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At the upper checkpoint above Yeddaw, guard captain Hauka works a queue of carts down into the immigrant quarter. The day's awkward customer is a cart of "tallew" from Azir driven by a too-soft-handed man in fine Liaforan boots and a silk belt. She probes the grain with her spear-butt for hidden refugees, finds none, and instead pieces the picture together herself: this is no farmer, the grain is overripe rather than new, and the war between Emul and Tukar — heated up under the rumours of Tukar's god-king — has left Emuli fields empty of the men who would otherwise defend them. He has stripped a neighbour's crop while their backs were turned and trucked it here to fence.

She kicks the situation up to Nissiqqan, the deputy scribe of immigration on duty, an older man wrapped in a yellow shiqua with the face pulled down — they are in Tashikki home lands, where Tashi is taken to keep Nun Raylisi at bay. Hauka and Nissiqqan have the easy rhythm of colleagues; he digs through his civil-code folder for a clause that lets him invoke triple tariff on a smuggler-and-fence and earmark the extra revenue to feed refugees, then mentions he has infused spheres to trade for her information later — a needed luxury in a city where open flame is forbidden. Hauka returns to the smuggler with the tariff forms and watches him fold under the implied threat that the alternative is full confiscation.

Then the tarp on the back of his cart rustles and a small, dark-tan-skinned Reshi girl sits up from the grain, mouth full of raw kernels and a complaint that they taste terrible. Hauka offers her a Sun Day tuk-cake if she comes out quietly; the girl thanks her, vaults from the grain over Hauka's grabbing hands, plants her feet briefly on the captain's shoulders, and lands behind her. Hauka stumbles, the smuggler swears, and Hauka chases the child into the guardhouse, club drawn for intimidation rather than damage. Inside, the girl slides across a wooden floor as if it were greased, ducks under a long table where Hauka's guards and the resident scribes are eating, then heaves the whole table over to spread their lunch across the floor, comes up with a pancake in her mouth, and — when cornered — squirts out a slot-window too narrow for any person, child or otherwise, to fit through.

Hauka and two guards barrel onto the roof to find her, find nothing, are told by the scribes that she is *back inside*, and then watch her skid back out into the open ground with one pancake in each hand and a third in her mouth. They tackle the girl just past the guard post; Hauka actually gets a hand on her ankle, but the two guards behind topple onto Hauka, and the girl, untroubled in the pile, calmly reaches behind her and pops the hitch pin out of the smuggler's cart. The hook lifts straight out of its seat as if it weren't resisting at all.

The cart begins to roll backward toward the wooden fence at the edge of the trench. Hauka throws herself off the men, off the girl, and onto the side of the cart in a heap, hands set against the stones, certain that if she fails this thing is going to plummet two stories straight down onto the heads of the refugees in the immigrant quarter. The cart slows and finally stops, ugly and ridiculous, with her braced under it. The girl, still chewing, leans down to acknowledge that the tuk-cakes really are good.

Then the child kicks open the tailgate. The grain comes out — not in a heap, but liquid, glowing softly as it goes, pouring out of the cart in a way physics is not really willing to explain. Hauka watches it shower down the cliff face and over the immigrant quarter, where she can hear shouts of praise as it blankets the streets. The girl smiles at her once and jumps off the back of the cart after it. The two other guards finally remember they are guards and grab the cart with Hauka; the smuggler is screaming, ringed by pools of red angerspren. The captain steps to the edge and looks down. The girl is gone. There is a strange black dust at her feet that the breeze takes a moment to scrub away. She tells her sergeant to take the next hour at the gate. She has, she realises, no idea how she is supposed to write this up.