BAM
Luckily, the door was open. Cleber flew through the entrance and landed on his back in the street, blinking at the sky, not quite understanding at what point his life had taken that turn.
The leader of his group closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. I know that face. It’s the face of someone who already knew his subordinate was going to do something stupid and just didn’t know when.
“Pardon me. I had to take out the trash.” The woman wiped her hands on her apron and looked around the whole room. “But I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble now. Will we?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered.
“Not at all. We’re the ones who should apologize for the commotion in your establishment.” The leader stood up and gave a short bow. “My name is Joseph. The idiot you threw out is called Cleber. He’s new, he doesn’t know the rules of your restaurant yet.”
“Then make sure you explain them next time. I don’t like doing that one bit.” She sighed. “Anyway.”
She crossed the room to our table and knelt in front of Lili, so that the two of them were at eye level.
“Want more? In my place, nobody leaves hungry.”
Lili understood she meant the ice cream. Before answering, she looked at me.
“Don’t look at me. She asked you.”
“Can Lili?” she asked the woman.
“Of course, sweetheart.”
On the other side of the room, Joseph was watching the scene with a crease between his eyebrows. He was wondering why the owner was so kind to us. He was wondering who we were. You could read it from three tables away.
“You’re newcomers, aren’t you?” the woman asked.
“We are.”
Rafael and Sun glanced at me sideways, surprised that I had spoken so openly. I had my reasons.
“Is this girl related to any of you?”
“No. We found her along the way,” said Rafael.
“I see.” She turned back to Lili. “What’s your name, child?”
“Lili.”
“I’m Marla, Lili. Where are your parents?”
Lili lowered her eyes to the empty bowl and didn’t answer.
“Hm. It seems that no matter the world, people are all the same.” Marla didn’t put on a look of pity. She scowled at someone who wasn’t there. “How would you like to live with me?”
I tensed. I opened my mouth to say something, not even knowing what yet, and Lili spoke first.
“No.”
It came out without thinking, round and whole, a no I had never heard from her.
“Why?” Marla didn’t seem surprised.
“Um… because it’s fun.” Then something came unstuck in her. “Oh! You should have seen it! There was a huge pig, and it came running at Lili, and Kai held its legs and shouted ‘Stop!’, like this, ‘STOP!’, and it stopped!”
She imitated the shout with her hands thrust forward, and the whole room looked.
“Oh. Is he that strong?”
“Yes! Big brother is strong. He protects Lili and gives her candy. And Mr. Rafael looks scary, but he’s kind. And Sun is a dummy.” She thought for a moment. “But he’s funny.”
“At least she said I’m funny,” Sun remarked, to no one.
I didn’t hear the rest. I got stuck on one word.
Big brother.
No one had ever called me that. On Earth, I was the only child of an empty house. In Erebus, going by the index, I had been a leader, a commander, the Black Radiance, never anyone’s brother. Now a fourteen-year-old girl who looked twelve had given me that name in the middle of a sentence about pigs, without even noticing she was giving it.
I did what I always did with things like that: I looked at the ceiling and counted the beams. There were eleven.
“That’s good. That’s good,” Marla was saying. “Sounds like you’re having a lot of fun.”
“I am!”
Marla stood up, her knees cracking, and went back to the counter.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“Off you go, I’ve kept you long enough. Take care of yourselves.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you very much.” I bowed slightly.
“Don’t mention it. Come back anytime, and come hungry.”
*
I nodded to the other three and left. We had barely gone ten steps down the street when Joseph caught up with us.
“Hey, you!”
“Hm? What do you want?”
“Nothing. Quite the opposite. I came to apologize for the trouble a moment ago.”
“It’s fine. No need.”
“Please, accept this.”
He held out his open hand. A necklace, with a fine chain and a green stone in the center. From the work on the setting, it was at least Rare.
“I appreciate the gesture, but I’ll decline. Sorry, we’re in a hurry.”
I turned and headed for the tower with the other three behind me.
It was tempting. Of the four of us, only Lili and I had anything of that level. But a gift from a stranger in Erebus is never a gift: it’s an IOU tied with a satin ribbon. If I accepted, I’d owe a favor to someone I didn’t know, and that favor would be called in at the worst possible moment.
Rule number one: never accept a gift from a friendly stranger. He always comes to collect later.
“At the restaurant,” Rafael said, once we were far away. “You knew what was going to happen.”
“The waitress owns the bar. A tier 2 adventurer, on top of that.”
“How do you know?” asked Sun.
“I just know. In time, you’ll know just by looking too.”
It was half true. I knew Marla was tier 2 from the way she moved, never needing to hurry. But the other half was the index. There was a line about her, a short one: Marla. Bar near the tower. In the early years, the only table where they didn’t charge you for what you didn’t have.
The early years were a blur even for the book. The index only said I had arrived alone and with no experience, that I had survived the first year “without a name,” whatever that meant, and that I had barely made ends meet in the first and the second. Later, when I became strong enough to carry weight in cities that size, I had long since left. Of that city I knew very little. I knew where to step and where not to. I knew about a table in a wooden bar.
Without a name. I kept it in my mouth, like a pit.
“Tier 2, that lady,” Sun said. “I’d have walked past her on the street without even looking.”
“That’s why you don’t judge anyone by their face. Otherwise you end up like the guy who went flying out the door.” I flicked his forehead. “And Marla is a very good person. You saw.”
“I did. I’ll remember.”
“Lili.” I waited for her to look at me. “Everything she said is serious. If someday you’re in trouble and you have no one else, go to Marla.”
She nodded. Then, without anyone asking, she took hold of the end of my sleeve and didn’t let go again, the same way she held the robe to check whether it was real. I didn’t pull my arm away.
*
“The second floor, kid,” said Rafael. “Any idea what’s there?”
“None. Absolutely none.”
It was true, and it was strange to say. The index had lines about people, about items, about traps, but nothing about the second floor. The other time, either I had never gone into it with that group, or I had never come out.
“Right.” Rafael stopped and pointed with his chin. “Either way, first we’ll have to deal with that.”
At the base of the tower that rose up to the sky, a bunch of people in shiny equipment were watching and questioning every group that tried to go in. On their chests, three different symbols. One of them was a planet with a ring.
Lili squeezed my sleeve harder.
“Wait here.”
I went over to a pair of adventurers standing near the steps and stood beside them, quiet, listening closely.
“This is so unfair. Questioning everybody. That’s not how they’re going to find out who cleared the first floor,” said a man with short brown hair and an ordinary face.
“Yeah! It’s irritating having to obey these morons,” agreed the other, blond, with freckles on his cheeks. “I bet they’d charge us to get in if the guild didn’t forbid it.”
“What can you do. They’re the three biggest factions in the city.”
“Right. This has got to be the doing of those Expansion Reach scoundrels. Rare Atom and Los Tundras are just going along with it.”
“They don’t usually do this. I keep wondering what happened to make them team up like this.”
“Hey, friends.”
“Ugh!” The blond jumped. “Where’d you come from?!”
Same reaction as Sun. I really do need a little bell.
“Sorry for the scare. Please, accept this as a token of good faith.”
I held out ten shillings. The brown-haired one took them at once.
“Sure, no problem. What do you need?”
“Nothing much. It’s just that I couldn’t help overhearing you gentlemen talking about those brutes at the entrance to the tower. I’m new in town and don’t know the local powers. Could you help me?”
I took my last dozen shillings out of my pocket and left them in plain sight, distracted on purpose.
Rule number two: bought information is cheaper than information discovered the hard way.
“Of course, young man!” The brown-haired one, a little older, took the coins out of my hand. “Polite people like you deserve it. Well then. The city has a lot of factions, but it’s small and there aren’t many resources around it, so the big ones don’t take much interest.”
“But don’t let that fool you,” the blond added. “They were all third-rate factions, with one tier 3 each. Except Expansion Reach, nobody knows how, managed to make another one. That’s what broke the balance.”
“Is that why the other two obey?”
“Not exactly,” said the older one. “Even though it reached the minimum to be second-rate, it doesn’t have the strength of a real one. It doesn’t have the power to boss Rare Atom and Los Tundras around. There’s something else going on.”
“Could Expansion Reach have found someone bigger backing them?”
“You’re sharp, young man.” The blond looked at me with new eyes. “It’s a good theory. It would even explain how the vice-leader became tier 3 out of nowhere.”
A vice-leader who becomes tier 3 out of nowhere. A bald boss who sends three thugs after a newcomer over a turned-down recruitment. A girl who freezes when she sees a planet with a ring.
I still didn’t know how those pieces fit together. But I was getting good at noticing when they belonged to the same puzzle.
“I see. Thank you very much for your help, gentlemen.”
I bowed slightly and went back to the group.
Rule number three, newly drafted: set aside money for rule number two.
“So?” Sun asked.
“So we’re going through the inspection.” I adjusted the hood, without pulling it up. “Look like scared newcomers.”
“That I don’t need to fake,” said Sun.
“I know. That’s why you’re going first.”