in Kyrkarta. Taking a job with Davon over at MMC.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch Jaesin’s look of surprise as he whips his head around to stare at me—and I realize my mistake. I told them I wasn’t sure. That I hadn’t made up my mind. Crap.
“I mean, I’ve had an offer,” I blurt. “Of a job. Thing. At MMC.”
Jaesin’s eyes go narrow. I backpedal furiously.
“Nothing’s firm yet, though. You never know. Jaesin, we should get to our meeting. It’s almost noon.”
Ginny’s face does the pity thing again, and she goes back around the counter and fishes four pastries from the case: one each for me and Jaesin, and a box with two more for Remi and Ania. Our favorites. She always remembers, even though I’m only there twice per year. My stomach twinges with a blend of guilt and hunger as she hands me an almond croissant.
“I’ve made way too many today,” she says, waving away Jaesin’s attempt at payment. “I expected at least a few of the factories to be operating, but the damage must have been worse than I thought. Don’t let me keep you. If I don’t see you again, I wish you the best of luck in Jattapore, Jaesin. Dizmon, don’t be a stranger if you decide to stick around Kyrkarta after all, okay?”
I nod, glaring at the ground, and Jaesin raises a hand in farewell as the door’s bright chime signals our exit. His curiosity about my job outburst radiates in waves I can actually feel as we walk down the block to the end of the long building the bakery lives in. The alley behind it holds the sewer access we need to get at the pipes, but there’s no way I’m taking my precious rare treat down there with only a napkin to protect it. At least Ania’s and Remi’s are in a box. I nibble slowly at my almond croissant, savoring its flaky, nutty, buttery sweetness, stretching it as far as it can go.
Until we turn the corner around the back side of the building and come face-to-face with a group of workers in full nullaz suits.
A sparking maz barrier blocks the alley off from the rest of the street. The workers haul huge piles of rubble away from a long fissure running straight down the alley, while a techwitch and a spellweaver work to stitch the crack back together bit by painstaking bit.
“Oi, this area’s off limits, kids,” a woman wearing a foreman’s colors says, stepping up to the barrier.
Jaesin turns on the charm. “Sorry, our bad. Just wandering around while we eat,” he says, hoisting his sugary fruit tart for her to see. “We’ll go.”
The woman nods, but her gaze follows us all the way down the road until we turn a corner, then collapse against the side of a greasy gray factory.
“Well, that plan’s screwed,” I say, licking the last of the almond cream from my fingers. “This job just got a lot more difficult.”
“Maybe not a lot,” he says. A link request pops up in my lenses, and I accept so we can study the map together again.
He continues. “If we think there’s just the one pipe, then theoretically any well-hidden location with underground access along this path should work, right? We just need to get down there relatively close to where we were before.”
He has a point, and there are plenty of sewer access points along the way. I’ve always found it a little weird that we carry something as powerful and valuable as maz in pipes running right alongside the ones that carry our sewage, but so it is. Made sense to use the existing infrastructure in the wake of the plague, I guess.
“Do you have your baby with you?” Jaesin asks, circling a few points along the projected path of the pipe, voice neutral. Good. Focus on the job and not my awful slip. I may have made up my mind about the job in my own head, but he doesn’t need to know that. I don’t even want to think about it right now, considering I’ll be tasked with protecting these pipes in a few weeks. At least I’ll have a thorough knowledge of all the vulnerabilities, right?
“I do, yeah.” I reach into my pocket and withdraw a tiny drone, a custom model I built for a school project two years ago. I got a perfect score on the project and a private email from my teacher praising my work.