Second Dominion (Fourth Age)
Aurean Cycle no. 462 of the Macbeth dynasty, reign of Aldric II
Third Quadrant, K-7 Commercial Station
The mechanic was skinning them alive.
"Collector's shot, conduits fused, exhaust compromised. It's a miracle you made it here in one piece, boys." The man was big, with oil-black hands, a cybernetic eye, and an apron that stank worse than fuel. The shop itself reeked of solvent and rust. It had been carved out of a secondary hangar and looked held together more by faith than by bolts: walls lined with cracks sealed by clumsy welds, shelves overflowing with rusted parts, a central counter cluttered with tools that had never seen maintenance.
"To bring her back, you're looking at at least…" The mechanic paused, doing mental math that was more theater than arithmetic. "…fourteen hundred pods."
Amarel laughed, leaning forward. "Fourteen hundred? Friend, for that I can buy a separate engine. I'm sure of it."
The mechanic shrugged, complicit. "Then buy it. Meanwhile, you're here. And I'm the only one with the parts."
Law watched without moving a muscle. "Thirteen hundred."
"Fourteen hundred."
"Twelve eighty, and I'm already giving away."
The mechanic smiled, showing nicotine-stained teeth. "You like to play hardball. This isn't the spice market."
Amarel opened his mouth to fire back, when a young voice cut in.
"Eight hundred."
All three turned.
A girl was leaning on the shop's rusted side door. Work jacket, hair tied in a hurry, bright green eyes. She held a bag of mechanical parts: the same girl they'd seen earlier at the window.
"Third-gen universal collector, used but tested. It's worth eight hundred. And you know it."
The mechanic darkened. "Not your business."
"Except it is."
She dropped the bag and took a step forward. "My father runs a transport company on Vala. I've seen too many guys like you hike prices on people who don't have a choice."
Amarel burst out laughing. "Well, look who it is!"
Law narrowed his eyes at the girl. "You're not invited."
"Relax, I wasn't trying to crash your dinner." Jean pointed at the ship behind them. "But if you don't want to pay double for nothing, you'll want to listen."
The mechanic snorted, hands up. "Fine, fine. Eight hundred. But you take the part as is, no warranty."
"No one's ever asked for a warranty on K-7," the girl said, satisfied.
He cursed under his breath and went rummaging behind the counter.
Amarel elbowed Law. "Told you this place was full of surprises."
Law didn't answer. His gaze stayed on the girl.
"What's your name?" Amarel asked.
"Jean. Viridis." She answered without hesitation. Or almost. You could swear she flashed Amarel the tiniest smile. Law noticed, and rolled his eyes.
"And before you ask: no, I'm not standing by while you do business. I want a spot."
"So you do want to crash our dinner," Amarel said, amused.
"A spot?" Law arched a brow. "On this ship?"
"Not on a public coach, no. On this one." Jean folded her arms. "You need someone who knows routes, markets, and how not to get fleeced by every station shopkeep."
Amarel laughed even harder. "I'm a yes."
Law shot him a look. "We… have somewhere to be."
Jean didn't look surprised. "Somewhere to be?"
"None of your business."
The girl turned toward the ship. The side hatch was ajar, left that way by the mechanics as they unloaded parts. Jean slipped in without asking.
"Hey!" Law reached her in two strides.
Too late. She was already crouched by a container, running her fingers over the electronic seal. She studied it a moment, then gave a crooked smile.
"You do know this stamp is fake, right?" she said. "This didn't come from a registered depot."
Amarel froze. Law planted himself in front of her, ice-cold. "What do you think you're looking at?"
"Oh, nothing. Just that my father runs a transport company. I can spot these seals in my sleep." Jean rapped the crate twice. "You've got contraband."
Jean ran her thumb along the seal's edge a second time, as if to be sure. The station's noise rolled in from the hangar in waves: hammers, voices, rasping announcements. Inside the hold, though, lingered that warm-metal and floating-dust smell of ships that never rest.
"You've got contraband," she repeated, quieter. Not a threat. A fact.
"Yeah, I heard you. And how would that change anything?" Law hadn't moved. Two paces from her, arms loose at his sides, the prosthetic gleaming with condensation.
Jean straightened, flicking a fleck of paint off her sleeve. "It changes how we talk, that's all. If I pretend I didn't see it, you pay me a 'thanks and bye.' If I don't pretend, we negotiate."
Amarel squinted, amused. "Interesting definition of 'negotiate.'"
"Call it what you want." Jean looked at him first, then at Law. "I'm not about to wreck my life handing you to the inspectors. But I'm not letting this chance get pulled out from under me either."
"Chance for what?" Law asked.
"To stop rotting here," she said, without hesitation. "And not leave my father alone in a war you can't win by staying put."
That word—father—hung between the crates like it had its own weight.
Amarel motioned for her to go on.
Jean drew one breath, as if to set a tempo. "My father's name is Orval. 'Viridis Starways'—two atmos mules and two interurban trucks on Vala, no ship of our own: for orbit we hitch rides with whoever we can. Lately, we've been forced to 'hitch' with the same people."
"Vala, First Quadrant… ah. The Tide," Amarel said evenly.
The Tide. Not an organization in and of itself, at least not on paper.
It was the Second Circle of House N'Vely—the ones who didn't parade through imperial halls but bent over docks, customs offices, and port-city alleys. No glittering crests or ornate uniforms: just seals, ledgers, and knives kept low.
The name had… several meanings.
Jean nodded. "The Tide. At first it was protection. Two men in an office, a handshake, a stamp on the log. 'No problems with customs, no surprise checks.' A tax, sure. But we were small: paying meant breathing. Then came the 'adjustments.'"
She wet her dry lips—anger, arid and controlled. "First five percent, then ten, then fifteen. And it wasn't enough. We had to use their depots, their warehouses, their 'mediators.' Every piece of our work went through them. And every piece crumbled into commissions."
Law watched without interrupting. Those wary, attentive eyes weighed every syllable, like a scale tuned too well.
"Dad held on." Jean tugged at the loose sleeve of her jacket, nerves showing. Her confidence was starting to wobble. "'We hold, we take our contracts back, we don't budge on price.' Good man talk."
A bittersweet, shaky smile. "But those people don't think like that. Twice they punched holes in our tanks. A shipment of spare parts vanished—'internal customs,' they said. They made our best driver sick with fear: one day he found my sister's dog in the trunk, asleep. Just asleep. But you get it?"
"…," Amarel grimaced.
"I started learning everything I could." Jean's eyes flashed—not pride, more that cool thrill when you grasp a mechanism and start using it. "Cargo codes, ground routes, orbital routes, customs tricks, genuine seals and forged ones. My father says I learned 'out of anger.' He's not wrong, really."
She tapped the fake seal on their crate twice. "This, for example, comes from a cheap stamp set that circulates between K-7 and the Black Belt. You recognize it by the micro-fractal along the lower edge: the real ones have a needle-eye pattern; these are more like a spiderweb."
"And how do you know it's a spiderweb?" Amarel asked, curious.
"Because my father tried to buy them." Jean's voice was flat. "To stay afloat. I banned them. It would've only put a bigger noose around our necks. The Tide sees that. And when they see it, they tighten."
Silence. From the hangar, someone whistled a flat tune; a cart jolted over a grate.
"So you want to get on a smugglers' ship to… save another one?" Law didn't really believe it: he was probing for cracks.
"I want to stop taking hits," Jean looked him straight on. "And I want to do it with people who can move where I can't. In return, I'll take you where you can't go."
Amarel studied her, serious. "Why us?"
"Because you're here." A flicker of irony. "And because you're not the Tide. I can smell them."
She turned to Law. "And because you…" She hesitated, weighing the line like a mechanic checks torque. "…you make moves. Not speeches."
Law's face lit, just a fraction. Something shifted in his gaze—a brief echo of the tavern, of the line tossed off and pocketed by Amarel like a bright coin. Then he shook his head.
"We're already on a job."
Amarel smirked. "Come on, I want to see Snow's face when three show up instead of two."
"It's serious."
Law looked back at Jean. "And if I say no?" He asked.
"Then I walk," Jean replied. "I'm not running to report anyone; I don't need it. I'll go home and go back to counting the cracks on the warehouse walls until the Tide decides it's our turn." She swallowed. "I don't want it to end like that."
"But you did catch us," Amarel countered, amused. "You could've kept quiet, bartered half a day's work, and vanished."
"And I wouldn't have gotten anything." Jean shrugged. "The world doesn't change if I stop getting fleeced on a collector. It changes if I start moving loads the Tide shouldn't touch." She stopped. "And if I pull my father out of their net."
"Does your father know you're here?" Law asked.
"No."
"Mhm."
"No, he wouldn't have let me. He'd have told me 'you don't play with big people'." Her jaw trembled a hair, almost invisible. "But I see them every day. I see how they look at him when he steps into the wrong office at the station. I see how he pretends not to notice the two who always switch tables at the bar across from our shed. I see how he checks the door twice every night before lights out. It isn't work anymore. It's… siege."
Amarel drew in a slow breath, as if the word had filled his lungs.
"Do you have proof?" Law asked.
"I have names." Jean crouched, unfastened a side pocket on her jacket, and pulled out a battered little datapad. Lists, arrows, maps sketched by impatient fingers lit the screen.
"This is the circuit of 'mediators' who are actually collectors. This is the 'secure' depot where crates evaporate. This is the route where they make convoys disappear. This other is the time window where they look away on extra loadings." She scrolled. "And here I've got patrol schedules along Northen Vala's coastal rim. Not official. But they never change."
Law took the datapad. One hand callused flesh, the other sythetic tissue, he held it with the same care he'd give a detonator. He skimmed fast. Each mark was like a breadcrumb in a forest—exact, recognizable. He studied in silence, eyes darting line to line. He seemed about to speak, then held back.
"Where'd this come from?" he asked without looking up.
"I listen. I watch. I ask questions while I'm buying parts," Jean said. "And I've got a friend at the upper port scale. She doesn't ask questions, but she sees everything."
"You're putting her in danger," Law said.
"They're putting us there," Jean set her jaw, then eased it. "If you find a way out and don't take it because 'it might be dangerous,' you end up measuring danger with the wrong ruler." She said it softly, like she'd told it to herself a lot.
Law glanced at Amarel with a faint smile. "That's rhetoric. Next time she gets the toast."
Amarel smirked and leaned back against the hold's post, arms folded. "Okay, okay. Let's suppose—and I do mean suppose—we take you on. What do you do, right now, that earns your spot?"
"I make sure no one touches your stuff." Jean opened her bag and took out a roll of translucent film and a device the size of a book.
"Mhm?"
She unfurled the roll and held it up. The inner weave threw back the light with a fine pattern. "Inverse-mesh film. You lay it over a seal and it duplicates the codes. With a cold matrix—" she lifted the device "—I lay a second layer: a nice 'unloaded and verified' stamp. Result? For thirty hours this crate is invisible."
"Invisible?" Amarel cocked his head.
"To the systems, yeah. Anyone scans it and sees cargo already checked, waiting to be recataloged. No one wants to dirty their hands with warehouse paperwork: you become dirty paper, and no one touches dirty paper."
Law stared, unmoving. "How long?"
"Fifteen minutes," Jean was already crouched over the crate. "And we leave the stuff in the ship. After that, if we want to get out of this station, it's the only way."
The silence weighed like lead. Finally Law gave a short nod. "Fifteen. Not a second more."
Jean worked fast, wrapping the film around the seal, calibrating the matrix as the display blinked green and red. Every so often it chirped—a small, artificial heartbeat. Amarel watched, intrigued, while Law kept an eye on the hangar door.
When time was up, the seal flared blue, then went neutral.
Jean wiped her brow. "Done. Now it's just a boring piece of luggage."
"Until when?" Law asked.
"Thirty hours, I said. After that, the film collapses and the old code shows."
Amarel whistled. "Just enough to go to Alay and come back. I like it."
Law nodded. "Then we move."
—
K-7's passenger terminal was a hive of neon and tinny voices. Hundreds of travelers pushed crates, animals in glass cages, bulging valises. Spice and fuel thickened the air.
Line 6 to Alay waited on the east concourse: an old, scabbed cylinder with scratched portholes and narrow seats. The sign flickered: Departure: 19:10.
"And there it is, our noble steed," Amarel said, laughing. "See, Law? You were right!"
Law grunted.
Jean shook her head. "Oh, and I took a closer look at your shuttle… it's done. What the hell did you do to it?"
Amarel stared at Law. "I'm never letting you near a cockpit again."
They boarded the shuttle-bus. Inside smelled of sweat and filters that had never been changed. Exhausted miners dozed, merchants clutched their bags, and a preacher murmured in a broken tongue.
Jean took the window seat, bag tight on her knees. Amarel dropped beside her, still amused by how ridiculous this was. Law sat across from them, rigid.
"Let's hope Snow doesn't drag this out. Amarel, check the listings for someone to buy the heap when we're back."
"Okay."
The bus shuddered, peeling off the docking corridor with a metallic groan. A rasping PA voice announced departure.
The station slid back, slow, lit by tired neon. Jean stared out, hiding a smile. Amarel drummed his fingers on the seat, as always. Law snorted and propped his head on his hand.
Thirty hours. Not thirty-two. Not twenty-five. Thirty.
And with that silent countdown, the three of them set out together for the first time.