Page 4 of Shadowed

Let her occupy my body. Let the wanting sharpen. It will make the having sweeter, and I have been patient for twenty years. I can afford the ache a little longer.

She's going to fix this, or nothing will.

My shadows ripple against the wall. The pattern isn't one I choose. It's the one they make when they're reaching for something they can't yet touch.

I don't stop them.

3

LILITH

Morrow's shop sits behind a butcher's in Bridgemire, which means it always smells like old blood and the desperation of people who sell things they shouldn't have. I like Morrow. He cheats me exactly the same amount every time, which is its own kind of honesty.

The bell above his door makes a sound like a cat being stepped on. Morrow looks up—a wide, florid man with muttonchop whiskers and the expression of someone who has spent thirty years buying stolen goods and has never once been pleasantly surprised by any of them.

"Morning, Lil."

"Morning." I put the documents on his counter. Fourteen pages, waxed cord, cream-coloured paper. He unties the cord, flattens the first sheet, and his face does something I've never seen it do before.

Not fear. The space just before fear, where the body knows and the mind hasn't caught up. His hands go still on the paper. His eyes move to me, to the documents, back to me. He's breathing differently.

"Where did you get these?"

"Fourth-floor study. Merchant's quarter." I lean against the counter. "Job came through you, Morrow. You sent me there."

"I know I sent you there." He's turning pages now, faster. The column of names. The shipping routes. His muttonchops are doing something complicated. "Do you know what these are?"

"Shipping manifests. Thirty-two names. Seven transport routes."

"Do you know whose shipping manifests?"

I didn't look closely. Looking closely is a luxury I generally can't afford. Morrow's face is telling me this was the wrong time to economise.

"Fae," he says, and his voice drops. "Not the pretty ones. The ones who move people instead of goods." He lays his hand flat on the documents like he's trying to stop them from getting up and walking away. "Transit records. Omega girls. Provincial families, most of them. Sold by the people who were supposed to protect them."

Thirty-two names. Thirty-two girls who were somebody's daughter, somebody's sister, somebody's Elena.

"Who hired the merchant to hold these?"

Morrow shakes his head. "Don't. Don't ask any of it. I'll pay triple and you forget the address, these pages, this conversation."

I stare at him. "Triple."

"Triple."

Morrow doesn't pay triple. Morrow once spent twenty minutes arguing down the value of a silver candlestick while I stood in his shop bleeding from a gash on my forearm. Morrow has haggled over ha'pennies. Morrow has haggled over ha'pennies while his tea went cold, which tells you everything about a man's relationship to money—he'd rather drink cold tea than pay a fair price for warm goods.

Triple means whatever I've stepped into frightens him more than his own cheapness, and that is a very high bar to clear.

I take the money. Count it—old habit, Morrow is honest about his dishonesty but crooked about his arithmetic—and the number is correct. More than I've held at once in six months. Rent, shoes, coat, and maybe coal if I'm careful. My hands want to shake with the relief of it and I don't let them because shaking in front of a fence is a negotiating weakness, even after the negotiation is over.

"Forget them, Lil." He says it to my back as I reach the door.

"Course," I say. I don't forget things. That is one of my better professional qualities and one of my worse personal ones.

The walk home takes me through Cutler's Alley, which I've been using since I was thirteen. I know this alley the way I know my Bramah—every tumbler, every shadow, every angle of stone. The shadow under the broken gas lamp pools to the left because the wall angles outward. Always has.

Today it's pooling to the right.