The Price of Waiting

Bidan Solaru's shop smelled like a drowned apothecary that had made peace with its own rot: brine and rendered tallow and under both of those, faint and mineral, the specific sourness of Lift gone a little stale in its clay jars. Tavo had grown up on that smell. It still didn't comfort him. Comfort wasn't what the place was for.

"You're early," Bidan said, not looking up from the coil of copper wire he was re-tempering over a low flame. He was a wide, soft-bellied man who moved like someone twice as fast as he looked, and he'd known Tavo since Tavo was eleven and small enough to fit through a grate Bidan couldn't. "Early's expensive. Early means you need something, and need means I get to charge for it."

"I need you to look at this before you talk prices." Tavo set the vial on the counter, upright, in the cone of lamplight where Bidan did all his real looking.

Bidan's eyes went to it and stayed there a beat longer than idle interest would explain. "Market sump?"

"Grate siphon. Last night."

"Mm." Bidan picked it up, held it to the flame, turned it with two fingers like he was checking an egg for a crack. Lift this fresh still held its shimmer in slow, lazy threads, gold-white against the glass, the way cream turns in water before it mixes. "Three-quarters, give or take. You're slipping, Tavo. Used to bring me full vials."

"Used to have more time to fill them." Tavo kept his voice flat, the way you kept your hands flat on a table when you didn't want someone to see them shake. He'd rehearsed this part on the walk over, the way he rehearsed anything that mattered. "Before you weigh it — watch the settle."

Bidan's eyebrows went up a fraction, which for him was practically a gasp. He held the vial still.

The threads inside were already thinning out, pulling apart into separate strands instead of moving as one slow mass. Tavo counted it under his breath, the way Bidan himself had taught him years ago, back when Tavo's hands were too small to hold a siphon rod steady and Bidan had made him learn the numbers first: a half mark, meaning half of thirty-some heartbeats, for a healthy fresh draw to still move as a single body of light. This one broke at a third of that.

"It's thinning early," Tavo said. "You weigh it now and price it like it's got a day and a half left in it. It's got maybe ten hours. I pulled it clean off a Reclaimer-cleared sump, not off a cracked main — there's no reason for it to be going this fast unless something in the sump itself is already souring the draw before it even leaves the grate. Which means it came off the line hotter than a normal trickle, or it wouldn't be burning down this quick. You're not buying three-quarters of a slow vial. You're buying a smaller amount of something a lot stronger."

Bidan looked at him for a long moment, and something that wasn't quite a smile moved at the corner of his mouth. "You've been paying attention."

"I pay attention to everything that keeps my sister alive. It's not a hobby."

"No." Bidan set the vial back down, gently, the way a man sets down something he's already decided he wants. "No, it isn't." He didn't argue the degradation. That was the thing about Bidan — he never fought you on a fact you could prove in front of him, only on the ones you couldn't. He named a figure, revised it up without being asked when Tavo opened his mouth to push, and settled on a number that was, by Tavo's quiet count, almost a fifth higher than what he'd have gotten walking in cold.

"That's for the quick-burn tincture," Bidan said. "You want the slow dose instead — the one that holds a Fathom flat for a while instead of just dragging the fall out — that's a different conversation, and the better rate you just talked me into on the vial is what pays for it. I'm not charging you on top. I'm telling you what it buys."

Bidan wiped his hands on a rag that had long since stopped being any identifiable color and nodded Tavo toward the stool across the counter, which was its own kind of answer: sit, this takes longer than a trade. "Sit. Let's talk about your sister, since apparently we're doing that today instead of just doing business like civilized criminals."

Tavo sat. The stool wobbled on an uneven leg the same way it always had, since before he was tall enough for his feet to reach the floor from it.

"She slipped a Fathom overnight," he said. "Two to three. Faster than the healer predicted."

Bidan didn't flinch, didn't make a sound of sympathy, didn't do any of the things Tavo might have wanted from someone who wasn't Bidan. He just picked up a scrap of chalk and a slate tile that had clearly done this exact job a hundred times before, the surface gray with the ghosts of other people's numbers.

"All right. Numbers, since you like them." He wrote as he talked, quick, economical strokes. "Draw Season peaks in — what, five weeks, I'd guess, maybe less if the storms come in hard this year. Fathom Three to Fathom Four on the standard curve is maybe two and a half weeks if we're lucky and she doesn't get another night like last night. Four to Five, with the slow dose holding her as well as it can, buys you another two, two and a half. That's your five weeks, if everything goes exactly as well as it's capable of going, which it never does."

"So I'm fine."

"You're fine the way a man standing on one plank over open water is fine. One bad night—" he tapped the chalk against the slate, a short, final sound— "and you're not fine anymore, and you don't get a second plank, you get the water. What you pulled last night buys you maybe four days of margin on that plank. What you've been bringing me most weeks buys you less than that. You're not falling behind because you're bad at this, Tavo. You're falling behind because the job you're good at was never built to outrun what's happening to her."

Tavo looked at the slate instead of at Bidan, because the numbers were easier to hold than the man's face while he said them. "So what's a job that is."

Bidan was quiet for a second. It wasn't hesitation — Tavo had seen him hesitate, and this wasn't that. This was Bidan deciding how much of something he was going to charge for by how he phrased it.

"There's a restricted junction out past the flood markers," he said. "Varu Cistern Annex. You won't know it, because nobody local's touched it — it's not on anybody's regular route, it's not in anybody's regular rumor, which should tell you something all by itself. Word is it's running hotter than its permits allow. A lot hotter. One real pull off that line, done clean, could cover your whole shortfall in a single night. Maybe twice over."

"Then why hasn't somebody already done it?"

"Because the one crew that scouted it two years back came back short a man and didn't go into details about why, and the two who've asked me about it since then changed their minds the second I told them what kind of patrol discipline they'd be walking into." Bidan set the chalk down. "I'm not telling you not to think about it. I'm telling you it's not a grate siphon. It's not even the sump job you did last night times ten. It's a different category of stupid, and I've watched you do the stupid kind before, so I know you're capable, but this is the kind that gets written up as a cautionary tale instead of a story you tell later."

"I didn't ask for the speech."

"You get the speech for free. Everything after the speech costs." Bidan almost smiled again, and for a second the old rhythm between them was just there, intact, under all of it — the look of a man who, by Tavo's reckoning, still saw the kid who used to steal his tools to practice with and put them back slightly worse than he found them. "Take the slow dose. Go home. Think about the Annex when you're not running on no sleep and your sister's clock ticking in your ear, because that's exactly the state of mind that gets people killed trying to be heroes about their own family."

Tavo took the small clay flask Bidan slid across the counter, the slow dose, weighty for its size, warm the way Lift always ran warm against the skin of your palm. He didn't say thank you. Bidan wouldn't expect it, not after all these years — gratitude had never been the currency between them, and saying it out loud would only have made them both look away.

"I'll think about it," Tavo said, which was as close to a promise as either of them was going to get.

He was most of the way to the door, flask tucked inside his coat against his ribs where it rode steadiest, when Bidan spoke again, in the same flat, unbothered voice he'd used for everything else that morning — like it was an afterthought, like it cost him nothing.

"Funny thing," Bidan said. "Somebody's been asking around the Flats this week. Who's good enough to touch the Annex, who's done work like that before, who's hungry enough to try." He didn't look up from the wire he'd gone back to tempering, like the words were just another transaction he was closing out. "I didn't tell them anything. Didn't have to."

Tavo's hand stopped on the door frame. "Why not?"

"Because they already had your name before I opened my mouth."

The street outside was doing what it always did at this hour — gulls fighting over something in the shallows, a woman two stalls down arguing about the price of eel — and none of it sounded different, and all of it did. Tavo stood in Bidan's doorway with a flask of borrowed time against his ribs and understood, with the specific, cold clarity of a man finding out he'd been seen in a room he thought was empty, that somewhere in the last few weeks, without doing a single thing differently than he'd always done, he had stopped being nobody.