Mercer Asterion's Arc

Chapter 2 of 10

The shadow belonged to a girl. She stood in the gap where the market ended and his ruined ship began, one hand hooked in the strap of a canvas satchel. Braids. Freckles. Boots that had walked this dirt a long time. She looked at the wreck behind him the way other people looked at a stubborn goat: mild curiosity, no alarm. Mercer kept his cybernetic hand inside his cloak and tried to look like a man who belonged to a road. "Hi there," she said again. "You dropped something big." He glanced back through the breach. The bridge was dark, but the gateway platform on the lower deck still bled soft light through cracks in the hull. Rings of blue and orange spun slow inside it, throwing colored bars across the dirt. Anyone who came around the corner would see. Any scavenger with a pry bar would strip the ring in an hour. The jump module in his satchel was useless without a platform to stand on. "I was hoping no one had noticed," Mercer said. "I notice most things." She tilted her head. "You want it hid?" He measured her. Fifteen, maybe. No merchant behind her. No parent calling. She waited the way market children waited, patient as a cat. "I do," he said. "Quickly." She pointed past his shoulder. Twenty paces off, half-swallowed by weeds, stood a collapsed lean-to. Rotted beams. A tin of nails spilled in the mud. Firewood stacked and forgotten. "Nobody's touched that pile in years," she said. "Merchants call it the eyesore. Guards don't walk past it because the roof drops rocks." Mercer looked at the wreck, then the lean-to, then her. "The platform is heavy. And it glows." "Cover the glow first." He pulled a tarp of insulation from the breach and threw it over the platform. The light dimmed to a dull ember. Then he braced his shoulder against the base and pushed. His arm did the real work under the cloak. The platform ground across the deck plates and out onto the dirt, gouging a track. The girl grabbed a broken plank and swept dust behind him, erasing the drag marks as they moved. They rolled it into the lean-to's belly. He kicked firewood down around it. She dragged a rotted door across the front and tipped a bucket of nails over the threshold so nothing looked disturbed. The insulation held the light. From three steps away, it was garbage. Mercer exhaled. He was filthy. His cloak had torn at the hem. Nothing in the market seemed to have looked up. "Mercer," he said, offering the name carefully. "Mouse." She wiped her hand on her skirt. "You've got parts to buy, don't you? I saw the list in your face." He hadn't shown her a list. He nodded anyway. The wreck was hidden. The module was safe against his ribs. Now he needed a guide, and one had walked up to him uninvited.