Vol 3: Chapter 2

Alex sat at the workbench with the ledger shut in front of him, running through every way he could think of to get money moving before anything else started.

An advance from Thane was the fastest way to go, no question. It also meant piling more weight onto a structure that hadn't even finished settling from the last debt, and he knew better than to load up a joint before it had time to cure.

Taking more Warden contracts made the numbers work out cleaner, at least. Only every day he spent out chasing a bounty was a day the shop just sat there with nobody running it, like pulling a part out of a machine that was supposed to be working.

Precision. That's what this needs, not another patch job.

Selling off the salvage he'd been sitting on would fix the timing problem fast, no argument there. But it also meant starting out with less material than he already knew he'd need, and that wasn't the kind of ground he wanted to build this on.

Undercutting his own prices would move product quicker than anything else on the list. Only that's the kind of choice a shop doesn't walk back from later. Start cheap, and cheap is what people remember.

None of it held up once he actually leaned on it.

He sat back and let the frustration settle into something he recognized, the same shape it always took when a problem didn't crack open the way it should. He'd spent years running into this exact wall building the Arosaurer alone, piecing it together from whatever he could scrounge because there hadn't been anyone else to ask.

If I could come up with one idea that actually held up, I wouldn't have spent years scavenging parts alone for the Arosaurer.

Some part of him clocked that he was doing the same thing now, working the problem by himself instead of actually asking anyone for help, and he kept doing it anyway.

He shoved the ledger aside and got up before he could talk himself into another lap around the same four ideas. Sitting there wasn't fixing anything, so he headed for the door, no real destination, just away from the bench for a while.

He hadn't made it two streets before he nearly walked into someone coming the other way, both of them pulling up short at the same time. Foothill Row was already busy with the morning traffic, wagons rolling past toward the docks, and neither one had been paying enough attention to notice the other until they were almost nose to nose.

Sela Vantram straightened first, her ledger swinging on its strap across her chest the way it always did, sharp-eyed enough that she'd probably seen him coming before he saw her.

They'd been through more together since the road than most people got through in years, dinners at her estate, the Petras scare out past the firing range, her personally pushing the workshop's lease through Goran's office in a fraction of the time it should've taken. Running into each other empty-handed in the middle of the street, with nothing on either of their schedules, was the strange part.

Sela recovered first, giving him a onceover that had nothing to do with cargo weight for once.

"You're a long way from a workbench for this hour."

Alex rubbed the back of his neck, aiming for something between an answer and an excuse.

"Needed to walk it out. You know how it is."

"I don't, actually. I've never once solved anything by walking away from my ledger." A corner of her mouth moved anyway, the closest she came to teasing. "How's Rhian?"

"Insufferable. Growing too fast for her boots, according to Ziya."

Sela's expression eased, genuine this time.

"Tell her Mika's still asking when she's coming back to see the cats."

He asked after Corwin next, and how the roads had been holding up through the Foothills this season, and she answered plainly enough, though her attention kept drifting to the middle distance the way it did when part of her was already three problems ahead of the conversation.

He caught himself trailing off mid-sentence about the roads, the thought skidding off somewhere else entirely before he'd finished it.

"Sorry. I'm not actually thinking about the Foothills right now."

Sela's eyes came back to him fully.

"What are you thinking about, then?"

Alex opened his mouth to deflect it, something about the shop, nothing important, and what came out instead was closer to the truth than he'd meant to give her.

"Money."

He hadn't meant to say it that plainly, and once it was out there wasn't much point trying to pull it back.

"I don't have enough of it. Not for what I'm actually trying to build."

Sela didn't answer right away. She just watched him, the same look she gave a manifest that didn't add up yet.

Sela set her ledger against her hip without opening it, holding it the way she did when she was working out sums nobody else could see yet.

"I lost three guards and two wagons getting into this city." Her voice stayed even, the way it did when she was working something out loud rather than complaining about it. "One armed escort that doesn't get tired, doesn't need paying by the week. Doesn't bleed, either."

Alex hadn't expected the numbers to come from her side of the conversation.

"You're talking about buying one."

"I'm talking about more than that." Sela's thumb found the edge of her ledger and pressed flat against the cover. "I've watched you scavenge parts for years to build one Zoid by hand. I want in before you've got a business anybody else has noticed yet."

Alex didn't have an answer ready for that, and it showed.

"I don't do exclusivity deals. Not with guilds, not with anyone." Her eyes stayed on him, steady. "This is different. I'm not buying a service. I'm betting money on you, specifically, making Zoids a thing people actually buy."

Alex opened his mouth to walk it back, tell her to forget he'd said anything, and she cut him off before he got the first word out.

"I didn't say no."

Sela's thumb tapped the cover of the ledger twice, slow, the way it did when a number wasn't adding up the way she wanted. "Reliable to everyone, owned by no one." She said it like she was reading it off a wall somewhere, not like it was a thing she believed anymore right now. "That's been the rule since I took over the routes."

Alex waited.

"You'd be the first exception I've ever made to it."

She let out a breath through her nose, not quite a laugh, and closed her hand around the ledger's strap instead of opening it.

"We'll sort out numbers properly later. My office, not the middle of the street." Sela started walking again, slow, like she expected him to fall in step. "For now just know it's happening. I'm in."

Alex fell into step beside her anyway, out of habit more than agreement, and it took him half a block to notice his shoulders had dropped from where they'd been sitting all morning. The money problem was still there. It just didn't feel like something he had to carry alone back to the workshop anymore.

Advance chapters on my p@tR$0n/Najicablitz.