Elias Varek had carried heavier things through the Lower City. Few of them had been packed badly enough to strike back.
Something inside the crate slid as he took the next step and hit the timber with a dull knock. Halfway up a steep flight of stone stairs, Elias stopped, shifted his grip, and reconsidered the payment he had agreed to.
It was not enough.
His younger sister Mira would have told him so before he took the job, then reminded him afterward with the particular satisfaction of someone who had been right in advance. He could almost hear her, even after two years of nothing.
Elias settled the crate against his chest and kept going.
The stairs rose between houses pressed into the canyon wall. Balconies leaned over the passage; laundry stirred above his head. From a doorway came the smell of onions frying, followed by a woman’s warning to someone not to touch the pan. Water from a narrow fall farther up the rock ran along a gutter beside his boots. Far below, the river was mostly hidden by roofs and bridges, but the docks announced themselves anyway: hammer blows, winches, voices calling across water, the blunt complaint of timber against stone.
Direct sunlight had reached the upper terraces hours ago. Down here, the day arrived by reflection.
At the next turn, a handcart blocked the stairs.
One wheel had lodged against a ridge of stone. An older porter held the handles while a younger man crouched beside the wheel and pushed at it with both hands.
“You’ll have to wait,” the older porter said.
Elias looked at the cart, then back at the stairs he had just climbed.
“How long?”
The porter tightened his grip on the handles. “Until the wheel comes free.”
The younger man gave him a hard look. “I said lift when I push.”
“And I said there’s too much weight on that side.”
Elias lowered his crate carefully against the wall.
The older porter frowned. “What are you doing?”
“Becoming optimistic.”
He stepped to the loaded side of the cart. Most of the cargo had been stacked over the trapped wheel.
“Hold it steady,” Elias said to the older man. Then he nodded to the younger one. “You push when I lift.”
The younger man nodded. The older porter looked unconvinced but braced the handles.
They shifted the weight just enough for the wheel to clear the ridge. The cart lurched forward half a pace and stopped.
The younger man exhaled. “That’s it.”
Elias picked up his crate.
The older porter gave him a short nod. “Thanks.”
“Load the other side first next time.”
“That would require the people loading it to listen.”
“That sounds expensive,” Elias said.
The porter was already telling the younger man which sacks to move. Elias picked his way past before they blocked the stairs again.
At the next landing, a boy walking with his mother pointed at the crate.
“What kind of things are in there?”
“Metal fittings.”
“What kind of fittings?”
“The heavy kind.”
The boy looked dissatisfied. His mother shepherded him on, but Elias could hear him asking her the same question.
A little higher, soot still marked the wall around a boarded doorway. Someone had stacked firewood beneath it, leaving just enough room for people to pass.
A crowd slowed Elias again two landings later.
A public notice had been pasted over older notices beside a stair junction. Its principal achievement so far was to block half the stairway. Traders and boat crews stood close enough to read while everyone else squeezed around them.
“They want records from two years ago?” a man complained.
“For license renewals,” a woman beside him said.
“During the uprising?”
“That’s what it says.”
Elias read the notice over a trader’s shoulder. For a moment he wondered whether the review might turn up anything useful. Then the crate shifted against his ribs, and someone behind him asked him to move.
He adjusted his grip and continued up the stairs.
The workshop was four flights higher, built into an old stone arch at the head of a stair. By the time he arrived, his forearms were shaking.
The woman at the receiving bench was fitting a clasp to a piece of ironwork. She shifted her tools aside, inspected Elias’s delivery paper, and pointed to a clear space on the floor.
“Set it there. Gently, if you can.”
Elias lowered the crate. “I can try.”
She pulled off the lid and lifted a wrapped fitting. The wrapping had split at one corner.
“Who packed these?” she asked.
“Someone who wasn’t carrying them.”
“Clearly.” She inspected the metal, then counted the rest without looking up. “Sixteen. All here.”
She signed the paper and counted his pay into his palm.
“There’s a bench by the door if you need it.”
“Do I look that bad?”
“You’re holding your hand like the crate is still in it.”
Elias tried straightening his fingers. They objected. He thanked her and took the stairs back toward Deepwater, where the evening workers were beginning to crowd the lower passages.
A porter answered a complaint from a balcony without looking up. The air smelled of wet stone and cooked food.
For once, Elias wasn’t in a hurry. He bought a piece of bread from a stall and ate it as he walked.
He had meant to spend the evening with his notes. More names from the days after the uprising, more dates he had checked before. His search notebook held so many of them now that he could turn to almost any page and remember what was written there.
Some nights he went through them again.
At the assignments desk beside the river, Elias stopped to see what work was available tomorrow. A familiar dock worker, busy pinning notices to the board, looked back over his shoulder.
“Elias. Someone was asking for you.”
Elias took another bite of bread. “For work?”
“Don’t think so. Young woman from the trading berths. Said she knew your sister.”
He lowered the bread.
“Did she leave a name?”
“A note. Ask inside.” The worker lifted another sheet into place. “She came before midday. I told her you usually check here after a delivery.”
The assignments clerk produced a folded note from beneath a stone weight.
“She hoped you’d come today,” she said.
Elias unfolded it. The writer, Maren, asked him to meet her near her family’s warehouse at the trading berths before the day’s work ended. She had known Mira. She had found something in a license-renewal statement she thought he should hear about.
“Was she here long?” Elias asked.
“Only long enough to write that.” The clerk looked him over, then tapped the slate. “You wanted tomorrow’s early run?”
Elias looked at the unclaimed runs on the slate. They would be gone by the time he returned.
He folded the note and put it in his pocket.
“Not tomorrow.”
He followed the river toward the trading berths.
Deepwater had already slipped into its early dusk. The river caught what light remained above and broke it into strips between hulls and pilings. Warehouses crowded the bank beneath the canyon walls; loading platforms reached out over the water; ropes creaked under tension. Above them, the city rose in stacked terraces and black stone arches until the buildings became too small to distinguish.
Maren stood beside an open warehouse, checking marks on a row of cargo bundles. A worker reached for one, and she stopped him with a raised hand.
“That one’s for the other berth,” she said, turning the tag toward him.
He checked it and carried the bundle back. Maren made a quick correction to the ledger in her hand before noticing Elias approaching.
“Elias?”
“Yes.”
Her shoulders eased, though not much.
“Thank you for coming.”
“Your note said Mira.”
“I know.”
He looked at her more closely. She was younger than he had expected, with copper-red hair partly tied back and tired eyes that seemed unwilling to admit the working day was nearly over.
Maren nodded toward the warehouse.
“Could we sit somewhere quieter?”
She led him to a bench under a shallow awning within sight of the doors.
Elias took the place nearest the open side. From there he could see the loading platform and the workers moving between the warehouse doors. Maren set her ledger beside her.
For a moment neither spoke.
“I knew Mira before the uprising,” Maren said. “We were friends.”
“I didn’t know your name.”
“We never met. She talked about you, though. Mostly kindly.”
“Mostly?”
“She was fifteen.”
“Fair.”
Maren laughed once, quietly.
“What brought her down here?” Elias asked.
“At first she came because she liked the boats. Then she decided liking them wasn’t enough.”
“That sounds like her.”
“My father was teaching her the basics. Lines, loading, what to do when everyone else is busy and shouting. She wanted to be useful on the trip beyond the canyon. She hated the idea of being treated like cargo.”
Elias could hear Mira saying that too.
“Was she any good?”
Maren looked toward the river, considering the question.
“She improved.”
“That bad?”
“One morning my father showed her how to secure a line. Practice only. He had the sense not to put her near anything important.”
“That was wise.”
“She watched him once and told him she understood.”
Elias closed his eyes briefly. “Of course she did.”
Maren’s smile appeared properly now.
“She tied the line around an old post we were replacing, then pulled on it to prove the knot would hold.”
“What happened?”
“The post came out.”
Elias stared at her.
“It knocked a bucket into the river,” Maren added.
A laugh caught him before he could stop it.
“What did she say?”
Maren was already laughing.
“‘Well, the knot held.’”
Elias covered his mouth with one hand.
For a few seconds, Mira was not a name on old notes or a question passed between offices. She was fifteen and impossible, standing on a dock beside a rotten post, defending the only part of the disaster she considered a success.
“He still taught her after that?” Elias asked.
“She came back the next morning before he did.”
Elias cleared his throat.
“Did she learn?”
“Yes. Eventually.” Maren’s expression softened. “She kept asking how far the river went once you were beyond the canyon. What the settlements were like. Whether the sky really looked different when there weren’t walls around it.”
Elias tipped his head back. From Deepwater, the sky was a darkening strip held between stone.
“She asked everyone,” he said.
“She meant to find out for herself.”
“I know.”
He had known that part. He had not known about the lessons.
There had been whole mornings in her life he had known nothing about.
Maren’s gaze dropped to her hands.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Elias paused. “I’m glad you told me.”
A call came from inside the warehouse. Maren answered that she would be there soon, then turned back to him. The warmth had gone from her face.
“The record,” Elias said.
She nodded.
“My family’s license is up for renewal. Under the new review, they sent us a statement of older voyages recorded against our trading credentials.”
“The notice I saw today.”
“Probably.”
“And one is wrong.”
Maren looked at him sharply.
“How did you—”
“You didn’t ask me here because the paperwork was accurate.”
“No.” She drew a slow breath. “There’s a voyage listed a few days after the uprising. It says our registration was used for a journey from the river approaches.”
“Your boat?”
“The statement only gives our registration. It doesn’t name the vessel.”
“Could your family have made it?”
“The only boat we operated then was here, laid up for repairs. We have the workshop bills. It couldn’t have made that journey.”
Elias leaned forward.
The bills could be checked. But even if the boat had stayed in Deepwater, that did not tell him who had used the registration, or whether the entry was accurate at all.
“Can I see the statement?”
Maren’s hands tightened in her lap.
“I didn’t bring it.”
“You could cover the registration details. I’d only need the entry.”
“You’d still have a copy.”
“I wouldn’t show anyone where it came from.”
“And if someone else got hold of it?” Maren asked. “I can’t bargain away that risk.”
Elias waited.
“It’s not only the numbers,” she continued. “We already challenged the entry. The office took our objection and told us it had to be reviewed. If copies start moving around while our renewal is unresolved, my father will know exactly where they came from.”
“Your father doesn’t know you’ve contacted me,” Elias said.
She shook her head.
“And we’ve got a little over a month before the license expires.”
Inside the warehouse, something heavy struck the floor. Maren turned instinctively toward the sound, then forced her attention back to Elias.
“If the renewal stalls,” she said, “we have contracts we can’t fulfill. People here depend on that work. I’m not risking all of them because I found one date that might mean something to you.”
Elias turned toward the warehouse, where a pair of workers were arguing over where to stack a load, neither of them able to spare the time for the other.
“All right. Keep it,” he said. “But tell me what you can.”
Maren gave him the date and the approximate stretch of river named in the entry. She repeated what she remembered of the wording and admitted what she could not. The statement gave no crew, no passengers, no cargo. The office had accepted the family’s request for a correction but would not change the entry until the original records had been checked. It had not said when.
“Why come to me?” Elias asked.
Maren watched the water.
“Because of the date. Because Mira disappeared during the uprising. Because she was supposed to travel with us, and when I saw our family attached to a journey we never made…”
She stopped.
“I kept thinking about her.”
“It may have nothing to do with her,” Elias said.
“I know.” Maren faced him. “I wasn’t going to tell you I found Mira. But when I saw that date, I couldn’t decide to keep it from you either.”
Elias had spent two years listening to people who were certain of things they had not seen.
He preferred this.
“Would you write down the date and the stretch of river?”
Maren hesitated, then took the folded message when he offered it back. She turned it over and wrote two short lines on the blank side, adding nothing that identified her family.
When she returned it, Elias read the details once.
“This is all I can give you,” she said.
“It’s enough to ask a better question.”
Maren waited.
“I won’t use your family’s registration details,” Elias continued. “I’ll ask about the date and the kind of record first.”
“Where?”
“A checkpoint office. I’ve been there before.”
“Will they help?”
“Probably not.”
The corner of Maren’s mouth moved despite the tension.
“But they may tell me who won’t help next,” Elias said.
This time she smiled.
“Mira said you were stubborn.”
“She had poor standing on that subject.”
Maren watched him for a moment.
“She missed you when you were working.”
Elias’s hand stopped over the note.
There were several answers he could have given. That he had worked because they needed money. That Mira knew that. That there had been nights when coming home at all had been the only promise he could manage.
None of them belonged to Maren.
“I know,” he said.
A worker called Maren’s name again, more urgently.
She stood. “I have to go.”
“So do I.”
She took two steps toward the warehouse, then turned back.
“Elias.”
He waited.
“Please don’t make this worse for my family.”
He watched the workers hauling cargo through the open doors.
“I won’t take your papers into this.”
“I appreciate that.” Maren paused. “I just wish I knew what you’ll find.”
“So do I.”
Maren considered him, then nodded once and returned to work.
Elias stayed beneath the awning for another moment.
The river moved past the berths into the bend where the canyon swallowed it from view. Mira had meant to follow it beyond the walls. She had spent mornings here learning knots, making friends, preparing for a journey he had only begun to accept.
Elias folded the note.
In the morning he would return to the checkpoint, where he had asked for news of Mira more times than he cared to count. This time he had a date, a stretch of river, and a record to ask about.
Wrong was enough to work with.