“Lillia?”

Tom Tanner’s whispered breath hung in the stairwell, a little cloud of mist floating in the ether. The darkness before him made no reply. There was only his labored breathing, and the drill of his heart beating in his head, and the tread of his feet plodding on weathered stone.

“Lillia,” he repeated, his voice rising.

Tom was winded from the descent and lightheaded, and his legs were beginning to tremble. Despite the cold, a film of sweat beaded across his forehead. He came to a halt, wiped his face, and cupped his hands to call out a third time:

“Girls?”

The sound of his voice fell into the void beneath him, unheard and unanswered.

Tom clenched his jaw for a moment. It was rare for Tom’s face to show vexation. He was tired, though, and starting to feel the chill in his knees. It had been a long time since he had made this journey; longer still since he had had to keep such a hurried pace. He was trying to catch up with two children.

Tom was considering whether he ought to just try shouting for them when a noise startled him from a few steps below—a faint shriek, followed by a flurry of tiny, savage squeals. Tom squinted at a movement in the shadows.

Two rats, their muzzles caked with blood, were squaring off over the mottled body of a third. They had clamped their teeth around the corpse, and neither one would let go.

Tom frowned. He drew a breath of frigid air, shook his legs loose, and resumed his trek downward.

All morning long, Tom had been traveling the crumbling artery of rock that wound through the workers’ realm of the Crag. There were thousands of these staired avenues scattered throughout the Crag, but this particular run was the longest. Not a true stairwell nor a corridor as such, but an avenue of loosely connected flights, landings, bridges, and broken steps, all of which ran, more or less, up and down to join the three wards of the Crag together. A long time ago, long before Tom had been born, when the tunnels were in better repair, the route had been called Forward Way. But that was under an old Plan, not the current one, so no one knew its name anymore. They were just stairs and tunnels. Decrepit, crumbling steps, no different than all the others in the Crag.

The only light in the stairwells came from metal pots nailed in the walls every hundred feet or so. These were filled, intermittently, with gulleystars—black, rancid smelling mushrooms that grew wild in the Mountain’s cracks. When pressed and packed together, a potful would cast an oily, yellow glow not much weaker than a cheap candle’s. For many who worked in the Crag, it was the only light they ever saw.

Tom passed beneath one of the glowing pots, a wiry, wavering shadow stealing down an expanse of empty stairs. At the bottom, he turned a corner and descended another flight, and then another, which became a long, winding curve that ended abruptly in a mortared wall and a makeshift doorway. The door was just a rectangle of planks nailed together and held upright on rusted hinges, but there was a picture of blue waves painted on its surface just above a sign with a single word in black. Though Tom could not read the word he knew what it meant.

A wisp of relief broke across his lips.

From the other side, Tom could hear a low murmur of voices. He shouldered the door open and stepped down into a small, windowless waiting room filled with people.

“Girls?”

All at once, there was a loud creak from another doorway opening and slamming shut, a waft of salt air, and a blinding light, followed by a chorus of groans. Tom held up his hands too late to shield his eyes and bumped into a lump of a woman who was slouched on one of the steps. She made a half-hearted open palm swing at Tom’s face. “Watch it, you ass.”

“Sorry. Lillia? Mava? Where are you?”

Still blinking from the sudden flash of light, Tom could make out the outlines of a small crowd huddled in front of a doorway. As his vision returned, he saw that the score or so of people here were his own kind, cut from the same mold as he. They were all Craggies: thin, ghostly in the light of the room’s only gulleystar pot, all dressed in coarse drab, with plain, expressionless faces. Stone people, queued up in a stone waiting room, within a chamber of a stone mountain.

But not a girl among them. Tom worried.

 “Beg your pardon,” the man next to Tom tapped him on the shoulder. He was very tall, and a pale scar running across his forehead had left his eyebrows permanently raised, as if he were perpetually enraged. But he spoke respectfully:

“Are you with them two sashes that just come through?”

Tom lifted his chin. “Yes. My daughter. And a friend of hers.”

“I thought so,” the eyebrows raised even higher, almost to the crown of his head, and the man gave a wide, toothless grin. “Could tell right away. Warden’s already let them through. Why don’t you go on ahead and give a knock, since you’re on business with them? Hey, clear a lane down there! The sash’s daddy’s coming through.”

Not everyone in the crowd was inclined to give up their place in line, but another shout from the man and the waiting room reluctantly shuffled itself around to make way for Tom. Tom ignored the glowers and muttered curses and sidled up to the far door. It was heavy and oaken. He rapped three times with his fist.

The door lurched open. The deluge of sunlight was obscured by the helmed head of a bearded, middle-aged man peering inside:

“Not time yet. Back of the line,” the helmet growled.

“I’m with them, warden,” Tom tried to point over the guard’s shoulder. “The sashes. Right there, see?”

A sneer broke across the man’s leathery face, but he stole a quick look behind him, just in case. Beyond the doorway past the warden’s station, a lone ray of afternoon sun filtered through a haze of smog and fire smoke; it was just enough light to illuminate the hovels and lean-to tents of a seaside market. Built in an open bay of the Mountain's side, where the rocky shoals met the water, a flat, featureless plateau of stone had been raised above the breaking waves to make a place for the labors and trades of the sea. A constant din arose from carts rumbling past, and men and women shouting over each other, and the barely audible peal of distant ships creaking in their berths, and countless gulls calling out noisily from the clouds above. Perhaps half a thousand of the Crag's men and women, cramped together, were carrying on their work.

In the middle of the clamor, two young girls were laughing uproariously at one another.

One was a small, round-faced blond; the other, a gangly adolescent with mouse-colored hair that badly needed combing. Neither was particularly lovely. But they were confident, and that made them stand apart. The short blonde had her hands on her hips. The crowds seemed to bend around her.

Both girls wore a yellow sash over their shoulders.

“See?” Tom pointed again and yelled. “Lillia!”

Neither one responded.

“Lillia, it’s me! Over here!”

The guard’s head swiveled back and forth. At last, the blond, Lillia, heaved an exaggerated sigh and rolled her eyes. Without saying anything, she waved at the guard for Tom to join her and then resumed her conversation with her friend.

The warden licked a set of chapped lips and nodded:

“Alright, you’re vouched for. I’ll still need a look at your pass. Sergeant’s out on rounds. Might be watching.”

“Sure,” Tom handed him a wadded paper from his shirt pocket that was weighted down on its corner by a seal. The warden opened and folded it again without looking at it. So long as there was a dab of wax, it was a pass. Tom identified himself:

“Tom Tanner, Industry Caverns, Upper Ward of the Crag.”

“Uh-huh, here’s your pass back, Tanner. Go on. Rest of you, better have your passes and your fees ready when it’s time for your shift. And I better not see a guildmark on any of those baskets, or I promise you I will torch them right here with you inside. So help me, I will.”

The guard did not stick out a palm for a bribe, so Tom hurried through the door to join the children. His legs, not used to walking on level ground, throbbed in protest, but he moved briskly, weaving through the market without ever looking anyone in the face. He made his way across a plaza of broken tiles, straw, fish entrails, and pools of seawater that had collected wherever the ground was soft. A few fires smoldered, burning trash that sent waves of foul-smelling soot billowing into the air. Tom’s eyes were watering by the time he reached the girls.

He looked down fondly at Lillia, his hands clasped behind his back, and waited patiently.

* * *

Lillia did not pause her conversation to greet her father.

“It’s so obvious Lynne’s just trying to curry up to Madam Teacher. Ever since we got passes to visit the library, she’s been jealous. But when we got to the Crest to see a removal. She’s seething—seething—at us now.”

“She certainly is,” the taller girl nodded and forced a reedy laugh. Something Lillia had mentioned made Mava frown; she started to wring her hands. It passed quickly, though, and Mava turned her expression back to the rapt attention of an animal hoping to be thrown a scrap of food.

“It’s pathetic,” Lillia continued. “I mean, when has she ever asked for more accounting work?”

 “Never. Nobody ever asks to do extra accounting work, right?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. I suppose if all you can aim for is a bursar’s position, it might be a good idea. Do the best you can with what you’ve got.”

“That’s true.”

“We all know Lynne will never have the marks to be a full clerk. She’s not like us, Mava.”

“No, she certainly isn’t.”

“And she doesn’t have any pull, like Jack.”

“Uh-uh,” Mava nodded.

The conversation had finally reached a lull. Tom smiled at the girls: “We ready to go see the ship?”

Lillia sighed. “I guess. Since we must. Why Madam Teacher is making us go through with this insipid assignment when we’re almost graduated, I have no idea. What is it you need again?”

“What we need,” Tom corrected her, “is salt. Two sacks for the tannery.”

Lillia winced at being reminded of her family’s trade, and Mava had to hide a smile.

“It’s on a ship called the Plentiful,” Tom said. “Not far up the Docks. When we get there, I’ll introduce you to the dockmaster. His name’s Mr. Overton. He’s decent enough. I’m sure he’d be willing to go over how he does his job with a couple of academy ladies. Help you with your reports. I’ll show him my papers, pay him the fee, and let you chat while I unload the cargo. Maybe afterwards the captain, Asa, can show you around the ship.”

Mava thanked him, while Lillia preened her hair and let out a yawn.

“Stay close to me in this crowd,” said Tom, leading the girls from the square. “The ship should be moored by now.”

They passed between little gatherings of people that were spread across the square. Clerks weighing nets teeming with fish; a sullen line of dockworkers waiting for their wages while women of all ages dressed in loose, short skirts lingered nearby, throwing their arms and their legs around each man as he got paid; some boys hurling rocks at a pelican. Hovering just over the crowds was a chair built atop a tottering wooden platform. In it a flaccid, balding woman called a lector slouched over to one side, trying to stay awake. She was reading official pamphlets in a voice as loud and grating as a seagull’s cackling, and no one paid her the least attention.

As they reached the plaza’s end, Lillia spotted a class of workers’ children, all in rags and sitting in a ring around a half-blind old man whose clerk’s sash was bleached white from years in the sun and salty air. He was a teacher, going over the rudiments of Crag labor:

“—and once you’ve finished training for your work as ship cleaners, the clerks will see that each of you receives the fruits of your labor. No one can ever exploit you. You’ll always have your rights and dignity. Our all for all. Isn’t that wonderful? And such good work you’ll get to do, scraping barnacles in the nice, outside air, catching rats. So much finer than scrounging gulleystars or growing potatoes on the Farms, you lucky little—Paula, pay attention! You want to go work on the Farms?”

“Sorry, Duncan,” Paula sang.

“That’s Master Teacher. Now, who remembers what a worker’s first duty to the Commonwealth is? We just went over it. Hm? Anyone?”

 Lillia made a point to cast a condescending sneer as she walked by. Not towards any of the children, who were beneath her notice. But to be stuck training workers’ whelps—it was surely one of the lowest assignments a clerk could bear. Poor old man. She tisked at him and followed her father.

They came into a quay where an even bigger crowd had gathered so that it took the three of them a long while to elbow their way onto the first pier. Lillia was feeling jostled and annoyed by the time they finally reached the water’s edge, but as they set foot on the first plank, all three came to a halt. They tilted their heads back and stared.

A massive wrought iron arch, soaring taller than any ship's mast, spanned across the tops of the first two pilings. It was rusted, and its swirling latticework was blunted with bird droppings and spray from the constant crash of waves. But still, it loomed, a shadow of lost splendor from a time before there were clerks and lectors, poised high above the lines of broken wooden docks and the dingy tides of people that they now carried. Tom, Lillia, and Mava stood silent in its presence.

Tom spoke, his voice thick with awe. “Isn’t it something? I always like to look at it whenever I come here. Nobody could make this nowadays.”

Mava nodded, but something about the arch offended Lillia:

“Why would anyone want to?”

“I don’t know,” Tom shrugged.

“It’s hubris,” Lillia said, showing off a word she had recently learned in class. “Look at all that wasted labor, all that iron left to rust, and for what? A giant bird perch. Such hubris.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way. I suppose that’s a fair point. Still. It is nice looking at. Kind of makes you feel small, but part of something big at the same time—I don’t know.”

“It was made by the priests, and that’s exactly the kind of thing they would have wanted you to think.” Lillia tried to soften her tone. “It may be hard for you to grasp, but things like this, these monuments, they’re just idols, you see? They were made in the old days to be bowed down to. To exploit you. That was their only function.” She cast another disapproving glare at the arch and straightened her sash. “It's the kind of hubris the dwarves would wallow in because we let them keep their stupid religious superstitions. But we are better than that. No. This doesn't belong here. It should have been thrown into the sea with all the gods. In fact, we shall make a note of it, Mava, so that a committee can see about reclaiming the material.”

“Alright,” Mava never took her gaze off the shadow above her.

 “Come on,” said Lillia, “Didn’t you say the ship was waiting for us?”

They passed beneath the arch silently, Tom leading the children out onto a crowded highway of weathered timber where their feet joined a steady drum of footsteps. They were elevated high above the ocean, and with each passing wave, they could feel the barnacled posts give way so that the girls nearly lost their balance. It quickly became an amusement, particularly for Mava, and Tom had to remind them not to linger.

They followed the main pier beyond the breaking surf, where it split into smaller docks, which in turn split again, and again, like a splintering tangle that had somehow taken root and spawned in the dark, turgid waters of the ocean. Without pausing, Tom followed a route Lillia knew he must have walked countless times before. The girls lingered behind, resuming their prattle about their school and their classmates.

As they went, a blur of faces passed before them. A team of wharfmen shuffling in a line. A poxed, legless sailor begging for change within a driftwood shelter. Men aboard a fishing boat roaring in laughter as a scrum of shirtless, feral children clawed each other for scraps of fish. Here and there clerks sat propped up in officious looking chairs and benches, most of them sleeping through their shifts. The girls had to hold their sashes to their noses to ward off the stench of bilge that filled the air.

At last, Lillia, Tom, and Mava reached a turn that took them past a long row of barrels, fishing nets, and a pile of empty crates piled up along the pier's edge. Tom scanned the berths and indicated that the ship was up ahead, a small transport with a single mast and a low cabin, already tied off. Scrawled in flaking, uneven yellow letters on her port bow was her name: Plentiful.

* * *

As soon as they reached the ship’s gangplank, Tom knew something was wrong.

A hatch on board burst open. A young woman came racing barefoot out of it and leaped across the plank, straight towards Tom.

“Asa?” Tom held out his hands, not sure what else to do.

The girls gaped from the dock as the woman collapsed into his arms. She was younger than Tom, but only a little, and very sunburnt. Her black hair was matted in knots, and her shirt had been torn at the nape. The side of the woman’s face was swelled from a massive purple welt. As he struggled to keep her on her feet, she pulled Tom’s head close and the scent of her blood filled Tom’s nostrils. When she opened her mouth, she whispered so that only he could hear her words:

“Tanner, is there—is there no help for a worker’s daughter?”

Tom went pale. He almost let her drop, but at that moment Asa slipped her hand into his, and he felt a leather pouch being pressed into his palm. It made a soft, metallic clink. Their eyes met. He grimaced, but quickly shoved the pouch into his shirt pocket and hoisted her back up. She had suddenly found her strength again.

 A loud curse rang out in the air, and a heavy-set man stormed across the gangplank. The wood groaned beneath his weight. “Where you think you’re going, Asa? We’re not done yet.”

Tom stole a look toward Lillia, hoping she would understand what he had no time to explain: that she absolutely had to keep her mouth shut. Then he drew his lips tight, squared his shoulders, and yelled straight back at the man:

“Who are you?!”

A flock of terns flew off, cackling loudly at the sound of Tom’s voice. Lillia let out a gasp, as if she had never heard her father raise his voice before. The man on the plank wavered, but not because Tom had checked him. He was catching his balance. The man’s eyes were bloodshot and glassy, and a reek of cragfire, the cheap, tasteless fungal spirit allotted to workers, wafted around him like a cloud.

Tom lowered his voice, though not its menace: “I said, who are you?”

The man swore until he finally managed to get his footing right. He was twice Tom’s size, and just as pale, but with a gray, sickly tinge around his cheeks and a bulbous, veined nose. The man’s shirt was unbuttoned, and Tom could make out fresh scratches on his neck and sagging chest. He also saw a yellow sash tied like a belt, although it was nearly falling off of him. The man adjusted his clothes and grunted at Tom:

“I’m the dockmaster.”

“What?”

“Overton’s been replaced,” Asa answered, glaring at the man. “This is the new clerk. His name’s Craigman … He doesn’t know how things work here.”

“Oh, I know more than you’d guess, my sweet.”

Tom’s head was spinning. He silently cursed himself for bringing the children here.

“Look,” Tom lowered his voice, trying to sound calm, “I’m just trying to pick up some salt.” He reached for his shirt pocket. “I’ve got papers.”

“Don’t give a damn about your papers,” Craigman belched. He found a small cask that was laying on its side and flipped it over for a chair. An iron whaling hook, bigger than a fist, had been wedged into one of its planks; he jerked the hook free and sat down. “Ship’s been impounded. Along with all her cargo.” Craigman made a leering glance at Asa and pointed the hook at her. “And her crew. Nothing’s leaving here.”

“Why?” Tom asked.

Craigman glowered at Tom as if to size him up, but then he answered:

“There’s guildmarks all over the crates in the hold,” he flapped his hand behind him, tottering on his barrel. “Hell, they’re all over the hull. If this little minx isn’t in a guild, I’m a Craggie. So I’m impounding this ship and setting a fine on it. Now. In the meantime. You said you need some salt out of the cargo? Might be that a particular sack doesn’t have a guildmark on it. Or if it did, I might not be able to see it.”

Tom breathed a small sigh of relief. He dropped his voice:

“How much?”

Before Craigman could begin haggling, Lillia’s voice broke in a high shrill:

“Don’t you dare pay this man anything! I know what he’s doing. We learned about this in class. He’s asking for a bribe. A payment over the guideline for his own profit!” She spun on her heel to face the man; a quaking finger extended. “I’m a sixth-year academy student and admitted to the Commissary. Show me your guidelines.”

“Lillia, no!” Tom hissed.

Craigman's eyes glowed, his face screwed up, and then a great guffaw burst out.

“Who’s this little Craggie think she is? Guidelines, ha!”

Lillia sucked in a breath of air. Her fingers clutched her sash. She began sputtering a dozen things at once. She was in an academy, practically a commissar already, and he, a mere dock’s clerk. Where were his guidelines? Where were his orders? Was he profiting? And over and over, the threat: she would make a note of him.

Craigman was not listening. His eyes strayed to Asa, who was still standing next to Tom, clutching her shirt tight to her chest. But when Lillia walked out onto the plank, the dockmaster whirled about with an angry shout.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Mava," Lillia's voice was shaking but defiant, "run and find that warden by the gate. Tell him—tell him a commissar has taken control of this, uh, boat, and is placing a clerk under arrest. For bribing.”

Mava was rooted where she stood, wide-eyed, like a rodent spooked from a noise; Tom knew the girl would bolt at any moment, but not to fetch a warden.

Tom shouted: “Lillia, get down from there, now! Craigman, please, we-we don’t want any trouble. Really. Just tell me how much—”

Craigman chuckled and slurred something that might have been, “C’mere.” His weight spilled off the barrel he had been sitting on. He turned clumsily, waving his free hand to keep his balance while his other hand reached for Lillia.

The moment froze before Tom: a cluttered berth, a teetering shack, the boat, the wooden pilings split and covered in white bird droppings. The smell of saltwater and filth was redolent in the air. A wave broke nearby, shining green beneath a break in the clouds. Lillia was standing on a plank, about to say something, her face a mask of indignation.

Suddenly, Lillia’s face went blank. The sun peeked through once more, catching a gleam of metal.

The metal hook that Craigman held.

And then it was gone, buried within her belly. Lillia’s shirt, her flesh, her sash: all became the same color, red.