Beau Rattigan had dug a vault under his pawnshop, and now he couldn't tell which of his objects belonged in it. Thirty years of trade filled the shelves above. Some pieces were harmless junk. A few could kill a man who touched them wrong. The trouble was, they all looked the same under the shop's dim lamp. He pulled the loupe from the cord at his neck and bent over the counter. Two objects sat side by side. One was a dented tin cup. The other was a fuzzy-capped swamp mushroom, dried and mounted on a wooden stand. A trapper had pawned it years ago, mumbling about a friend who ate one and stopped breathing. Beau had written the same warning label for both. He no longer remembered which warning was true. His weasel jumped onto the counter, tail crooked, whiskers twitching toward the mushroom. Beau nudged it back with one finger. "Not that one," he said. "Maybe." He reached for his price guide, the fat one he'd thumbed for decades. He flipped to the pages on oddities. The book listed the mushroom's market value. It said nothing about the poison. A price guide could tell him what a thing was worth. It could not tell him what a thing could do. Beau closed the book. He had one method left. He set the tin cup on the harmless shelf and carried the mushroom toward the trapdoor. The vault below was cool and empty. He would lock away the dangerous one and be done. The weasel darted ahead of him. It slipped through the trapdoor gap and knocked the tin cup off the counter as it went. The cup hit the floor and split at a hidden seam. A grey powder spilled from inside and hissed against the damp boards. The wood blackened where it landed. Beau froze on the ladder, the mushroom in his hand. He had guessed wrong. The cup was the killer. The mushroom was nothing but a dried lump on a stand. He climbed back up fast. He grabbed a rag, swept the powder into a jar, and screwed the lid tight. His hands shook. If a customer had lifted that cup, the seam would have opened in a living palm. Beau carried the jar down and set it on the vault's stone floor. He climbed up and looked at his shelves with new eyes. Every label he had ever written was now a guess he could not trust. The mushroom, the elk antler, the old rings, all of it. Any one of them could be another cup. He couldn't sort them by memory. He couldn't sort them by price. He needed someone who knew what these things truly did. Beau reached for the loupe again and held it to the lamp. Below him, the jar sat alone in a vault built for hundreds. He had one dangerous object locked away, and a whole shop still loose.