The bounty crackled out of every speaker in the market at once, and Sable Vex heard her own name spoken by a god. She was three stalls deep when it happened, her cracked silver helmet tipped low, the stolen vial hot against her sternum. The voice came from the tin horns strung above the awnings. It named her. It named the fire she carried. It promised a year of clean water and open channels to whoever put a hand on her shoulder. Heads turned. Not all at once. First the fishmonger. Then a boy counting coins. Then a woman with a baby who stopped bouncing the child and stared. Sable felt the shift the way a swimmer feels current. Every stranger in reach had just become a hunter, and she had maybe twenty seconds before one of them was brave enough to move. She needed to hide the vial. The glass leaked light through her collar in a slow blue pulse, and anyone who looked twice would see it. She had run from the sealed broadcast tower with it three nights ago. She had not slept since. The divine hunter the signal gods sent was somewhere behind her, closing, and now the whole street would do its work for it. She walked, not ran, to the nearest stall. A liquor seller stood frozen with the broadcast still ringing in his ears. On his shelf sat a fat gold bottle, ridged neck, painted with bright bars of red and blue like a broadcast waveform. Signal Spark Mead. Festival stock. The kind of bottle a courier might carry as a delivery and no one would question. "How much," she said. He looked at her helmet. He looked at the horns. His mouth opened. She slapped every coin she had on the counter and took the bottle before he answered. She turned her back to the street, cracked the seal with her thumb, and poured half the mead into the gutter. Then she lifted the vial off her neck, dropped it inside, and thumbed the wax back down. The glow diffused through the gold. It looked like ordinary drink catching ordinary sun. The liquor seller found his voice. "That's her," he said, not loud, testing it. Sable set the bottle on her hip like cargo. She pulled a folded delivery slip from her jacket, an old one, and held it up so he could see the courier's mark burned into the corner. "Delivery," she said. "For the shrine with the pink lotus over the door. You want to be the one who stopped a temple order?" He hesitated. That was all she needed. She walked. By the time the fishmonger shouted behind her, she was around the corner and moving. The vial was hidden. Her name was not. Every road out of the market now led through people who had heard the price on her head, and the hunter would follow the noise straight to her.

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.