Listen.

  Listen because I don't repeat myself.

  My name is Eymire. Say it once and keep it to yourself. I am not a sermon. I am not a sin. I am not a saint in disguise. Not good. Not bad. Not righteous and not evil. Just a hand that moves things from point A to point B. That is all. Keep your moral judgements for the men who build monuments and write names on plaques. I move what the world wants to forget, and I get paid for it. Fuck, I get paid well.

  You want what I look like? Fine. Forgettable faces are useful. I am five foot nine. White. Short hair that I shove under the scarf so only my eyes show. Eyes are the trick people remember a look, not a name. A hat pulled low, a scarf up to the nose. If it's hot, the forehead shows; a strip of hair. Sometimes a kid in a market sees it and thinks it's enough. It isn't. Nothing about me is meant to be studied.

  We work in the underbelly. People call it the Warrens, Sub-Imperis, Blackcairn whatever the mapmakers call it on polite days. Names mean less down here. The space itself means everything: rooms stacked on rooms, balconies like ribs, pipes that bleed sewage and steam, lanterns hung on iron like a poor man's constellations. The city under the city breathes slow and constant. It smells like boiled bones and vinegar and old coin. It is louder than the capital at midnight. People whisper that the warrens are bigger than the capital itself. I don't argue with that. Bigger, nastier, truer. If the capital pretends, the warrens remember.

  The job tonight was simple in words move a crate from Wharf Seven to a cellar beneath the Pleasure District. Words lie. My work doesn't.

  The man who hired me met me under an arch that rained soot. He was all teeth and too-clean boots, which means someone else did his dirty and he enjoys it. He didn't look at my face. No one ever does. Payment was half up front, marked in a ledger with a blunt thumbprint. He didn't look at the crate. He looked at the ledger and the coin. That is also common. You learn a lot about a man by what he refuses to look at.

  The crate was a simple thing to most eyes. Plank wood, iron hoops. Smelled faintly of tar and something sweet under it that my stomach recognized before my brain did. I set my palm on the wood. Habit. Anchor. It tells people nothing, but it tells me everything. The ritual is small. One minute exact. Breath in. Breath out. Count the second one as if I still believe in seconds. It sticks if I mean it. I do. I always do.

  Inside because I can't help being a busybody with other people's things was a soft sound of breath. Human breath. Not an animal. Not a thing. A human. A living, breathing problem wrapped in wet cloth.

  I stood there and listened. The man with the boots smiled like a ledger and turned away. He didn't know. Good. He never does. He only needs me to move it. He did not care what else it cost me.

  Fuck.

  Don't think I was surprised. You think this work makes you soft? It doesn't. It just makes the line between living and blithe ledger thin. I have moved corpses, rare books that curse, and jewelry wrapped in curses that make my teeth rattle at night. I can move a body the same as a bale of cloth, but living things demand more. Passengers are different. They take a toll. They make the world notice. They pull at memory, at the edges of what the anchors hold.

  Carrying a human doubles the burn. Every hop leaves a scrap of me behind. A name, a face, a small thing I might otherwise remember cleanly gone. You pay with memory when you move the living. I don't like paying. Fuck, nobody likes that bill.

  Still. Work is work. I hefted the crate. It was heavier than the ledger promised. Of course it was. I tucked it under my arm and moved.

  The warrens do not like strangers lugging secrets. The alleys are crowded with overlords-of-trash, with pickers and children who have learned to look but not speak. They do not interfere unless their coin is threatened. They do not interfere unless someone smells weakness. A man carrying a heavy crate and walking alone looks like money with a mouth. That invites hands.

  Hands reached before I hit the first choke two men, faces inked, knives visible. Local gang. They call themselves the Knucklebones for fun. They were not expecting me. They were expecting a tired trader. They smelled like the wrong brand of courage.

  “Oi,” said one, voice like a gutter. “Wallet, friend. Or hand.”

  I could have said no. I say very few things. I don't speak unless I must. I do not trade. That is how I survive. But tonight I wanted to see how far names could get me.

  I adjusted the scarf. Eye to eye with the closest, I let a fraction of what I was do all the talking. Silence is a kind of shout down here. I could have bricked him. I could have pulled the knife from my belt and made the numbers change. I don't do that unless the ledger tells me to. His stupid grin tightened. The second man moved to my other side. Typical. Humans are predictable: they want to be part of a gang and they think that will make them safe. It makes them louder instead.

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  “Move it,” he said, because gangmen learn to order and never evaluate.

  I moved. I stepped past him like I had been planning it for a long time. The alley narrowed. The second man lunged. Fingers on the crate like a claim. That was their mistake. They chose a hand on the wood rather than my throat. Hands on the wood mean they became part of the cargo. That offers options.

  I don't like being watched when I anchor. The ritual wants solitude. Chaos is its enemy. Two hands on a crate while I anchor is a problem. I stopped. I felt the scrape under my palm like an answering pulse. Counted anyway. Sixty. The minutes are lie detectors, if you pay them enough attention.

  The butt of the knife on my hip hummed quiet against leather because the smith had loved the balance. I didn't reach for it. I let the crate take the sound of their fingers and the alley take their breath.

  When the anchor finished, I blinked.

  Call it blink, hop, slip the word is small. The thing itself is not. One breath, one step. The world compresses like a fist and then lets go. You do not run through space. You are taken and then set down. There is a weight to it. A ringing in the teeth. A small ache like a bruise behind your eyes. And when a living passenger is involved, the ringing is louder, the ache deeper. Memory's price goes up.

  We were in the Passage of Bones and then we weren't. We were under the Pleasure District where coin is worship and sins are sold by the hour. The gangmen were still mid-lunge, still with the smell of their breath in the open air of the first alley; twenty seconds later they were looking at the clean hole where I had stood and thinking their knives had cut ghosts. I was already setting the crate down near the cellar door. They howled and cursed and the city around them began to wake in warning. I could hear the echo ripple back up the line of alleys. A nice sound.

  The crate slid into the basement like it had never been moved. Hands unseen helped drag it out and into a room that smelled of vinegar and perfumed oil. A lamp was set low. Faces blurred in the half-light — buyers, inspectors, a woman with the pleasure queen's badges at her wrist. She didn't look at my face either. Why would she? My face is a ledger too. My hands are where they look.

  I set the crate on the table. When I opened it not because I wanted to act brave, but because curiosity is a currency too I saw a small man folded in on himself. Not a boy. Not a noble. Someone with a life and a name. Thin, yes. Breath steady. Eyes closed like he was asleep between storms. He smelled of spice and sweat and a fear I could taste. He wasn't meant for me. He was meant for other hands.

  “Move was clean,” I said, aloud at last because they all looked at me like beasts look at trophies. My voice is flat. People remember it in the way you remember a stone hitting the water. It makes rings and then silence.

  Payment was placed on the table heavy coins that clacked like promises. I counted them with a practiced hand, never looking at the faces. The woman with the badges slid a last parchment across. She said something about delivery and secrecy and rewards for discretion. I nodded. I do not say much.

  My lungs were sore from the jump. My head felt like the back of someone's throat after shouting. The living shipment had taken more than the ledger accounted for. I felt small bruises of memory slip a childhood alley I used to run, the sound of a woman laughing once at a poor joke gone, soft as ash between my teeth. I didn't cry. I don't. I clench things down like teeth on a bone.

  Before I left, the small man in the crate grunted and his eyes flicked. For a moment they fixed on me as if he could see the shape of the world through the cloth. There was no pleading in them. Just hunger. Just the simple housekeeping of someone surprised their life continued. He did not know me. He did not need to. He didn't ask for help. He only breathed, and that was enough for the ledger to be balanced.

  I walked back into the alley where I had arrived. The Knucklebones were gone, roasting whatever wounds they'd earned. The arch was the same, the soot the same. Things in the warrens like this job do not polish themselves. They just become part of the dirt.

  I spent what was left of the night in my hall beneath the undercity, where the sewers widen and forget their purpose. Stone arches leaned toward one another like tired men. Water whispered below the walkways, slow and black, carrying everything the city pretended it never touched. The hall wasn’t meant for living, but neither was I. A narrow room opened off the main passage, dry enough, quiet enough. I drank something scavenged and bitter, a taste like rust and old smoke, and let it settle in my chest.

  I counted the coins again. Habit. The bills were right. The ledger was clean. Above me, the city shifted its weight. Someone would notice the missing crate by morning. Gossip would start its crawl through taverns and tunnels. They would call it legend, prophecy, theft, salvation. It didn’t matter which. Words are cheap. Down here, only movement counts

  You asked if I care. Do I sympathize? Not in the way you mean. Sympathy is a soft thing and softness will break a man who moves bodies for coin. But there is a thing I keep: I do not enjoy watching a living thing sold like a tool. I don't enjoy the memory-tax either, fuck. Nobody enjoys that one. So I keep small promises to myself. I leave a coin sometimes where the children sleep. I don't free every chain. I can't. I also don't enjoy watching the same cruelty rerun forever.

  Tonight I finished the job. The crate got from point A to point B. The coins are in my pouch. The memory-burn is small, a bruise that will probably fade into another bruise. The city keeps breathing.

  That is my trade. That is my life. I told you at the start: I don't repeat myself. Remember the name if you must. Remember the rules if you dare. And if you ever find yourself with a crate and a man who says he moves things be polite. Pay up. Don't touch the wood.

  Fuck. I need sleep.

  Eymire.