Gathering the Muscle

The only thing more dangerous than a locked vault in South Suna was a partner who thought he could settle an old debt with his fists.

I ducked beneath the dripping cedar pilings of the Iron Sluice, the damp chill of the lower timber wharves seeping straight through the shoulders of my oilskin coat. Below the floorboards, three fathoms of black canal water churned against the stone bulkheads, thick with harbor silt and the sulfurous reek of low tide. Above me, three hundred drunk stevedores, rope-spinners, and off-duty barge crew were screaming loud enough to rattle the barnacles off the foundation posts.

I had spent two hours running across slick slate roofs after shaking Warder Liko at the salt hoists. My right wrist still throbbed under its copper-kelp bandage, the counter-resonance poultice holding the silver tracking brand numb and dark for barely two hours. I should have been back at the Kaloa safehouse laying out the four-man breach sequence for Baya’s Grand Vault. Instead, I had arrived at an empty cellar to find a blood-smudged debt marker pinned to the pine table with a rusted fish hook.

Jala had walked straight into Rell’s subterranean fighting pit to clear his sister’s dock taxes before our heist went live.

"Idiot," I muttered under my breath, slipping through the heavy burlap curtain that separated the wet boat slips from the pit's observation tier.

The arena was carved out of an abandoned floodgate chamber. An iron mesh cage hung suspended by heavy chains directly over an open drainage sump, where the murky surge of the canal rose and fell through iron grates. Iron braziers hung from the timber beams, spitting oily yellow smoke that mixed with the sweat and cheap cane liquor of the crowd.

Inside the cage, Jala was bleeding from his left eyebrow.

He was stripped to his canvas trousers and rawhide boots, his broad, dark shoulders corded with tension. His knuckles were wrapped in leaded linen, glowing with the faint amber flicker of his kinetic warding. Every time he planted his feet, the floorboards beneath him groaned under the localized gravity surge he drew into his calves.

Opposite him stood Koro, a three-hundred-pound barge enforcer whose right forearm was encased in a syndicate hydraulic brace.

The brace was powered by high-pressure brine tapped directly from the overhead hoist lines. Heavy copper tubes ran from Koro’s leather harness into a pneumatic reservoir on his back, hissing with pressurized steam every time he shifted his stance.

"Three to one on the Smasher!" shouted a fat bookmaker perched on a timber barrel near the stairs, shaking a wooden tin full of brass and silver tokens. "Last calls before round four! The boy from Kaloa is spitting teeth!"

I shouldered my way past two towering deckhands, ignoring the stale beer they sloshed onto my sleeve. I reached the bookmaker’s barrel and slammed a heavy leather purse onto his ledgers.

The coins inside landed with a solid, ringing thud that cut through the roar around us.

The bookmaker blinked at the purse, then looked up at my dripping hood. His eyes darted to the handle of the copper dagger visible at my hip.

"Eighty silver crowns on Jala," I said, my voice cutting through the noise like a razor. "And I'm taking the five-to-one odds you posted on the board three minutes ago."

"Odds dropped to three to one when his eyebrow opened, sweetheart," the bookmaker sneered, reaching for the purse with ink-stained fingers.

I planted my palm over the leather drawstring, pressing the copper pommel of my dagger firmly against his thumb.

"The chalk on your board still says five to one, greasy," I murmured. "Mark the slate, take the silver, and lay the marker for Rell's house ledger. When Jala drops him, I'm collecting four hundred crowns plus his original note."

The bookmaker swallowed hard, feeling the hard copper against his knuckle. He scribbled the wager across his slate, snatched the purse, and shoved a stamped lead marker into my palm. "Your funeral, girl. Koro hasn't lost a bout since the spring thaw."

"Koro relies on cheap plumbing," I said, turning away from the desk.

I climbed the narrow wooden ladder that led to the catwalk running five feet above the iron cage. The heat up here was stifling, thick with soot and the sharp, metallic tang of vaporized canal brine.

Inside the cage, the bell clanged—a heavy iron cleat striking a suspended anchor fluke.

Koro lunged forward with a roar. His hydraulic brace hissed, the piston driving his iron-plated fist forward with the force of a battering ram.

Jala crossed his forearms in a tight defensive block, his amber kinetic ward flaring bright as the blow landed. The impact sent a shockwave through the cage, vibrating the iron mesh and throwing Jala back against the chain links. His heels skidded across the wet planks, leaving scorched friction marks in the wood.

Jala shook his head, spitting a mouthful of red into the drainage grate below.

He was strong enough to absorb two more of those kinetic bursts, maybe three. But the hydraulic brace gave Koro an unnatural recovery cycle. The pressure valve on Koro’s shoulder hissed, venting spent steam and resetting the piston in less than a second.

If Jala took a clean hit to the ribs, his sternum would crack. A broken kinetic specialist couldn't turn the primary ballast valve beneath Baya’s vault. Without Jala at full strength, the four-man breach was dead before we even set foot in the Sunken Bazaar.

I moved along the catwalk until I stood directly over the central suspension block that held the cage.

The overhead rigging was a mess of counterweights, greasy hemp ropes, and high-pressure copper pipes feeding the arena’s hydraulic lifts. I knelt on the wet timber, my eyes tracing the gleaming line of pipe that dropped from the main brine reservoir on the ceiling down to the swivel coupling at the top of the cage.

The syndicate mechanics had tapped the main harbor pressure line to run their arena show, using an uncalibrated gate valve to keep the pressure spiked.

A red copper bypass lever jutted out from the pressure manifold right beneath the catwalk floorboards. It was secured with a crude wire cotter pin to keep the crowd’s vibrations from slipping the gear.

I pulled two slim tension shims and a notched steel wedge from my coat pocket.

Below me, Koro backed Jala into the corner of the cage. The crowd surged against the wooden barriers, screaming for blood. Koro drew his right arm back, the copper tubes on his harness swelling as the hydraulic reservoir built up maximum pressure for a finishing blow.

"Finish the dog!" a voice roared from the VIP box above the sump.

Jala lowered his stance, planting both boots deep into the planking. The amber glow along his forearms deepened into a dark, burning copper. He was preparing to catch the punch head-on, betting his marrow against syndicate steam.

He was going to lose that bet if the piston fired at full compression.

I leaned over the catwalk rail, wedged the flat blade of my steel shim behind the cotter pin, and flicked my wrist.

The pin snapped with a tiny metallic ping lost beneath the screaming crowd.

In the same breath, I drove the notched steel wedge straight into the teeth of the pressure manifold's release gear, hammering it home with the heel of my boot.

The manifold shrieked.

The bypass valve slammed shut, cutting off the return line and forcing the entire volume of high-pressure brine backward into the overhead feed tube. The pressure gauge needle spun past the red mark, vibrating violently in its brass casing.

Fifty feet below, Koro threw his punch.

Instead of a clean, bone-cracking discharge, the hydraulic line on Koro’s shoulder ruptured with a deafening bang.

A spray of scalding canal water and black hydraulic grease blasted straight into Koro’s face. The pneumatic piston jammed halfway down its stroke, the sudden pressure inversion jerking Koro’s massive right shoulder out of its socket with a sickening pop.

Koro let out a strangled shriek, his balance crumbling as his arm went limp under the dead weight of fifty pounds of twisted iron.

Jala didn't hesitate.

Whatever had gone wrong with the brace, he saw the opening and took it. He dropped his shoulder, stepped inside Koro’s guard, and unleashed every ounce of kinetic force stored in his amber wards.

His right fist caught Koro square beneath the jaw.

The sound of the impact was like a sledgehammer striking a side of beef. The kinetic wave rippled through Koro’s massive frame, lifting both of his feet three inches off the floorboards before slamming him face-first into the iron mesh.

The entire cage shook, groaning on its suspension chains.

Koro didn't move. He lay crumpled on the wet timber, a pool of black grease and canal water spreading around his head.

The arena went dead silent for two seconds.

Then the bell clanged three times, frantic and ragged.

"Winner!" the referee bellowed from the ladder, his voice cracking with shock. "Winner by knockout—Jala of Kaloa!"

A roar erupted from the cheap seats, half the crowd cheering the upset while the other half cursed and threw empty liquor jugs against the iron mesh.

I pulled my steel wedge out of the manifold gear with a quick tug of my pliers, slid the tools back into my wrist roll, and climbed down the ladder into the observation pit.

By the time I reached the cage door, Jala was already stepping out onto the wooden pier. He had a bloody towel pressed to his eyebrow and a deep purple bruise spreading across his ribs, but his legs were solid and his eyes were clear.

"You took your sweet time," Jala grunted, wiping sweat and canal grit from his chin.

"I had to climb three flights of rigging because some idiot forgot how to count cards and wound up in a cage match," I said, shoving his wool tunic into his chest. "Put your shirt on. You smell like boiled grease."

"The brace blew its seal," Jala muttered, pulling the coarse wool over his bruised shoulders with a wince. "Lucky break. The bastard’s arm was about to take my head off."

"Luck had nothing to do with it," I said, tapping the cold steel shim in my pocket. "Move your feet. We have silver to collect before Rell figures out his plumbing didn't fail on its own."

We walked over to the bookmaker's barrel.

The fat man was staring at his ledgers in horror, his hands shaking so badly he could barely count the coin stacks. When he saw me step up, his jaw tightened, but one glance at Jala’s bloody knuckles and my unblinking stare seemed to make him think better of arguing.

"Four hundred crowns," I said, holding out my canvas satchel. "Plus Jala's original debt note with Rell’s wax seal on the bottom."

The bookmaker pulled a crumpled parchment from an iron box beneath the counter and shoved it toward me alongside four heavy bags of silver.

I took the debt note, checked the wax seal with my thumb, and held it over the nearest brazier until the parchment curled into black ash.

"Pleasure doing business with the Iron Sluice," I said, sweeping the silver bags into my satchel.

We didn't run, but we didn't linger. We slipped out through the side drainage corridor, ducking under the low stone arches where the canal water rose to our shins. The cold brine stung the scrapes on Jala’s knuckles and made the canvas wrapping on my wrist feel heavy, but within three minutes we had left the roar of the arena behind and climbed the iron ladder leading up to the wet streets of the timber wharves.

The rain was still falling, a cold, relentless mist that washed the smell of the fighting pit from our skin.

We ducked into the deep shadows beneath the overhanging roof of an abandoned sail loft, the harbor wind whistling through the rotted cedar siding.

I dropped the heavy satchel of silver onto an overturned salt crate and crossed my arms, looking Jala up and down.

"Your sister’s dock taxes were eighty silver pieces," I said, my voice flat. "You risked a broken shoulder and a syndicate contract for eighty pieces of copper-washed brass?"

"Rell doubled the interest when the Warders closed the lower canal stairs this morning," Jala said, leaning his head back against the damp wood and closing his eyes. "If I didn't fight tonight, his collectors were going to take her skiff. She can't fish without the skiff, Tani."

"And you can't turn the primary intake valve on Baya’s Grand Vault with broken collarbones," I countered. "I spent the last three hours dodging Liko across the salt market. He knows I'm targeting the Grand Vault. He knows I'm looking for a Tide-compass. The Warders are tightening the perimeter around Black Basin as we speak."

Jala opened his eyes, looking at me with a sharp, calculating focus that cut through his fatigue.

"You authenticated the blueprint?"

"Vano confirmed it," I said. "Sano’s original master schematic. Hand-drawn. The vault sits over an active Tide-conduit with reversing gravity and pressurized brine locks. It requires four people to turn the release valves simultaneously, or the whole chamber floods with border-sludge the second the outer seal cracks."

"Four," Jala repeated, rubbing the back of his neck. "You, me, and two others. You got the muscle. What about the compass?"

"The compass is in the Sunken Bazaar," I said. "Roko has it in his lockbox behind the flooded temple. He wants four hundred crowns for it, which we now have sitting in that satchel."

"That leaves the insider," Jala said.

I looked away, staring out into the rain-slicked alley where the yellow reflections of the harbor lamps rippled across the puddles.

"We find a freelance lock-breaker from the Gutters," I said. "Someone who can read a hydraulic gauge and keep their mouth shut."

"A freelance breaker won't know the municipal conduit rotation," Jala said, his voice dropping into a stubborn, grating rhythm. "Baya doesn't use standard harbor timing. He rotates the master pressure frequencies every twelve hours using the Harbor Registry ciphers. If we don't have the daily valve rotation codes, all four of us will turn our keys at the same second and still get crushed by the brine pistons."

"I can crack the rotation frequency on site," I said.

"In four minutes while the gravity is flipping upside down?" Jala scoffed, stepping closer. "You're good, Tani. You're the best reverse-thief in Suna. But you're not a magician. We need someone who already works the treasury ledgers. Someone who has the daily codes in his head before we ever step onto the bank foundation."

"No," I said, my voice hardening.

"Tani—"

"I said no, Jala."

Jala took a deep breath, wincing as his bruised ribs caught the cold air. He wiped a smear of dried blood from his jaw with the back of his hand and looked me dead in the eye.

"We have to recruit Muli."

The name hit the damp alley like a splash of cold canal water.

"Muli is a lying, silver-tongued leech who would sell his own mother's burial shroud for a pot of spiced wine," I snarled, stepping into Jala's space until our coats brushed. "Two years ago, he gave us the wrong shift rotation for the Customs House safe. We spent forty minutes up to our necks in freezing bilge while the Warders dragged the canal with iron nets."

"He got us out of the bilge," Jala pointed out.

"After I had to pick three deadbolts with a rusted iron nail while the water was touching my chin!"

"Muli is the only clerk in South Suna who has Baya's private registry keys," Jala insisted, refusing to back down. "He owes Baya two thousand silver pieces from the gambling dens in Fishhook Lane. Baya’s enforcers are already hunting him to collect. If we don't grab him tonight, Baya’s men will have him at the bottom of the basin with iron boots on his feet."

"Good," I snapped. "Then the basin will have one less thief."

"If Muli dies, the valve rotation codes die with him," Jala said, his voice dropping into that quiet, immovable tone he only used when he knew he was right. "And if you try to breach that vault without the codes, you won't be returning an anchor to seal the rift. You'll be drowning the entire district in Tide-brine."

I stared at him, my fists clenched tight inside my coat pockets.

The rain drummed against the sail loft roof, cold and relentless. In the distance, the low, mournful blast of a harbor foghorn rolled across the water, followed by the faint hum of a Warder boundary-halberd cutting through the mist three streets away.

My wrist twitched under the linen wrapping—a phantom throb of silver static reminding me that Liko was out there, closing the net block by block.

We were running out of time. The vault was a clockwork monster, and Jala was right. Pride didn't crack municipal pressure locks. Knowledge did.

"If he tries to skim a single copper coin from the satchel," I said, my teeth clenched so tight my jaw ached, "I'm throwing him into the sump myself."

Jala let out a rough, breathless laugh, wincing as he clutched his side. "Fair enough. Where's he hiding?"

"The old drying sheds behind the timber docks," I said, slinging the heavy satchel of silver over my shoulder and pulling my hood low against the rain. "Let's go find our insider before Baya’s collectors turn him into fish bait."