The walk back is a different kind of quiet. Here the streets are restless - people who only come out when the rest of the city goes to sleep, moving with the particular wariness of those who have reasons to. A few shapes in the doorways track me as I pass. I keep my pace steady and my shoulders set, and they decide I'm not worth the trouble.

  The alley I want smells of stagnant water and cold ash. This block burned years ago and nobody rebuilt - the city wrote it off, and the locals stay away from the unstable stonework. Which suits me fine.

  The building I've been using has no stairs anymore - hacked out for firewood at some point - but the old coal lift shaft is still there, hidden behind a reinforced pantry door. Getting up requires the collapsed section of hallway where the upper floor came down in the fire, leaving a tangle of blackened joists packed into a steep slope against the wall. It looks like a ruin. It works like a ramp. I know which beams are solid and which piles of plaster will shift, and I go up fast, hand over hand along the exposed wall-ribs.

  The door at the top is the only thing in this building that still feels like it was made with intention. Timber, salvaged iron, no handle or keyhole. I trace a shape against the center of the wood - a quick geometric sequence, the same one every time - and feel the low hum of the wards responding. The bolt slides back.

  I close it behind me and locks click into place. I'm home.

  The wet cloak goes over the chair. I light the oil lamp on the desk and the workshop comes up in steady yellow - lockpicks in their roll, carving chisels in their slots, chalk stacked by color. Everything where it should be. No mess here. No accidents.

  The tools from the job go onto the desk. Cleaning them can wait until morning.

  I sit on the edge of the bed - the only clean surface in the room - and kick my boots off and let myself breathe. Safe. The job is done and I'm home and nothing went wrong. I reach for the pouch at my belt.

  My hand doesn't move.

  It sits on the mattress with the palm flat down, fingers pressed against the quilt. I can feel the intention leaving my head but nothing in my arm receives it. I grab my right wrist with my left hand and pull. The resistance is absolute. Then it snaps, all at once, and my arm is mine again so suddenly I nearly fall backward off the bed. I sit there, confused.

  Then I open the pouch. The transparent box comes out in my hand and my stomach drops before I've fully registered what I'm seeing. The containment seals on the glass - the ones I counted, the ones I studied before I touched it - are gone. Burned away, the surface smooth where they used to be. I can't feel anything from the ring. No hum, no pressure. Whatever was inside that box isn't inside it anymore.

  I rip the glove off.

  The indigo stains on my fingers are still there, but something has been added to them. Thin dark lines running along the tendons on the back of my hand, tracing the bones down to a point where they braid together at my wrist. They aren't still. Even as I watch, they move - slow, almost lazy, threading further up my forearm toward the elbow. The ring didn't just spring the trap. It passed it on.

  I'm back at the desk before I've decided to move, shoving tools aside, grabbing the leather roll of specialized lenses from the shelf with hands that won't quite stop shaking. The brass frames clatter against the wood as I unroll it.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  I pin my forearm flat and hold the strongest lens over the back of my hand. Under the glass, the lines are active - a sick, faintly oily light that makes the carvings on the lens rim respond. A few of the etched symbols flicker into pale blue. I recognize two of them. "Dominance." "Constraint." The rest I've never seen.

  The notes. I grab the wooden box from the shelf and dump its contents across the desk - a stack of papers I acquired along with the lenses from a job two years ago, research from someone who knew things I didn't. I tear through them, scanning diagrams and crossed-out equations and cramped marginal notes. There. One sketch, near the bottom of a page, no name attached. But the description is enough. High-tier binding work, near the ceiling of the craft.

  The notes don't tell me how to remove it. They just confirm that whoever made the ring knew exactly what they were doing, which means the man I robbed was handling something well above his understanding.

  Out of habit I start calculating the cost of work like this. I shut that down. The price doesn't matter.

  What matters is that the lines are already past my elbow.

  I go back through the notes twice more, looking for anything - a bypass, a counter-sequence, a name I can chase down. Nothing. The notes end where my knowledge begins, which is not far enough.

  I grab the glass sensing rod from the floor where I dropped it earlier and press it to my wrist.

  The air catches fire. It's not a metaphor - there's a dry, searing heat that clamps across my skin the moment the rod makes contact, and I grit my teeth and try to hold on, try to trace the dispersal shape I've used on stuck door wards a hundred times.

  It does nothing. The heat builds. I drop the rod and it clatters to the floorboards and I sit there with my arm pressed against my chest, waiting for the burning to fade.

  So. Not that.

  The lines are past my elbow. If I can't erase them I have to slow them down, which means interference - layering my own seals directly over the path of the curse. It's a desperate move. It's the kind of thing that can go badly wrong in ways that aren't reversible. But the strings are most of the way to my shoulder and I'm out of better options.

  I pull the carving kit. The metallic ink. The steel needle. I don't aim for clean work. I aim for noise - anything that will jam the mechanism, crowd the path, give the curse something to fight through. Sleep. Weaken. Slow. Weight. I stab them directly into the lines, left hand clumsy and rough, marks ugly and uneven. I don't stop. I move up to the forearm and keep going, layering seal over seal, driving the needle through ink and then skin.

  The pain arrives late, as it always does, and then all at once. My head hits the desk. Enough.

  The needle goes down. I stay where I am, slumped over the desk, and just breathe.

  My hand is a mess of black ink and fresh blood, the seals rough and overlapping, nothing like the precise work I'm capable of on a good day. The dark lines have stopped moving. I can see them vibrating faintly against my interference, pressing at the edges of the seals, but the climb has stalled.

  I've bought a night. Maybe a little more if I'm lucky.

  One last check - I lift the lens with a hand that feels made of lead and hold it over the back of my hand. Through the glass the scene is a static tangle, my crude marks flickering against the deeper lines in a hum that feels like two machines trying to occupy the same space.

  The dangerous symbols are just muffled - they aren't gone.

  I reach behind the stack of ledgers for the wine bottle I keep there and find I can't manage the cork, so I use the blunt end of a chisel to lever it free. A long pull on an empty stomach. The edges of the panic go soft.

  I need to identify those runes. I need someone who knows the mages and the gear and the kind of work that leaves marks like this. I need a real solution before the interference I've built stops being enough.

  Zeke.

  The name comes with a reflex smirk I can't quite help. Arrogant piece of shit, possessed of a reputation as a fixer that he cultivated specifically because he couldn't beat me at the work we were both trained for. He branched out two years ago, went legitimate on the surface, built connections in circles I don't move in. He'll be insufferable about this.

  He knows people who would know.

  Another drink. The bottle goes back behind the ledgers.

  Tomorrow. I'll deal with him tomorrow.