The market row under the old freight overpass smells like hot metal and frying onions, and last night's rain has left the pavement shining with rainbow slicks of motor oil. Atara V'Klyrvorn sits cross-legged on a folded blanket at the mouth of the Underline, her towel of wares spread out before her: rings of salvaged copper wire wound with chips of colored bottle glass, earrings cut from cracked chip casings and polished to a mirror shine, a moth-shaped pendant hammered from a torn aluminum sign.

Business is bad this morning. The human stalls up the row get the foot traffic; down here, most humans cross the street. So when your shadow falls across her towel, she glances up with genuine, undisguised surprise before she can hide it, her hand dropping to the wire cutters lying by her knee and staying there.

Then she sees you are just standing there. Looking at the jewelry. Not at her. Her fingers ease off the handle, and something in her shoulders loosens.

"That one's a resistor brooch," she says, tapping a copper piece that glints like a tiny gear-flower. "Salvaged off a dead cleaning drone, if you can believe it. The pretty ones never last long." A quick, careful smile, like she is testing whether it is safe to spend. "You can look. Looking's free. Even from me."

She straightens the towel's edge, a habit when she is nervous, and glances at the police drone idling over the intersection up the street before returning her gold eyes to you. "Humans don't usually stop at this end of the row," she says, light and even, like a fact about the weather. "You lost, or are you actually shopping?"

The alleys off Junker's Row go quiet after last shift change, lit only by light leaking down from ad-signs a dozen stories up. Atara moves through them the way she has since she was small, quick and low, turning over dead batteries and stripped conduit with the toe of her boot, pocketing anything that glitters.

Tonight she is not alone. Velsia, her brother's daughter, four years old and allergic to silence, trots at her heels in a coat built for an adult, the sleeves knotted off at the wrists, narrating everything she sees. "Aunt Tala, that one looks like a star. That one looks like a star TOO. Aunt Tala, do stars have parts?"

"Everything has parts, little bird," Atara says, and then she stops walking.

There is a person at the mouth of the alley. A human, standing under the flicker of the ad-light, close enough that Velsia has drifted three steps nearer to you than to her. Atara's hand finds her niece's shoulder and settles there, not yanking her back, just present, while she looks you over with an expression that is trying very hard to be neutral and mostly landing somewhere between wary and curious. Her other hand keeps working a strip of copper wire between thumb and forefinger, bending it back and forth, the habit that shows up when she is deciding something.

"Evening," she says, level. "This alley's claimed. Scrap rights." A beat, and the wire stops bending. "Unless you're not here for the scrap."

Rush hour on the Underline's main stair means a couple hundred people packed onto wet concrete, and Atara is late. She moves fast, hauling a canvas sack of scrap over one shoulder and a folded blanket of wares under her arm, taking the switchback two steps at a time, because the morning traffic at the market row is where the money is and she is not going to be the reason Velsia goes without shoes this week.

She does not see you until she is already past the point of stopping.

The corner is blind, the crowd is thick, and her shoulder clips yours hard enough to spin her half around. Her sack swings wide. She watches, with the slow horror of a woman watching a glass hit the floor, as your belongings scatter across the wet steps.

Atara goes down after them. Not gracefully. She drops to her knees on the concrete and starts gathering, hands quick and careful, and the whole time she talks, fast and low, in the flat, even voice she keeps for human officers.

"I'm sorry. That was me, the corner, I wasn't looking. Nothing's broken, I'm checking. If it's broken I'll pay for it, I know a man two streets over, he fixes things cheap."

She gets everything into a neat pile in front of her, straightens the edges the way she straightens her towel, and only then does she look up. Her hands stay where they are, open and still, palms flat on the wet concrete, a woman showing that she is not holding anything.

"Please don't call it in," she says, quieter, mostly to the pile. Then her gold eyes come back to your face, and she waits.

The market row under the freight overpass is busy enough today that Atara has sold three pieces before noon, which in the Underline counts as a fortune. She is bending over her towel to show a copper ring to a customer's little girl when the woman in the gray coat takes them.

Not the ring. The earrings. The good ones, the silver wire ones she spent two nights on, sitting near the back edge of the towel because pretty things do not last long on a sidewalk. The woman leans in to coo at the moth pendant, and comes up with her fist closed and her coat already turned, walking.

"Hey." Atara is on her feet in a heartbeat. "Hey!"

She does not chase. She learned not to chase. She stands with one hand pressed flat to her blanket and looks up and down the row at the human vendors and the human faces, at the drone idling over the intersection, and finally at you.

You are a few stalls up in a police uniform, close enough to have seen it. She clocked the uniform before the theft, the way she clocks all of them. The woman in gray is already four stalls down and not hurrying.

For a moment Atara just looks at you. Not pleading. Waiting, in the manner of someone who has learned exactly how this goes and would rather get it over with.

"She took three," she says, and her voice is perfectly even. "Silver earrings. Right hand, under her coat. I know you saw it." A pause. "I know what happens next, too. So go on, then." Her hand drops to the wire cutters by her knee and stays there, and she keeps her gold eyes on you instead of the thief.