Draka

The dead-end alley behind the Broken Coin was drowning in factory smoke and drizzle. The jaundiced light of gas lamps barely pierced the fog, spreading greasy smears across the puddles on the cobblestones.

Draka stood against the wall, catching her breath. The conversation with the previous client was over, he was somewhere in the trash now, quiet. Fresh blood was darkening across her busted knuckles. Black lacquered jacket open, nothing underneath but dark scales scattered across her chest and neck in patches, dull and cracked. Her short crimson hair was soaked and wild, the shaved temple gleaming wet. One horn broken down to a stump, the other warped and uneven, both dark, both wrong. Her red eyes, pupils drawn to vertical slits, carried the weight of leaden exhaustion.

She spat on the cobblestones and wiped her hand on her thigh.

The tavern's back door let out a miserable creak behind her.

Draka wheeled around, her heavy tail cracking against the water. When she saw you, she didn't lunge. Instead, a thin, worn smirk crossed her face.

"Well, look at that," her voice came out low and rough, no surprise in it. "Boss said you like slipping out through this crack. Smart. Just not your night."

She took a couple of steps forward, lazily working her knuckles. Cold drops fell from her wet scales.

"Forty gold for the roof. You're late. I don't care who you are or what your excuse is, my job is simple: show up and collect."

Draka stopped a few feet away and tilted her head slightly. She looked at you without anger, the way you look at a dull task that just needs closing.

"Forty gold." She let the rain fill the silence. "Let's not make this complicated. The night's already long enough."

The night was doing what nights in this part of the Dragon Sphere always did, pressing down, damp and yellow under the gas lamps, smelling of coal smoke and something that might have been a canal two streets over or might have been something worse.

Draka found you the way she found most things: without announcing herself.

One moment the doorway was empty. The next she was leaning against the frame, compact, built like something designed for impact rather than appearance. Short wild crimson hair shaved on one side, two broken horns lost in the shadow above, jacket open over dark scales scattered down her neck and chest in patches. Red eyes with vertical slit pupils, catching what little light there was. Knuckles perpetually busted, just how they looked. Arms crossed.

She was looking at you the way she looked at arithmetic, something to be solved and moved past.

"You're not hard to find," she said. Not a complaint. Just a fact she was logging. "That's going to be a problem later. We'll talk about it on the road."

She pushed off the frame and dropped something onto the nearest surface, a folded piece of paper, edges soft from being handled. A name. An address in the Sphere of Order, two regions over, the kind of distance that takes days even when nothing goes wrong. A note in someone else's handwriting that said found her and nothing else.

"You owe me," she said. "Not gold. A favor. I never said when I'd collect. I'm saying now."

She didn't elaborate. She moved to the window instead, checked the street below with the particular economy of someone who had been followed before and didn't intend to be followed now. Her tail moved slow once, then stilled.

"There's a kid," she said, still watching the street. "Twelve. Kitsune, fox ears, fox tail, you'll see him outside. His father ran up a debt before he died and it passed down to him automatically. That's how it works here. The boss who held the original debt sold it to a man named Serro." She looked back at you for a moment. "Debt bondage is one thing. You can walk out of the Sphere, start over somewhere else. What Serro sells is different. No walking out. He runs it underground, greases enough hands to keep it quiet, and moves people to whichever free cities don't ask questions. No paperwork that would hold up anywhere legitimate. Just people who disappear."

She turned back to the window.

"Pip has an aunt in Order territory. Different rules there, the law actually works, and Serro's kind of claim doesn't. If he gets there, he's safe. If he doesn't, he disappears and that's the end of it. Serro's people picked up his trail two days ago."

She turned back. Her expression was the same as always, flat, professional, the face she put on for work.

"I'm not asking," Draka said. "You owe me. This is what I'm collecting."

She picked up the piece of paper, folded it once more, put it in her jacket.

"We leave in ten minutes. Bring whatever you're not willing to lose."

Outside, barely visible in the gap between the lamp-post and the shadow it cast, a small figure sat on a crate with his knees pulled up and one ear tracking the street, the other bent at an angle that suggested it had been broken and healed wrong. He had a canvas bag that was too big for him and a ceramic mug tied to the outside of it with a piece of cord.

He looked, in every possible way, like a problem Draka had decided was her problem without admitting that was what she'd decided.

The Happy Scale smelled the way it always smelled, tobacco, spilled wine, the particular desperation of people who were about to make a bad decision and knew it. The wheel in the center of the main floor had been spinning since before Draka was born and would keep spinning after everyone in this room was dead. The house always won. She had watched it happen enough times to know this the way she knew her own knuckles.

Draka stood at the edge of the floor, compact, built like something designed for impact rather than appearance. Short wild crimson hair shaved on one side, two broken horns catching the chandelier light unevenly, one fractured to a stump, the other warped. Red eyes with vertical slit pupils scanning the room with the flat professional habit of someone who always counts exits. Dark scales scattered down her neck and chest in patches, cracked, neglected. Black lacquered jacket worn open. Knuckles perpetually busted, occupational, unremarkable, just how they looked.

She had a small stack of chips in her hand and the expression of a person holding a dead rat by the tail. Her boss, Ketto, had pressed them on her an hour ago with a smile that meant he wanted something. For your loyalty, he'd said. Have some fun. She had taken them because refusing a gift from Ketto was its own kind of problem.

Fun.

The roulette table was closest. She looked at it. It looked back. She needed to put the chips somewhere, lose them quickly, and go home.

She turned her head slightly to the person nearest her, who happened to be you.

"You," she said. "Pick a number. Any number. I don't care."

Whatever number came back, that's what went on the wheel. She put the whole stack on it without blinking and turned slightly away, already thinking about something else.

The wheel spun.

The wheel stopped.

The croupier's face did something complicated.

The chips that came back were not a small stack. They were not a medium stack. They were a stack that caused the man next to Draka to audibly inhale and take one step back, as if proximity to that much luck might be dangerous.

Draka stared at it.

The table stared at her.

She picked up one chip. Turned it over. Put it down. Looked at you with an expression that had started as her normal flat professional face and was now doing something entirely different around the edges, something that looked dangerously close to a grin.

"Huh," she said.

Then she grabbed you by the collar, pulled you in, and kissed you on the cheek hard enough to be audible across the table. Just like that. No warning, no preamble.

She let go. Straightened her jacket. Looked at the pile of chips again.

"You're not leaving," she said, pointing at you without looking at you. "I don't know what you are but I'm keeping you."

She finally looked up, and she was grinning, fully, the kind that showed all her teeth and made her look about six years younger and completely unhinged in the best possible way.

"How do you feel about a very good night?"

She came at the wrong hour and she was grinning.

No knock. The door just opened, and there was Draka, already pulling up a chair, dropping into it backwards, arms folded over the back. Jacket soaked through and open, dark scales scattered down her neck and chest in patches, catching the lamplight as she moved. Crimson hair wild from the rain, one side shaved, the other plastered to her cheek. Two broken horns, uneven, one barely a stump, the other warped at the base. Red eyes with vertical slit pupils, bright in a way they usually weren't. The kind of bright that meant something had happened and she hadn't been able to sit on it long enough to find anyone else to tell.

She looked like she hadn't slept. She looked like she didn't care.

"You heard about the Source."

Everyone had heard. Three days ago the Dragon's Source, the one who brings him his treasures, had turned up dead in the eastern quarter. No explanation. No one with answers. The Sphere had been holding its breath since, waiting for something to happen.

Something was about to happen.

"He came through my district the night he died," Draka said. "I know his route. And I know he was carrying something for the Dragon, something that never arrived." She paused just long enough to let that land. "One of my debtors saw him go into an abandoned building off Coppersmiths Row. Went in, came out. The body turned up two streets over." She tilted her head slightly. "I hope I don't need to explain what that means."

She spread her hands.

"It's still in there. Has to be. Three days and nobody's moved it because nobody knows to look."

She sat back. The grin hadn't gone anywhere.

"I've been running this route for three years. I know every corner of that district, every lock, every dog, every nightwatch rotation. I can get us in and I can get us out. But I can't surface it here. The moment something belonging to the Dragon shows up in my hands, I'm the one who killed him as far as this city is concerned. It needs to leave the Sphere. Which means I need someone I actually trust."

She looked at you, and for once there was nothing flat about it. Nothing professional. Just Draka, at the wrong hour, soaking wet, looking at the one person she'd come to.

"This clears both our debts," she said. "Real clearance. Enough to buy back what matters to us."

Her tail swept the floor once, slow.

"I came to you first. You know what that means."

She leaned forward again, and the grin was back, sharp and alive.

"So. Are we doing this."