maintained. It gives me something to amuse myself with.”

I’ve worked very hard to ape the diction and manners of the Seanna City Human upper class, who ape the Aeddannari Lords. I’ve even learned to think in their prissy grammar. I'm not going to waste all those years of self-inflicted torture by devolving into honest wharf cant now. It will take far more than three years in prison to break me—I've suffered worse accommodations, after all.

“Let’s go,” she says, and we leave the utility closet.

I can't go through the front gates, and it cost a small fortune in bribes for the guard posted at the side service door to look the other way long enough for me to slip out.

We share a last, final handclasp, a thing of the wharfs which if any of my high society former friends had seen, would expose me as a fraud. But I'd already been exposed three years ago, the darling of the papers for the weeks of my drawn out trial, my background and rise dissected.

Of course no one could prove I'd been the hand behind Herbert’s death, or I would have been sent to an execution block, not merely a squalid debtors’ prison. No, my trial had been for bankruptcy, a crime in Seanna City, not murder—only a crime if caught. Though I suspect my life is due more to the fact Herbert’s creditors, including two Fae Lords, can only collect if I'm alive to be coerced into signing over what's left of his estate.

They may also assume I know the location of his hidden assets, and they are not stupid, so that's a fair assumption. Then they can kill me.

I make my way stiffly through the streets, slow from the injuries and several sleepless nights, my clothing smelling of mildew, wrinkled and not exactly clean, and probably three years out of fashion. Long skirt and frothy high-necked blouse cinched at the waist with a waspie, because three years ago Vittorian-core had been in style.

Almost there. I’ll collect the package, praying to the deaf Human gods that it’s been safely delivered undamaged, and then I have one more stop before we flee Seanna City for good, and head to the spring Sorting.

But I recognize the prickling along my spine as unease. The streets are quiet, too quiet considering I have a swath of bounty hunters on my heels. By now the Warden will have realized I slipped out of the wrong entrance. Truthfully, I'd assumed she was intelligent enough to watch all the exits, but Neteen must have come through for me.

Too quiet.

I can't quite believe I've managed to give Herbert’s enemies the slip, and of course because I don't believe in it, it's not true.

I spend the next two days running in circles.