Chapter 8: Night Shift

Chapter 8: Chapter 8: Night Shift

The coin had been in his jacket the whole time.

Elias found it two days after the cathedral, when he finally worked up the courage to wash the jacket and turned out the pockets. Most of what he’d hauled was scattered across a collapsed dungeon now, thrown at the Ossuary King one bag at a time. But one relic coin had slipped through a tear in the lining and stayed there: tarnished gold, stamped with a drowned saint on one side and a crown of fingers on the other.

It was faintly warm. Irregular mana did that.

Technically, it belonged to Ironfang. Every scrap a porter carried belonged to the guild. Elias turned it over in his fingers, thought about stone palms and stone walls and nothing personal, Pierce, and decided that Ironfang could file a complaint.

He didn’t take it to the Association exchange, where every sale was logged. He took it to Ozzie’s.

Ozzie’s Salvage sat in the Market District between a phone repair stall and a noodle shop, under a hand-painted sign that read WE BUY GATE GOODS. NO QUESTIONS. Ozzie was sixty, bald, and wore a jeweler’s loupe on a chain like a pendant. He took one look at the coin and stopped chewing his gum.

"Where’d you get this?"

Elias pointed at the sign.

Ozzie studied him for a long moment. Then he ran the coin under a scanner, read the number, and whistled low. "Irregular-touched. Collectors go crazy for this stuff." He named a price.

Elias managed not to react. It was more than four months of carrying bags.

He rode two buses to Merridan General with the envelope buttoned into his inside pocket and set it on the billing counter in front of Mr. Halloran, along with all three pink notices.

"All of it," Elias said. "Please."

Mr. Halloran counted the cash twice. Then he looked up, and for the first time since Elias had known him, he didn’t look sorry. He looked startled, and then, quietly, glad.

He stamped the notices PAID. Elias kept them anyway.

Mira was waiting for him with her arms crossed.

Not literally, since the drip line made that hard, but in spirit. Her tablet lay facedown on her lap, and she wore the look their mother used to get when one of them came home with a ripped shirt and a story.

"Nurse Ruiz says my account’s clear," she said. "All of it. Even the stuff from March."

"That’s great news," Elias said, sitting in the cracked chair. Left side.

"Where did the money come from?"

"Hazard bonus."

"Ironfang doesn’t pay hazard bonuses. Ironfang doesn’t pay regular bonuses. Dex told me they once charged a porter for a broken flashlight."

"Survivor’s compensation," Elias tried. "The Association has a fund."

"Since when?"

"Since... recently. It’s new. Very new."

Mira stared at him. Elias stared back and tried to look like someone who had never in his life sold guild property to a man named Ozzie.

He was a terrible liar. He always had been. At twelve, he’d sworn to their mother that he hadn’t eaten the last slice of birthday cake, with the frosting still on his chin.

"Eli," Mira said.

"Yeah?"

She opened her mouth. Then she closed it, and something in her face went soft and tired, and she sank back into her flat pillows. The blue lines on her arms looked darker against the sheets than they had last week.

"Fine," she said. "Keep your secrets. I’m too tired to fight you today."

"You’re never too tired to fight me."

"I’m saving it." Her eyes were already closing. "Tomorrow, I’m going to interrogate you so hard."

"Looking forward to it."

She was asleep before he finished the sentence. Elias sat there for a long time, listening to the stabilizer hum, before he finally went home.

The Rat Warrens opened at midnight under a highway overpass on the south side. It was an E-rank gate so worthless that no guild had bothered to clear it in two weeks, and the Association listed it on the public board for solo clears. Elias signed in at the bored kiosk by the tape, flashed his license, and walked in alone.

In the first dark tunnel, he stopped being alone.

"Aveline," he said.

The air folded open, white-gold, and she stepped out in full armor with her sword drawn and shield raised. She took in the dripping brick walls, the black water in the gutters, the faint scratching of claws in every direction.

"Sewers," she said. "Wonderful."

The rats were the size of dogs, grey and scabbed, with too many teeth, and they hunted in packs of six or seven. The first pack hit two minutes in. Elias froze, the way he always had as a porter, and Aveline cut down four of them before he remembered how to breathe.

When it was over, she turned to him. "Again," she said. "But this time, stand where I tell you."

She taught him the way she must have taught squires in Carrow: patiently, repetitively, and without mercy.

Stand here. Behind her left shoulder, on the shield side, where nothing could reach him without going through her first. Not there, in the open, where a flank could swallow him. Watch the tunnels, not me. I see what’s in front of me. You see everything else.

So he watched. Keen Observation was the one thing he’d always had, and down here it finally had a use. He spotted the second pack before she did, a shiver of movement in a side tunnel.

"Left," he said. "Seven."

She pivoted, and they died.

When to call me forward: when a pack commits and bunches in a narrow tunnel where it can’t spread out. "Forward!" And she drove into them like a battering ram.

When to pull me back: when she pushed too far, when a pack circled behind, when he saw something she couldn’t. "Back!" And she gave ground instantly, without argument, trusting his eyes over her own.

By three in the morning, he wasn’t just calling the fight. He was in it. When a rat broke past her shield, Quick Step snapped him sideways out of its path, and his guild dagger found the soft spot behind its skull. He didn’t think about it. His body simply knew where to be.

Aveline nodded once and said nothing. From her, that was a parade.

Near the heart of the warrens, they found an iron grate and, behind it, a cavern where something enormous was breathing in the dark. The Rat King. Its eyes caught their light, red as coals.

Aveline lifted her sword. Elias put a hand on her arm.

"If we kill it, the gate closes," he said. "If we don’t, nobody else wants this place. It’s ours. We can come back every night."

She looked at him, and then she smiled slowly. "A porter’s thinking."

"An assassin’s," he said.

They left the king breathing.

When they came out under the overpass, the sky was going grey. Elias’s legs were shaking and his ribs ached, and the windows were waiting.

[Level up: 2 → 3.]

[Level up: 3 → 4.]

[Level up: 4 → 5.]

[Rank up: E → D.]

[New summon slot unlocked. Summon slots: 1 / 2.]

He stared at the last line until the letters blurred.

"Not tonight," Aveline said beside him. "You can barely stand."

She was right. He let her go back to the grey place, and he stood alone under the overpass, watching the sun come up over Merridan. For the first time in years, he wasn’t counting what he owed.

He was counting what came next.