"…I had this game going, see, with the daughter for the Underminister of Fabrics & Towels. Beautiful girl."

  "Murder."

  "It wasn't like that, unfortunately. She isn't into men. But she into pianos."

  "Murder?"

  "Like into pianos. I had this old Verdigris, that's a kind of piano but not a good kind, but we'd plated it with sepha-wing, that sort of iridescent soft stuff that you can hardly touch without scraping it. And I told the girl that it was a lost Sinjar. He's a guy who made, like, seven pianos and they're the best pianos in the world."

  "Murder."

  "They're supposed to be, anyway. I've never played one. I think four out of seven are in Earth-as-in-Heaven's vault. The Verdigris played like crap, but it didn't because, get this, the Underminister's daughter is totally tone-deaf!"

  "Murder?!"

  "Seriously! All those pianos and she can't tell a good player from a blind monkey. Anyway, a friend of mine was posing as a shady dealer, and we kind of implied the piano had been taken from some raiders who'd burned down somebody's manor, so if it went on the open market it'd disappear before coming to auction. She was ready to pay us an absolutely stupid amount of money."

  "Murder?"

  "Money is … it's hard to explain. It's a good thing to have, take my word for it."

  "Murder."

  "But meanwhile there was this girl named Ba'alabeth."

  "Murder."

  "Okay, yes, with her it

  like that. For a while anyway. Then it wasn't for a while, and then there was one night, and I her it wasn't going to be a thing but she never listened to me. And she's married to an undersecretary of the Prefect of the Second Circle, who's supposed to be watching out for like, counterfeit candy antennae at festivals, but she convinces him to have me watched. And of course they see me visiting the girl and jump to the wrong conclusion."

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  "Murder."

  "Pretty much! She sends this goon squad in and there's a scuffle and one of them kicks the stupid piano. All that sepha-wing goes , which of course wouldn't happen on a real Sinjar. Between the two of them they manage to convince the Justiciar of the Second Circle that I'm some kind of subversive, I don't know. Do subversives usually start by selling counterfeit pianos? I think Ba'alabeth was sleeping with her too."

  "Murder."

  "You're damn right it's unfair. So instead of a few nights in the Wailing Dark and a fine, I get shipped off to the Edge Mines. For a piano!"

  Mercy shakes her head at the injustice of it all.

  This conversation serves to distract me from a number of inconvenient thoughts. There's my growing thirst, my tongue scraping desperately around my dried-out cave of a mouth, and the various aches and pains. More importantly, though, there's the overwhelming awareness of exactly how stupid I must look right now.

  The mechanics of the situation are thus: Mercy is carrying me on her back. Her arms are hooked backward around my knees, a position made easier by the fact that her shoulders can shift sickeningly out of their sockets with no evident discomfort. My arms are wrapped around her chest, where my hands are starting to ache from holding tight.

  My head is buried against the nape of her neck to protect my face from flying grit. This is necessary because Mercy is running at what I conservatively estimate to be forty miles per hour, taking long, bounding steps that leave us briefly hanging in the air before landing in a spray of sand. Because I am much larger than Mercy, I hang off her like a ludicrously oversized backpack, with my ruined shirt tied around my neck so Gray doesn't fall out.

  If my friends from the City saw this, my reputation would never recover. At least Gray seems to be taking a break from muttering dolefully in my ear.

  Fortunately, there's no one to see. The landscape of the waste is nothing if not monotonous -- dune after dune, with some low hills to the north and the distant mountains to the south. The nightsun has swung high overhead, outshining the weaker stars. I can only hope Mercy knows enough not to fall into another hellpit.

  Not long after finishing my sorry tale, I begin to realize something is wrong. The cruiser isn't hard to follow -- its tracks are deep and wide, tessellated with the interlocking pattern of its treads. But it's no longer alone on the sands. A twisted tangle of other tracks curve in from the north to overlap the ship's path and swing out to flank it on both sides.

  Navy outriders, maybe? But I know I'm grasping at straws. What would a platoon of Navy riders be doing out here?

  Fine. inhabitants of the waste, come for the opportunity for honest trade -- at night, in large numbers --

  Mercy skids to a halt at the top of a dune, where we can see the flames.