The clockmaker's workshop is dark when Zeke unlocks it, but never silent. The clocks don't care that it's past midnight - they tick on in their dozens, each one slightly off from the others, filling the room with a sound that never quite resolves.

  He doesn't bother with the main lamps. He knows the room well enough. I follow him in, and he lights a single lantern on the workbench, and the yellow glow carves the space out of the dark. He sets his satchel down and starts unbuckling the straps with the focused detachment of someone already onto the next thing.

  "Pleasure doing business with you, Ashley."

  He doesn't look at me. He's checking the package casing, turning it in his hands.

  I stand at the edge of the workbench. The adrenaline has been gone for an hour and what's left is a bone-deep tiredness and the particular hollow feeling of a job that gave me less than I needed. I have the transport log. I have a number and a trail and a clinical description of what I'm going to become if I don't follow it fast enough. I don't have a cure, and the lines on my arm haven't moved in the last two hours but I know better than to mistake a pause for a stop.

  "The deal was for information," I say.

  Zeke goes still. His hand rests on the package casing. Then he looks up.

  "The deal was for access," he says. "I got you in and I got you out. Whatever was or wasn't in those files is not my problem."

  He sets the package down and looks at me with the same expression he'd give a ledger that didn't balance. Then he gestures at the empty space on the bench beside his tools.

  "My lenses, Ashley. Put them on the table and go get some sleep."

  I don't reach for the lenses. Instead I pull the transport log from my inner pocket. The paper is stiff, the wax seals catching the lantern light as I smooth it flat on the workbench between us.

  "I need a location for this." I point to the final entry - the transport codes, the blotted signature. "The last leg."

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He doesn't look at the paper. He looks at my hand, at the way it isn't quite steady above the wood. He's cataloguing something.

  "This paper got you shaking," he says.

  Not a question. Not sympathy either. Just an observation, offered back to me like a fact he's filed away.

  I pull my hand back and tuck it into the fold of my elbow. I have nothing left to bargain with except the information in my head, and that's the one thing I can't give away - not what I read in that folder, not Stage Four, not any of it. If he knows how compromised I am he stops seeing a partner and starts seeing a liability.

  The silence stretches between the ticks.

  "You know the agencies that handle these codes," I say. "I don't."

  He shifts his focus to the log. Doesn't pick it up. Just turns it with the tip of one finger, rotating it so the stamps catch the light, and reads.

  "This isn't standard courier routing," he says. The dismissive edge is gone from his voice. "The Guild doesn't use these stamps for books or gold. This is quarantine-level cargo."

  He looks up. Something has shifted in how he's looking at me - not warmer, but more attentive. He's adding things up.

  "If someone is moving this kind of cargo through my city," he says, "I want to know who. And I want to know why."

  I say nothing. I can see him already building plans around whatever secrets are attached to that shipment - the information as currency, as leverage, as the kind of thing that makes a man like Zeke more valuable to more people. He's going to use this. I knew that before I put it on the table. Right now I don't have better options.

  "I can get the location," he says, leaning back and crossing his arms. "But no more surprises. No more messy gear and no more walking into secured spaces without telling me what I'm actually walking into. Next time something sets off an alarm, I want to know why before we're standing in front of it."

  "Fine," I say. "No more surprises."

  A lie. But it's the price he's set, and the lines on my arm haven't stopped moving just because I found a trail, and I don't have the luxury of principle right now. He takes the transport log from the bench and tucks it into his own pocket.

  "Come to my place in two days," he says, already turning back to his tools. "I'll have the location and the route."

  "Two days is too long."

  It comes out before I can stop it. Too fast, too flat. No way to dress it up after the fact.

  Zeke turns back slowly. He looks at my jaw, at the way I'm holding myself, at whatever the past three hours have written on my face. He doesn't ask why. He doesn't push for the truth I'm not going to give him.

  "Tomorrow, then," he says. His voice is quiet. "Don't disappear."

  I nod once and walk to the door before he can change his mind. I don't look back at the workbench, at the transport log in his pocket, at the man who just agreed to help me for the second time without knowing what he's actually helping with.

  The ticking follows me out into the street.