Sixty flights down and Fenn’s shoulders had stopped complaining about the satchel straps somewhere around forty-two.
That was the trick with pain on the stairwell you let it settle into the rhythm of your steps and it stopped being pain, became just another fact of the job.
Boot on metal, weight shifting, the particular ache that told you you’d been doing this long enough to know better and were doing it anyway.
The delivery manifest said agricultural supplies, which meant seeds in sealed packets that weighed almost nothing and took up most of the bag’s volume anyway.
Fenn didn’t love seed runs.
No heft to them, nothing to brace against when you were trading up or down a landing.
Just air and paperwork, and paperwork never impressed anyone.
He made the turn at fifty-eight, paused to let a cleaning crew pass didn’t look at their faces, that was porter courtesy and kept moving.
The records clerk worked out of a storage bay two levels below the agricultural depot, which meant Fenn’s route took him past Dutch anyway.
Unavoidable.
Dutch had been waiting for an excuse to corner him about the upper routes for two weeks now, and Fenn had been ducking him just as long.
He made it to sixty-one before Dutch stepped out of an alcove like he’d been timing it.
“Fenn.”
“Dutch.”
“Heard something interesting.” Dutch leaned against the rail, arms crossed, doing the thing where he blocked just enough of the stairwell to make you stop without making it obvious he was making you stop.
“About a certain stairwell incident.
Judicial involvement.
Somebody saw something they weren’t supposed to see.”
Fenn adjusted the satchel strap.
Didn’t bite.
“Sixty flights, Dutch.
You want gossip or you want me to make quota?”
“I want,” Dutch said, “to know if the routes you’re running have anything to do with who’s being watched.
Because if Judicial’s tightening up on the mid-levels, I need to know which landings to avoid.
Professional courtesy.”
Professional extraction, more like.
Dutch wanted the upper routes because they paid better and complained less, and he’d use anything he could scrape together as leverage to get them.
Fenn smiled.
Didn’t mean it.
“You hear a lot of things, Dutch.
Most of them two days late and wrong in the middle.”
“This one came from a porter who was on forty-seven when it happened.
Saw the whole thing.
Screen went strange, then a deputy climbed past looking for witnesses.”
“Strange how?”
“Like somebody asked it to be something it wasn’t.”
Fenn’s pulse didn’t change.
Hadn’t survived eleven years on this job by letting his face do the talking for him.
He shifted the satchel to the other shoulder, buying a second to think.
Dutch wanted the routes.
Fine.
The routes were worth protecting, but not with a fight Dutch could win by going around him.
Better to give him something small and true, let him think he’d won.
“Heard the same,” Fenn said.
“Also heard Judicial opened a quiet file and closed it inside a week.
Malfunction.
No witness worth the paperwork.”
Not true, but plausible.
Dutch’s eyes narrowed.
“You sure about that?”
“I’m sure,” Fenn said, “that my manifest says agricultural and my timer says I’ve got twelve minutes to make the drop, and if you want to stand here and trade rumors you can do it without blocking my stairwell.”
Dutch stepped aside.
“Fair enough.
But if that file opens back up, I want to know before it lands on my routes.”
“You’ll know when everyone knows,” Fenn said, and kept walking.
Two flights down, the satchel lighter by exactly nothing, and Fenn ran the numbers in his head the way he always did.
Dutch had a rumor.
Rumor wasn’t fact, but it was close enough to be dangerous if it started moving laterally through the guild.
The porter who’d been on forty-seven Fenn knew three people who ran that landing regularly, and two of them owed him favors.
He could isolate the source, maybe.
Slow the spread.
Or he could do what he was actually planning to do, which was reroute a piece of paperwork that hadn’t landed on his routes by accident.
The records clerk’s bay was tucked behind the agricultural storage, accessible only if you knew which unmarked door to take and which shift the clerk actually worked.
Fenn knew both.
He knocked twice, waited, and let himself in when the lock clicked.
The clerk didn’t look up from his terminal.
“You’re late.”
“Timer says I’ve got nine minutes.”
“Timer’s generous.” The clerk tapped a key, and a screen above the desk refreshed with a list Fenn couldn’t read from this angle.
“You bring it?”
Fenn pulled the length of copper wire out of his satchel, set it on the desk.
Sixty centimeters, double-wrapped insulation, the kind that didn’t come through requisition channels anymore.
The clerk looked at it the way a man looked at something he’d been trying to source for three months and hadn’t.
“That’ll do,” the clerk said.
Pocketed the wire without ceremony.
“What do you need?”
“Shift logs,” Fenn said.
“Judicial request.
Came through yesterday, flagged priority.”
The clerk’s fingers paused over the keyboard.
Didn’t stop, just paused.
“You know which one?”
“Mid-levels.
Maintenance and screen-tech rotations, last four days.”
The pause lengthened.
The clerk turned in his chair, looked at Fenn properly for the first time since he’d walked in.
“That request is active.
You’re asking me to slow an active Judicial priority.”
“I’m asking you,” Fenn said, “to let the backlog be what it is.
You’ve got three requests ahead of it already, and nobody’s breathing down your neck about turnaround time yet.
Log says you’ve got forty-eight hours before it’s overdue.
Use them.”
The clerk’s expression didn’t change.
He was doing math in his head, same as Fenn had been doing math on the stairwell, weighing cost against favor against the number of times Fenn had made a delivery when the official channels said it couldn’t be done.
“Forty-eight hours,” the clerk said.
“After that, it moves.”
“Fair.”
The clerk turned back to his terminal.
Typed something Fenn didn’t ask to see.
“We’re even now.
Don’t come back here asking for another delay on the same file.”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
Fenn left.
Satchel lighter by one length of copper wire, ledger heavier by the weight of a favor he’d just spent without asking anyone’s permission.
The records clerk would slow the request.
Maybe it bought enough time, maybe it didn’t.
Either way, the shift log wouldn’t land in Judicial’s hands today, and if Corliss was building a case on shift-pattern overlap, she’d have to wait two more days to confirm it.
He made the agricultural drop with four minutes on the clock, turned around, and started the long climb back up. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Eleven years running this stairwell, Fenn had developed an opinion about the kind of favor that paid itself back and the kind that just sat in your ledger like a debt you’d never collect on.
The copper wire was the latter.
He’d sourced it two months ago off a decommissioned panel somebody had been too lazy to strip properly, and he’d been holding it because wire like that always found a buyer eventually.
Using it to slow a Judicial request on behalf of an electrician he’d traded jokes with exactly twice was the kind of thing his younger self would’ve called stupid.
His current self didn’t have a better word for it, but he did it anyway.
By the time he hit thirty, he’d logged the trade in his head the way he always did.
Copper wire, market value: two chits, maybe three if you found the right buyer.
Paid to a records clerk for a forty-eight-hour delay on a priority Judicial request.
Return on investment: unknown.
Likelihood the favor ever gets repaid: low.
Fenn didn’t write it down.
Didn’t need to.
His ledger was in his head, had been for eleven years, and this entry sat at the bottom of the page under a category he didn’t have a name for yet.
The one where you did something because you liked someone and didn’t examine why.
He kept climbing.
By fifty he was back in the groove, shoulders remembering the rhythm, boots finding the cadence that let you take a hundred and forty-four levels without hating yourself by the end.
The stairwell was quiet this high up.
Always was, past forty.
The people who lived up here didn’t make noise, didn’t draw attention, didn’t need porters as often because they didn’t want the trail of favors that came with it.
Fenn liked the quiet.
Gave him space to think.
He thought about Cole.
New to the crew, competent enough that Andrus had stopped watching him like a supervisor two days in.
Quiet.
Kept his head down.
Fixed boards faster than the logs said he should’ve been able to, which wasn’t Fenn’s business except that it made him wonder what else the man could do that didn’t show up on a manifest.
He thought about the stairwell incident.
The screen that had resolved into something it wasn’t supposed to be.
The fact that a Judicial deputy had climbed past looking for witnesses, and the fact that the file was still open even if Dutch thought it wasn’t.
He thought about the shift-log request, sitting in a records bay two levels below agricultural, delayed by forty-eight hours because Fenn had traded a length of copper wire for time.
And he thought about the fact that he’d done it without asking Cole if he needed it.
That was the part that stuck.
Fenn didn’t do favors for people who hadn’t asked.
That was the rule.
You asked, he quoted you a price, you paid or you didn’t.
Clean.
Professional.
No room for someone to come back later and say they hadn’t wanted the help in the first place.
But he’d done it anyway.
He made quota with two minutes to spare, dropped the last package at the depot on twelve, and signed off the manifest with the same signature he’d been using for eleven years.
The depot clerk barely looked at him.
That was fine.
Fenn didn’t need to be looked at.
He walked out, satchel empty, and let the stairwell take him home.
Somewhere sixty flights down, a records clerk was letting a Judicial request sit at the bottom of a queue for forty-eight hours.
Somewhere four flights up, an electrician was finishing his shift and didn’t know someone had just bought him two days he hadn’t asked for.
Fenn logged it in his head.
Copper wire, paid.
Favor, banked.
Return, unknown.
And underneath that, in the part of the ledger he didn’t say out loud: This one was free.
He didn’t tell a soul.