Lili Crow - Wayfarer

Laurissa sometimes stared hungrily at the star sapphire, though it kept itself dull and dead in her presence. It always had. It was far more active nowadays, though, and sooner or later something was bound to happen.

Anyway, Ellie turned the stone toward her palm before she caught the bus at Perrault and 42nd, so that only the silver band showed. It could have been any metal, really, and she was safe enough.

The bus lurched and swayed all the way up 42nd to Grimmskel, and then lumbered toward Deerskin Station. It was stuffed with cabbage-reeking jacks—feathered and furred, those born twisted by Potential into odd shapes, full of anger and confined to the lowest-paying jobs—and a shapeless mass of non-charmers, some smelling of alcohol and some of nicotine, all of desperation.

Often Ellie wondered if she gave off the same invisible aroma.

She hopped off the lumbering silver beetle of a bus at Deerskin and set off for Southking without incident, which was a blessing. The first few times, she’d been terrified one of the jacks was going to eat her. There’d been a scuffle at the back of the bus, and a baby screaming, too.

Before they’d moved to New Haven, Ellie had foggy memories of things discussed in hushed tones, adults dropping their voices when they noticed a child was present. It took her a short while to figure out that if you shut up and didn’t ask questions, they would drop other hints. Especially because of Dad’s work—he knew, often enough, the stories that hadn’t made it into the papers and tabloids.

Stories about jacks with a taste for charmer flesh, or charismatic Twists who gathered more than one gang of the dispossessed and allowed criminal hungers free rein inside the blight of the core. There were other dangers, especially for young Potential-carrying girls. Lots and lots of them.

Money and connections bought safety, and that safety came with a hedge of restrictions. Only an idiot wouldn’t draw the conclusion that the restrictions wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t a high chance of something going awfully, terribly wrong.

Her usual spot on Southking, right next to what used to be a small bodega and was now a red-curtained shop called Alterative Boutique, as if that wasn’t a name that would give anyone the shivers, was taken by another scruffy charmer in a long blue denim coat hawking popcharms and eyegrabbers, so she headed against the flow of traffic, uphill.

The hawkers and buskers were out in full force today, a press of tattered velvet, denim, and cheap glinting metal, singing their sell-songs.

“ Pret -ty silver, buy some sweet silver, Miss ?” Shaking a fistful of chiming, thread-thin charmsilver bangles.

Waving a blood-red flower as big as a fist. “ Pe -onies for a pen ny, three days guar anteed!”

A jack with a high gray bone crest on the back of his head snapped his long spidery fingers, his nails clicking in time to his cry of “ Buy some fresh goff charms, two for a cre dit!”

On the corner of Southking and Bastir, where the latter curved north toward the market part of town, there was a young man playing a violin, his shock of russet hair under the bright spring sunshine matching the red in his coat, clashing with his yellow jeans. The bow trembled as he drew it across the strings, a small charm to make the music audible further away resonating within varnished wood and catgut. A delightful little shiver went through her as she passed, the charm’s simplicity and power perfectly married to its function. Nice work. Except there was a brittle undertone to the music that made her think of sharp teeth and beady eyes, a nasty smell like wet fur, so she hurried past.

Further up, there was a space—a bodega’s brick wall, covered with an intaglio of graffiti. Nothing that looked likely to give her any trouble, but Ellie still spent a few moments leaning against the wall, her felt hat pulled down low to hide her hair and shade her eyes. When nobody moved to shove her along, she shook her fingers out. The sapphire was a comforting warmth against her palm, and she began searching the faces passing by.

Non-charmers with net shopping bags, jacks with feathers or fur or other odd mutations, carrying backpacks or canvas slings. All with sneaking sidelong glances, credits changing hands in corners, kept down low out of the sightline. You couldn’t quite get everything on Southking, not the way you could in Shake’s Alley or nearer the core where the Twists and black charmers, half-Twisted themselves, sold nasty, expensive, brutal charms for poison, death, curse.

But you could get a lot.

No formal or informal apprenticeship or she’d be producing in a workroom and selling in an atelier. No membership in a charm-clan, producing work under a clan’s sigil even if she wasn’t powerful enough to have a personal one. She obviously didn’t have any sort of license either, or she’d be in a tent over on Rampion or in the Market District proper. It was clear she was too young to have her Potential settled, so any charm she gave might have an unpredictable side-effect, but it was likely to be cheap as well as powerful. There were some valuable things unsettled Potential could do, even if some of the High Charm Calculus equations went into a tangle of weird inconstant values as soon as someone whose Potential wasn’t settled enough worked at them. The intersection of math and magic was never static; it kept responding to every breath of chance and Potential.

Still, you had to at least have been exposed to Calc before your Potential settled. It inoculated you a little bit against Twisting.

A lean, short jack, bone spurs on his cheeks slicing out through the suppurating, too-thin skin on his stretched face, grinned and slunk a little closer. His laboriously multicolored jacket marked him as one of the Simmerside Tops; that particular jack gang was pushing into Southking on weekends to take a cut from those too weak to resist—or those who didn’t want trouble.

The edge of Ellie’s Potential sparked, a hard sharp dart of light describing the arc of her personal space. Back off, bottom-feeder. “Cryboy.”

“Bluegirl.” The weeping fluid on his cheeks, where the bone rubbed through, glistened. He’d called her a number of things, trying to make her twitch, before finally settling. Now on Southking, she was slightly known. “You been gone a while.”

“Busy.” And you’re not getting any protection money from me. Mithrus, you’re a sucking hole.

“This is a nice spot. Really nice.” Another smirk. What would it be like to have your cheekbones cut that way, to feel the proof of mutation on your face? Every time you looked in the mirror, to be reminded of a difference you couldn’t hide?

Not like the Strep. Nobody saw through her , at least nobody over eighteen.

Ellie’s fingers tensed. The rest of her stayed loose, her heart skipping along a little too quickly, but that was okay. It wouldn’t show. Not to him , anyway. She’d popped a dartcharm at him the first time he tried to squeeze her for a credit or two, and proved she had enough Potential to give him serious trouble if he pushed harder. Since then he’d just hung around, like a jackal.

As long as Ellie kept him where she could see him, in the middle of a daylight crowd, there wasn’t much he would do. If he caught her near dark, or alone in a lonely place, well, that would be different. “Thanks for the compliment. Now run along, jack. You’re blocking my sunshine.”

“Sure thing, charmer girl .” He spat it like the jack insult it was, all hot air and halfway to Twist. Ellie restrained the urge to roll her eyes. Instead, she just watched him drift away along the tideline of the crowd.