Amara Sinclair had been in Needlefall three weeks, and she had already watched four people walk past her open hands. The last one was a boy with a split lip who pretended not to see the tea she offered from her thermos. She sat on an overturned crate at the edge of the market, her locs pulled back with a strip of green cloth, her skirt dusty at the hem. She had come to this city to build a place for people like him. So far she had built nothing. A blanket on the ground was not a sanctuary. It was a woman sitting on the ground. By afternoon she understood the problem. Needlefall moved. The market shifted streets on market days. The guard sweeps pushed loiterers from one block to the next. Anyone soft enough to need her was soft enough to keep walking. A door that stayed in one place would never catch them. A door that followed them might. She counted her money twice on the crate. Her grandmother's ring. The pay from two months of kitchen work in the last town. The small roll she had promised herself she would not touch. It was almost enough. Almost was the word that had stopped her every time before. The lot at the town's south edge sold used haulers and cast-off homes. Amara walked the rows until she stopped at a grey and white mobile home mounted on a long trailer. It stood two stories, with a raised loft and windows on every side. A covered porch ran along the front. It had the shape of a meeting hall someone had taught to travel. She climbed the step and put her hand flat on the door. The seller named a price. Amara named a lower one and pushed her whole roll across the hood of his truck, plus the ring. He looked at the ring a long time. He said the axles were sound and the roof did not leak and the last owner had died in the loft, if that mattered to her. She said it did not. She said she wanted the keys before dark. He handed them over at dusk. Amara climbed inside alone. The main room was wide enough for a long table and two rows of chairs. The loft above could sleep four. She stood in the middle of the empty floor and listened to the trailer settle under her weight. For the first time since she had crossed into Needlefall, she had walls to offer. Then she looked out the front window at the dark lot and understood the next problem. She had a sanctuary and no way to move it. The truck that could pull it was not hers, and the man who owned one was already locking his gate for the night.

Amara slept in the loft with the keys under her pillow. At first light she climbed down, locked the door, and walked back into Needlefall on foot. A trailer without wheels under it was a box. A box in the wrong place was worse than no box at all. She needed to know where the people she wanted actually stood at noon, at dusk, at the hour the guards pushed through. She had three weeks of wrong guesses behind her. She did not have another three. She tried the market first. The stalls had moved two streets over since yesterday. She asked a woman selling onions where the sleepers went now. The woman shrugged and looked at her hands. She asked a boy stacking crates. He walked away. By midday she had asked eleven people and learned nothing she could use. Her thermos was empty. Her feet hurt. The city was answering her the same way it had answered her all month. She was crossing a lot behind a shuttered garage when a grey truck pulled in and stopped. The hood was dented. The tires were caked. A tall man swung down from the cab, locs tied back, sleeves pushed to the elbow. He had a stack of folded blankets in the truck bed and a cardboard flat of bread rolls beside them. He did not look at her. He looked at the corners of the lot, the way a person checks a room before speaking in it. "You lost?" he said. "I'm looking for where people sleep," Amara said. "The ones nobody's counting." He considered her skirt, her empty thermos, the ring finger with no ring. "You a church?" "No. I bought a trailer. I want to park it where it's useful." He laughed once, short. "A trailer." He pulled a blanket from the stack and folded it tighter. "I'm Marcus. I run this route three days a week. Bread, blankets, whatever I can carry." He nodded at the truck. "She pulls anything with a hitch." Amara's throat tightened. She kept her face still. "Show me the route." He drove her through the afternoon. He pointed without slowing. Behind the tannery wall, twenty people by dark. The drainage yard past the rail cut, families, mostly women. The old feed lot when the guards swept the market. He named times. He named which corners emptied when the wind turned. He did not write anything down because he did not need to. By dusk Amara had a map in her head that three weeks on foot had not given her. Marcus stopped the truck at the lot where her trailer sat. He looked at it a long time. "That's a lot of door," he said. "You planning to open it tomorrow?" "Yes." "Then we should talk about what you're going to say when the first ten people don't trust you." She climbed down. The truck idled behind her, waiting for her answer.