POV: lift
Summary
Lift hurries through the slot at dusk to keep an appointment she has set with herself. Wyndle zips along at her ankles asking, hopefully, whether she means to scrounge spheres for the Stump and earn herself the woman's good favour; Lift dismisses the whole sphere business as either a laundering scheme for criminals or a guilt-and-trade hustle to clean dun spheres at a profit. Wyndle, sincerely shocked, sputters. Lift shrugs. Pity, she tells him, is a tool — anyone who can make you feel something has hold of you. It is the kind of thing she has built her short life around making sure no one ever does to her.
At the bottom of the ramp out of the city she finds a cleft in the rock and settles in to watch the upper checkpoint. The line of refugees is longer now than it was that morning, and a few enterprising merchants are working it for tents and clean water. She has no intention of trying the guards again. After a while the captain who chased her that day comes down the ramp, lets her shoulders slump out of sight of her post, and trudges home. Lift falls in behind her. Tailing is easy after dark in a city this thin on side streets; the captain lives only a few streets back, in a tenement carved as a sheer wall of cut shutters.
Wyndle grows a climbing rope of vines up the face of the building so Lift can scale it. They pass a few lit windows on the way and she helps herself to a shiqua off a washing line. She does not stop at the captain's window. She goes all the way to the top, climbs out onto a rim field of treb — grain pods bunched in narrow stone slits cut along the trench edge — and settles in for a long evening of staring down at the city. Yeddaw at night is pricked here and there by spherelight rising up out of the slots. She imagines the place lit properly, in a year of full spheres, as bright columns of light rising up out of the cracks. Below, the captain closes her shutters and hoods her spheres for the night. Lift tells Wyndle to keep watch and wake her if anyone goes in or the captain comes back out, then curls up on the stolen shiqua and falls asleep tangled in vines.
He wakes her at dawn with a comment that he finds himself in awe of her ingenuity and her stupidity at the same time. She is staring up at farmers on the rim already at work, who are staring back at the little Reshi girl asleep in their crop. Then she remembers what she is doing here, and Wyndle tells her: Darkness himself — the man who almost killed her in the royal palace — has just walked into the building below.
She admits, when pressed, that none of this is coincidence: she made a spectacle of her powers in front of the captain specifically so that the captain's report would draw Darkness here. She had not, however, expected him to find his way to it this fast — he must have a scribe watching incident reports. To Wyndle's appalled *why*, she tells him the rest of what she has been keeping to herself: the viziers in Azimir mapped Darkness's killings and could not work out a pattern, but she can. He is hunting someone in this city. Someone like her.
They climb down to the captain's window and Lift presses her ear to the shutters. Inside, Darkness is producing papers that name him a *special operative of the prince*, an ancient and rarely-used designation that the captain has never heard of and accepts because the document looks correct. He walks her through her statement: did the girl glow? Did the grain glow? Was she slick to the touch? Yes, yes, slicker than oil — and yes, she is of sound mind. He confirms each answer with the same neutral patience, has her sign, tells her to watch for the child and report the moment she is seen, and notes on his way out, idly, that her infused spheres are a lucky thing to have in the Weeping. Lift, clinging to the wall, is acutely aware that he has a Shardblade and could cut through the stone she is hanging on if he chose.
He leaves the building and steps out onto the morning street, black-and-silver uniform, the dark Makabaki skin and the crescent birthmark she remembers. He pulls his long-cuffed gloves on with the same neat efficiency he uses for everything, eyes that look at the people around him like they are stones. *Now what?* Wyndle whispers. Now, she says, swallowing, they follow him.