The light is wrong. Flat grey, leaking through gaps in heavy curtains, the quality of it dusty and mid-morning. I wake in stages, each one slower than the last.

  The ceiling has a water stain spreading across the plaster. I don't recognize it. I don't recognize the smell of the room - old straw, cheap tallow, the faint mineral edge of cold stone. I try to move and the memory hits before my muscles do, a full accounting of the previous night arriving all at once while my body catalogues its objections.

  Everything hurts. Not in the acute, sharp way of injury but in the deep, wrung-out way of something that has been pushed past its limit and is now presenting the bill.

  My forearm is wrapped in a clean bandage. White linen, tight and even - not my work. The cloth is stark against the grime of my tunic.

  I send the command to my fingers. Curl.

  They move. Stiff, the skin pulling tight over the knuckles, but they respond. I try the other hand. Same - present, sluggish, mine.

  Legs next. Heavy. The stone-cold weight that's been in them for days has retreated to something more ordinary, just the soreness of overworked muscle. I push myself to sitting and the room tilts once, then steadies.

  The room looks like a fight took place here. The chair in the corner is knocked over. My knife is on the floor where it fell, the blade dulled from what I used it for. The quilt beneath me is stained in a way the innkeeper is going to have opinions about.

  Zeke is gone. The space beside me is cold, the straw barely disturbed. He didn't sleep here.

  At the foot of the bed, the artifact lies on its side against the floorboard. In the grey morning light it looks smaller than it did last night, less like something that nearly killed me. The blood from my palm has dried dark into the geometric grooves. I look at it for a long moment without moving.

  Part of me wants to kick it under the bed and leave it there.

  Another part - the part that grew up counting every copper twice before spending it - knows exactly how many lives this object is worth and what it cost to get it.

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  There's a scrap of parchment pinned to the door at eye level. His handwriting, compact and dry:

  Lenses: drop at office.

  Favor stands.

  Try not to get arrested with that thing.

  Innkeeper thinks I killed you.

  I did not correct him.

  I let out a breath. It comes out halfway between a laugh and something else, and I sit there on the edge of the ruined mattress holding it for a moment. The closest thing to a get well card I'll ever receive from him.

  He paid for the room. He wrapped my arm while I was unconscious. He stayed until the bleeding stopped and then he left without asking for anything in return - not information, not acknowledgment, not the satisfaction of being thanked. That's more than most people in this city would do for someone they trust completely, let alone someone they don't.

  Getting down the narrow staircase takes longer than it should. I move carefully, one hand on the wall, testing each step before committing to it. My legs are back - slow and protesting, but back.

  The common room smells of woodsmoke and last night's ale. The innkeeper is wiping down the counter. He looks up as I reach the bottom of the stairs, takes me in - the bandage, the state of me - and a knowing, conspiratorial smile crosses his face.

  "Ah," he says. "The gentleman said you'd be needing this. All paid for."

  He slides a plate to the corner table without being asked. Thick bread, a hard-boiled egg, a cup of water.

  I sit. Peel the egg with fingers that still feel faintly alien, not entirely trusted. Near the hearth, the serving girl is murmuring something to a regular who's nursing his morning drink. They keep glancing at me - at the bandage, at my face, back at each other. I catch fragments. Screaming. Blood on the floor. Thought for certain he'd left a body up there.

  I eat the bread and ignore them.

  My reflection in the window glass looks back at me - pale, the scattered marks visible at the edge of my collar where my tunic has shifted. They're dormant now, the dark lines broken into chaotic fragments that sit under my skin like a badly planned tattoo. Not gone. Not cured. But quiet, for the first time in days.

  The gratitude I feel toward Zeke is a complicated thing. He could have left me in the waste chute when my legs started going. He could have taken the artifact the moment my hand unlocked and walked out of the mansion alone - his package retrieved, my problem no longer his. Instead he carried me across a district and fought something he didn't understand in a rented room at midnight, with no guarantee it would work and no particular reason to care whether it did.

  I finish the bread. I drink the water. I pull my satchel tight against my side and stand up, my legs holding without much argument.

  The artifact is a heavy, blood-stained problem in my bag. The catalyst is still out there somewhere, attached to a transport log and a set of codes I've memorized and no destination. That's tomorrow's work. Next week's work, maybe. There's no countdown running anymore.

  For the first time in three days, I'm not counting the seconds.

  I walk out into the morning.