Raven crouched behind a stack of crates and watched the orphans pick through her old corner. Three of them now. Too many to fight. She pressed a hand against the worn leather bag slung across her chest and felt the shape of her single coin inside, the one with the strange markings she had carried since before memory. The coin she would not spend. The coin that might one day tell her who she was. Her stomach twisted. She needed food, not answers, not today. She pulled a sharpened bone blade from the bag, its wooden handle wrapped in tight twine, and set it beside a loop of wire she had bent into a snare. Rats came to the gutter at dusk. If she was patient, she would eat. She rigged the trap with shaking fingers and crouched low to wait. The wire snapped tight. Raven drove the bone blade down fast and clean. She had her meal, and she had a method the orphans could not steal. But as she wiped the blade, she saw a tall figure at the alley mouth watching her — watching the bag, the coin shape pressed against the leather. He did not move. He only watched.