Sable Vex's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Sable Vex made it two streets before she understood the helmet was going to kill her. The bottle on her hip passed for cargo. The cracked silver dome on her head did not. The broadcast had named her by the split down the visor, and every child in the district had heard the description twice. A woman at a fruit cart tracked her with her eyes and reached for a bell. Sable turned into the first narrow gap she could find, a service lane between a bakery and a shuttered shrine. She needed her head bare, or she needed a new head. Bare meant showing the scar down her jaw, which was also on the broadcast. New meant something she did not have. The baker's back door stood open for the heat. A rack of dark, split loaves cooled on a plank. Beside the rack hung a battered lantern with a shattered glass belly, the kind delivery runners clipped to their belts at night. On a hook above the lantern, a stiff canvas hood, flour-grey, the sort bakers wore against the ovens. She took the hood. She took the lantern too, because a courier without a night-lamp was a courier no one believed. She left two coins in the flour bin and stepped back into the lane before the baker turned around. In the shadow of the shrine wall she worked fast. She unbuckled the cracked helmet and set it on the ground. Her scalp went cold. Her hair stuck to her neck in wet strings. She pulled the canvas hood down to her brows and tied the throat cord tight enough to cover the scar to her chin. She clipped the broken lantern to her belt beside the gold bottle. Now she looked like what the slip in her pocket said she was. A courier on a temple run. The helmet was the problem still. Left here, someone would find it in an hour and the hunter would have her exact turn. She picked it up, walked to the shrine's offering slot, and pushed it through. It clanged down into whatever dark box waited on the other side. Let a priest puzzle over it at dusk. She stepped out of the lane with her head down and her hands full of legitimate cargo. A cart driver looked at her and looked away. A boy asked if she had the time. She grunted like a tired worker and kept moving. Three blocks. Four. No one shouted her name. At the corner of a water queue she heard it. A low, humming crackle, like wire in rain. A lean grey dog stood at the mouth of the alley she had just left, mane lifted in blue sparks, nose down at the spot where her helmet had touched the ground. It raised its head. It looked straight at her hood. The description was gone. The scent was not.