I woke to somebody shining a crime in my face.

  Not the theatrical sun from the books the one that smells like freedom and postcards but the real thing: bright enough to make my eyes swear and stupid enough to remind me I’d been sleeping without civility for most of my life. My skin complained like an old man after a market brawl. The healer said words like and I translated: .

  My hands were cuffed to the bed rail. Proper Golden Order cuffs — efficient, polite, and cold in the way only men who never get their hands dirty can afford to be. A woman in a plain blue coat fussed with a cooling cloth against my cheek. She had the look people get when they’re certain their salves will outargue violence. The captain stood in the doorway looking like a file with shoulders.

  “You’re awake,” he said. As if anyone had ordered the city to do it for him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Bruised, slightly, and fashionably unwashed. Your hospitality is overwhelming.”

  He didn’t smile. They never smile when they’ve patched you up because they plan to unpick you afterward. That’s how the Order behaves: they stitch you, then ask where the stitches came from.

  They used something expensive on me. You don’t get the Order’s healcraft for free unless you’re a favour, a curiosity, or both. That usually means they think you've got something useful rattling around in your skull. Valuable is the nicest word for “useful” in their minds ; the sharp one is “asset.” I am apparently both in the eyes of men with neat fingernails.

  “Who are you?” the captain asked, opening the interrogation with all the charm of a tax bill.

  “Oh, I’m a moving company,” I said. “We specialize in awkward cargo and poor life choices.” Smile. Deflection. They did not like it. They are not built for jokes that refuse to be sad, as if I will give them my true name .

  They asked about routes, teachers, and whether my talent came with a handbook. I told them what I tell most people: it came when I needed it. I didn’t learn it in a chapel or under a master’s tutelage. I picked it up like a bad habit and it stuck.

  “Yes,” the captain said slowly. “We’ve heard it’s…lightning-connected. Dangerous. Useful but we don’t know yet if you don’t want to speak we will find out eventually .” shit this bad .

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  “That’s the rumor,” I said. “Also: lightning doesn’t come with a warranty. It bites, leaves you with scars, and sometimes it takes the funny bits you’d rather keep’ mix some truths with lies and you get a perfect lie .

  They pressed counts and names. They wanted Don Cinder. They wanted routes. They wanted the shadow. I gave them the kind of answers that leave lines to trip over later — half-truths, a joke, a shrug. I do not betray employers. That is not morality; it is the only currency that sometimes pays in blood and sleep.

  Inside, I was boiling. The Order are the fancy door guards between sun and sewer — men who enjoy holding passports and stamping people into being up or being down. I hate them with the sentimental fury of someone who’s been stopped at checkpoints his whole life. I didn’t show it. I laughed at their bureaucratic righteousness and let them write it down as nervous charm.

  “You should be grateful,” the captain said at last, like he was reading the final line of a contract and enjoying the pen’s weight. “We allowed you into the upper city. We gave you medicine. We will question you. Give us what we want, and you will not return to the warrens. Refuse, and you will go back to your shithole.”

  Graceful. Thin. Threat under the lamplight.

  Grateful. I almost spit. Grateful is not the taste I keep. But opportunity smells different when it’s mixed with threat: the sun is bright, the cuffs are warm now, and the world has opened a blunt hinge where it used to be nailed shut.

  The girl from the square sleeps in another cot. Coma. Quiet. She’s the only other witness and for now, useless to answer. That makes me the only living mouth that can tell anything. Leverage. Currency again. I don’t sell it. I fence it: a little pressure here, a little patience there. Tell them enough to keep the needles off my skin but not enough that they can carve my employers into trophies.

  They call my ability a conduit. They sniff at the lightning thing. They want diagrams and names and routes so they can lock the gate I use. I refuse to be a map for men with ledger-eyes.

  “You think gratitude will save you?” the captain asked, softer, the threat filed under “practical.”

  “No,” I said cheerfully. “But it might buy me a decent coat. Sunburn is a cruel fashion statement.”

  He did not laugh; he did not need to. He left with his men to write their reports and to talk to other men who love sentences that circle you like hounds.

  Alone, cuffs off, shoulder stinging, I lay back and tested a feeling that had nothing to do with their kindness or their threats. The healers’ seam work hadn’t only closed flesh. Whatever stitch they’d used — a thing of warm humming under the skin — had loosened the jam on the gate I carry. Jumps that used to feel like threading a needle through rope now felt like stepping through an open doorway. Not wide, not free, but willing.

  They think they brought me up to be catalogued and useful. They don’t know they’ve given me something else: an opened gate. The gate between above and below. It’s mine.

  I laughed then, the sound small and sharp and entirely unrepentant. Not because I liked the Order. Not because I trusted them. Because somewhere in their neat reports and polite cuffs they’d mended the one thing that sells better than coin in this city: movement.

  “Let them write their reports,” I told the empty room. “Let them imagine they own the keys.”

  They don’t. Not anymore.

  eymire