The closer we got to the Adventurers Guild’s orbit, the more my skin started to itch.

  Everything here had edges. Painted arrows that told people where to flow. Plates bolted to stone that told you what corridor you were in. Lanterns held a steady pulse, no flicker, and the air felt heavier, like the city kept its hand on your shoulder.

  I kept my head down and tried to be boring.

  Trent walked like he belonged. Neutral, practiced. Like a man who knew the rules well enough to bend them without snapping anything. He rarely looked back, but when he did, he checked my hands, my posture, the way my eyes kept cutting to exits.

  “You’re doing fine,” he muttered.

  “I hate this,” I muttered back.

  He snorted. “That means you’re paying attention.”

  The timer in the corner of my vision pulsed once, then again, like it had decided subtlety was no longer useful.

  02:41:18

  It had been quiet for most of the night. It had let me pretend the paper in my jacket was just paper. Now, with the number down in hours, it kept the number in my face.

  Trent couldn’t see the numbers, but he saw the expression I couldn’t hide anyway.

  We came around a corner and the corridor widened into something more open. People moved through in steady streams, no chaotic crush, more like controlled flow. A service artery built to handle bodies the way pipes handled water. A counter ran along the far wall behind a waist-high rail. Above it, a sign painted in clean block letters.

  ADVENTURERS INTAKE

  PERMITS & SIGILS

  A second sign was smaller, and meaner.

  NO PERMIT, NO ACCESS

  NO EXCEPTIONS

  NO ARGUMENTS

  I felt my mouth go dry.

  A row of booths sat behind the counter like little cubicles. Each had a clerk, ink pots, stamps, stacks of paper, and a thin metal plate embedded in the wood. The plates pulsed faintly with ward lines, steady as a heartbeat, like the whole counter was part of a larger lock.

  The clerks looked bored. Mundane bored. The kind of bored you got when you had heard every excuse a hundred times and still had to pretend each one was new.

  I could work with bored.

  Trent guided me to the shortest line. He touched the rail once as we waited, a runner’s habit, I supposed grounding himself. Or marking his place. Or both.

  A man two spots ahead turned his head and looked me over, quick and practiced. His eyes flicked to my jacket seam, to the place where the leather strip pressed against my hip. He looked away too fast for it to be casual.

  Trent noticed. Of course he did.

  He leaned closer without changing his expression. “Don’t stare back,” he said. “You’ll make it a conversation.”

  “I wasn’t,” I lied.

  “You were,” he said. “Keep your eyes on the signs. Look confused, nobody will approach that way.”

  I forced myself to look at the wall text and pretend I was just another lost idiot who wanted paperwork.

  The line moved.

  A clerk waved the next person forward with two fingers, eyes down. The man at the counter slid coins across the wood, got a stamped slip back, and left.

  Simple.

  My heart did not believe it was simple.

  When it was our turn, Trent stepped up first. He leaned his elbows on the counter like he had done this a thousand times and had never once been told no.

  The clerk was a woman with ink-stained fingers and hair pulled into a tight knot. She looked up just long enough to register Trent’s face.

  “You again,” she said, flat.

  “Morning, Sella,” Trent replied, like her irritation was a weather report.

  Her eyes skipped my face and pinned my posture, the way you watch a sample waiting for titration.

  “Who’s this,” she asked.

  Glancing back and forth Trent let the pause do work, like he was choosing which version of me to sell.

  “New gatherer,” he said finally. “Needs a provisional stamp. His transit paper’s burning down.”

  Sella’s eyes narrowed. “Unregistered?”

  “Yes,” Trent said.

  “That’s my least favorite kind.” she said.

  “Nobody’s favorite,” Trent said, and he smiled just enough to make it look like a joke.

  Sella’s gaze dropped to my jacket. “Sigil.”

  I pulled the permit out with careful fingers and set it on the counter.

  The sigil shimmered once, prickly in open air.

  Sella tapped the paper twice with her nail. “This is a transit authorization,” Sella said, “a flow-through pass. You move through and you come back up empty, no reagents, no cores.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She looked at me like she had not asked for my opinion.

  “Transit is also not a promise,” she continued. “It’s a courtesy. Conditional. You make a mess, the courtesy ends.”

  “I already made a mess,” I said before I could stop myself.

  Trent’s elbow nudged my side, warning.

  Sella’s eyes sharpened. “Yes,” she said softly. “You did.”

  My stomach dropped. My stomach dropped, she didn’t need magic to see it, paperwork leaves residue, and people leave trails in ink, whispers, and stamped corners.

  Sella slid the permit under the counter plate. The ward line pulsed again. The sigil shimmered, then steadied.

  “Where’d you get this?” She asked.

  “A clerk,” Trent said.

  Sella’s mouth twitched. “Well of course it was.”

  She looked back at me. “Name?”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  I hesitated.

  My old name felt like a liability. Not because it meant anything here, but because it meant something to me. It belonged to a different lab, a different set of mistakes. A different world that had killed me with a cheap gasket.

  I needed something that fit the work.

  “Antoine Laurent,” I said.

  Trent’s eyes flicked to me, quick. A question he did not ask out loud.

  Sella wrote it down like it was nothing. “Occupation?”

  “Gatherer,” Trent supplied.

  Sella snorted. “Not yet.”

  The timer pulsed again.

  02:29:44

  Sella’s hand paused over the ink. “You know what a provisional sigil is,” she asked, like she was testing whether I was worth the paper.

  “A temporary permit,” I said. “Access to and from the Undercity. Right to return with gathered materials.”

  “Correct,” she said. “And?”

  “And it expires,” I said.

  “And it is bound,” she added.

  I frowned. “Bound how?”

  Sella leaned back in her chair, finally interested enough to educate me. Her gaze had no kindness in it, just accuracy.

  “Bound to you,” she said. “Your signature. Your blood. Your breath. Whatever word makes you behave. It ties to you. It’s a city mark. You don’t hand it to your cousin when you’re too tired for a run.”

  I looked down at the permit in my hand.

  The paper felt thinner all of a sudden.

  “And you can’t fake it,” she said, like she was answering the thought before it formed fully.

  My jaw tightened. “I wasn’t planning to.”

  Trent made a small sound beside me. Almost a laugh.

  Sella’s eyes slid to him. “Don’t encourage him.”

  Trent raised his hands slightly. “I’m remembering, that’s all.”

  Sella turned back to me. “People try,” she said. “They always try. They think if they can copy the stamp, they can copy the permission.”

  She lifted a stack of papers from beside her and slapped it down. “Half of these are confiscation notices. You know why.”

  I just shrugged in answer.

  Sella lowered her voice, not for secrecy, but for efficiency. “Two months ago, a boy came in here with a clean counterfeit. Pretty paper. Pretty ink. He thought he was clever. He had a friend with a steady hand and a stolen stamp.”

  She tapped the counter plate again. The ward line pulsed in response.

  “The plate screamed,” she said. “Silently, in its own way. The system flagged it. The tax-guards were here before he finished sweating.”

  Tax guards. The enforcers who showed up faster the more you escalated.

  Sella’s expression stayed flat. “He cried,” she continued. “He said he was only trying to work. He said his family needed the coin. He said the city was unfair.”

  Trent made a quiet noise, like he had heard the same speech a hundred times.

  Sella shrugged. “Maybe it was unfair,” Sella said, “but the guards didn’t care, they fined him, confiscated his haul, and processed him. Then a priest got involved because counterfeit permission is theft plus a ward threat, it stresses the lines and teaches people they can pry at locks.”

  I felt my side ache, phantom pain from the now healed wound, like my body remembered what it felt like to snap a warded seam the way the rat had scarred my flesh.

  Sella’s eyes stayed on mine. “He walked out later,” she said. “Alive. But he walked out different. Quiet. Like someone had taken a piece of him and held it for ransom.”

  Skill-lock, I thought. A reversible lock, if you knew the right illicit ritual. If you had the coin, or the leverage, or the contacts.

  If you were someone else.

  “Crafting effigies are the same,” Trent said, cutting in. “Before you ask.”

  Sella gave him a look.

  “What?” Trent said. “He was going to ask.”

  I had been.

  The little silver license keys, the priest-blessed effigies, the four-point stars with loops. I had already seen them on necklaces in the crowd, worn openly by people who wanted to look important, or safe.

  “You can’t fake those either.” I stated, expressing my understanding.

  Sella’s smile was thin. “Now you’re learning.”

  Trent leaned closer to me, voice low enough that the counter noise swallowed it. “People steal them,” he said. “Pilfer them. Mug for them. Nobody forges them as you now know. And a priest's blessing is territory-level. The system knows the difference between a cast trinket and a keyed permission.”

  “So if you want one,” I said, keeping my voice steady, “you steal it.”

  Trent’s eyes stayed on mine. “Or you pay someone who already did.”

  The words sat between us like a chemical hazard sign.

  Sella cleared her throat. “We don’t discuss theft at my counter.”

  “Of course,” Trent said, spreading his hands placatingly.

  Sella pulled a blank slip from a drawer and set it on the counter plate. She took a small metal stamp from a locked box. The stamp was ugly, pure function, etched with lines that made my eyes slide off.

  “Provisional gatherer,” she said. “Duration is just over a day. After that, you are locked out. No other scrutiny. The city doesn’t care why you missed the window,” she said, “only that the key expired. An expired sigil still lets you climb out, but you come back up clean, empty-handed. Understand?”

  My vision pulsed again.

  02:18:03

  I could feel the countdown in my throat now. Pressure. Like watching a reaction approach its endpoint, knowing once it passed a certain point, you could not reverse it without breaking something.

  Sella dipped the stamp into a small dish of dark liquid. Not ink. It shimmered wrong.

  Then she pressed it onto the slip.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then the sigil on the paper flared faintly, a structured shimmer that made the air feel clean and cold.

  The system flickered, sparingly, like it hated being obvious.

  STATUS FLAG UPDATED

  Enforcement Risk: Deferred (Conditional)

  ACCESS SCOPE: Provisional Gatherer

  The timer stayed, but it changed.

  27:03:11

  Sella slid the slip across the counter toward me. “Here,” she said.

  I picked it up.

  It felt heavier than paper should.

  “You keep it on you,” she continued. “You show it when asked. You do not cause pressure events. If you do, you lose it, and you get a fine, and if you cannot pay, you get the other kind of lesson.”

  I nodded once.

  “And you,” she said, eyes shifting to Trent, “you keep your runner out of trouble.”

  Trent smiled. “I always do.”

  Sella’s expression said she did not believe him for a second.

  She leaned forward slightly, voice dropping again. “Business logistics,” she said, like she was reading off a checklist that had nothing to do with heroism. “You bring up materials, you sell them through approved channels, or you sell them through whatever dirt you crawled out of. Either way, someone takes a cut.”

  Trent’s smile widened. “That’s a universal law.”

  Sella ignored him. “Approved channels pay in schedules,” she said. “Slow. Reliable. Illicit channels pay faster. Dirty. Risky.” She tapped the counter once. “Bring up what the watchlist pays for. Anything else is a story that ends in confiscation.”

  I thought of the hooded contractors. The lantern. The clamp.

  I nodded again.

  Sella tapped the counter once, done with me. “Next,” she called, already looking past my shoulder.

  Trent did not move right away. He waited until we stepped away from the rail and the counter noise swallowed us.

  Then he exhaled and leaned close.

  “You hear that,” he said. “A day.”

  “I heard,” I said.

  He nodded once. “That means we work today.”

  I held the provisional slip in my hand and felt the edges bite my palm.

  I had access again.

  It was not freedom or safety. It was access, reduced to one stamped word that could get me inside and get me killed if I treated it like a shield.

  Trent steered me out of the intake hall into a narrower walkway where the crowd thinned. Lantern pulses faded in the morning light, and the air felt less supervised, which was a relief right up until it became a risk.

  I looked down at the paper.

  “You said you could get me a connection,” I murmured.

  Trent’s eyes flicked sideways. “I just did.”

  “That’s bureaucracy,” I said.

  Trent’s grin returned. “Welcome to the city. Bureaucracy is a weapon. So is coin. So is who you know.”

  He paused at a corner and pointed down a side passage that seemed innocuous enough.

  “And now,” he said, “we talk business.”

  My stomach tightened again.

  Not from fear of rats.

  From the kind of danger that smiled.

  “What kind of business,” I asked.

  Trent’s gaze slid to my jacket seam again, to the place where the leather strip hid like a second skin. “The kind that keeps you from dying when the paper runs out,” he said. “The kind that gets you coin without you walking up to a clerk with your hands out.”

  I felt the system timer tick down in the corner, quieter now, less aggressive with the new number.

  27:01:46

  I had bought myself time.

  Now I had to turn time into leverage.

  And leverage into something that could not be taken with one stamp.