It was Flint’s idea to go to the east docks.

  Not for a job. Just to go. He showed up at Arbor Street on a Sunday morning when Zelig had no particular plan and said there was a food stall down there that did something with fried dough and river fish that he had been thinking about for three days and did Zelig want to come.

  Zelig had no particular reason not to.

  The east docks in the morning were a different place from the east docks at any other time. The working part of the day had not fully started yet, the heavy cargo movement and the shouting and the smell of it all at full intensity. It was just waking up. Dockhands moving at the pace of people not yet required to move faster. The water doing its grey morning thing, flat and wide, the opposite bank just visible through the haze.

  The stall was where Flint said it was, run by an old man who did not greet them or acknowledge them in any way but produced two portions without being asked the moment they appeared in front of him, which suggested Flint had been here before and had established a routine.

  They took the food and sat on the low wall at the edge of the dock with their legs hanging over the water.

  It was good. Zelig ate most of his before saying anything.

  “How did you find this place.” He said.

  “I was down here on a job two years ago.” Flint said. “Before the Hollow Hand. A small thing, just me, went wrong in a specific way that ended with me sitting on this wall for an hour waiting for someone to stop looking for me. The old man just appeared with food.” He looked at his portion. “I’ve been coming back since.”

  “Did he ever ask about the job.”

  “Never asked about anything.” Flint said. “Just makes the food.”

  Zelig looked at the old man behind the stall, who was doing something with oil and dough and looking at nothing.

  “Good quality in a person.” Zelig said.

  “Extremely.” Flint said.

  The water moved below them, slow and grey.

  They ate and watched a cargo boat making its way up from the south end, low in the water, whatever it was carrying substantial. Two men on deck doing something with rope in the specific unhurried way of people who had done the same task enough times that the task no longer required their full attention.

  “Can I ask you something.” Flint said.

  “You ask me things constantly.” Zelig said.

  “I mean something you’ll actually answer.”

  Zelig looked at him.

  “The Metarealm.” Flint said. “You go somewhere. I don’t know where. You come back different sometimes, not different in a way most people would notice, but I notice. And you don’t talk about it.”

  Zelig said nothing.

  “I’m not asking for details.” Flint said. “I know you well enough to know details are not on offer. I just.” He paused, looking at the water. “I want to know if you’re okay when you’re in there. Whatever it is.”

  Zelig thought about the pyramid with his father’s name on it. The boy on the curb with his head down. The third stone crumbling in his hand. The headaches on the way out.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “It’s complicated.” He said.

  “Most things worth doing are.” Flint said.

  “I’m okay in there.” Zelig said. “It’s work. Hard work but the kind that goes somewhere.”

  Flint nodded. That was apparently enough. He did not push further, which was one of the specific things about Flint that Zelig had come to rely on without deciding to. He knew where the line was and he stopped at it and he stopped there genuinely, not performatively, not in the way of someone waiting for you to volunteer more.

  “Okay.” Flint said. “Good.”

  They went back to the food.

  The cargo boat had docked by the time they finished eating. The dockhands were moving with more purpose now, the morning properly started, the machinery of the place coming up to full speed around them.

  Flint crumpled the paper from his food and held it for a moment.

  “When I was twelve.” He said. “There was a man on the Row who ran a legitimate business. Small, importing cloth, nothing interesting. He was from the Middling Ring originally, came down to the Underlayers for cheaper premises. He hired me to run messages for him. Paid well, always on time, never asked me to do anything that would get me in trouble.”

  Zelig listened.

  “I worked for him for eight months.” Flint said. “Then one morning I showed up and the premises were empty. Cleared out overnight. No note. Nothing.” He turned the crumpled paper over in his hands. “I asked around. Turns out he had made enough to go back to the Middling Ring. Just went. Didn’t tell anyone.”

  “What’s the point of the story.” Zelig said.

  “The point is I was twelve and I had been good at that job, genuinely good, and I had thought that being good at a job meant the job would continue.” Flint said. “And it doesn’t. It just means you were good at it while it lasted.” He threw the crumpled paper in the water. “So I decided after that to work for myself. Always. Whatever arrangement I was in, whatever crew, whatever job, I was the only person I was working for in the end.”

  Zelig looked at the paper floating away on the current.

  “That’s what I thought too.” He said. “For a long time.”

  Flint looked at him. “And now.”

  Zelig thought about Ervan’s handshake the first night. The way it had stayed with him. The thing he had not been able to name about the way Ervan stood.

  “Now I think it’s more complicated than that.” He said. “Working only for yourself is clean. Simple. But simple and correct are not the same thing.”

  Flint was quiet for a moment.

  “Marie.” He said.

  “Marie is part of it.” Zelig said. “Not all of it.”

  Flint looked at the water. “I don’t have a Marie.” He said. Not sadly. Just as a fact, the way Flint stated most facts, plainly and without dressing them up. “My family is not.” He paused. “We don’t talk. That’s the short version.”

  “I’m not asking for the long version.” Zelig said.

  “I know.” Flint said. “I’m just saying. The way you are with her. The way you notice things about her without making a performance of noticing. That’s not nothing.” He looked at Zelig. “Some people don’t have that and spend their whole lives not knowing what they’re missing. You know what you have.”

  Zelig said nothing.

  He thought about Marie at the table with the diagram woman’s garment and the note she was going to write back, longer than it needed to be, to a lonely woman who kept sending her work because the work was not the point.

  He thought about his jacket on her shoulders when she fell asleep.

  “Yes.” He said. “I know.”

  They sat on the wall for a while longer, not talking, watching the docks come fully awake around them. The noise level building. The water traffic increasing. The old man behind the stall still doing what he was doing, looking at nothing, producing food for people who appeared in front of him.

  “The Shining Place.” Flint said eventually.

  “What about it.”

  “When we get there.” Flint said. “Not if.”

  “When.” Zelig agreed.

  “I’ve been thinking about what it looks like from the inside.” Flint said. “Not the buildings or the streets. What it actually feels like to be someone who belongs there. Someone who grew up there. The way they think about the Underlayers.”

  “They don’t think about the Underlayers.” Zelig said.

  “Exactly.” Flint said. “That’s the thing. We know everything about them. Their ranks, their systems, their checkpoints, their social events. We’ve been watching them our whole lives.” He paused. “They don’t even know we exist.”

  “That changes.” Zelig said.

  “Yes.” Flint said. “It does.”

  They both understood what the other meant by that and neither of them needed to say it out loud so neither of them did.

  The water went on doing its grey morning thing below them.

  The docks went on waking up.

  Two people from the Row sitting on a wall in the early part of a Sunday with the whole problem of their lives ahead of them and enough of the right things between them to face it without flinching.

  That was enough for a Sunday morning.

  That was, in fact, more than enough.