Second Dominion (Fourth Age)
Aurean Cycle no. 462 of the Macbeth dynasty, reign of Aldric II
Third Quadrant, K-7 Trade Station
The mechanic was skinning them alive.
"Broken collector, fused conductors, compromised exhaust. 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 smelled worse than fuel. The shop, overall, stank of solvent and rust. It had been carved out of a secondary hangar and seemed held together more by faith than bolts: walls full of cracks sealed with coarse welds, shelves overflowing with rusty parts, and a central counter covered in tools that had never known a lick of maintenance.
"To get her back in shape you're looking at at least…" The mechanic stopped, doing mental math that was more theater than arithmetic. "…fourteen hundred pods."
Amarel laughed, bending forward. "Fourteen hundred? Friend, for that much I'm pretty sure I can buy a whole new engine."
The mechanic shrugged, complicit. "Then buy one. 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 it away."
The mechanic smiled, showing nicotine-stained teeth. "You like to haggle hard. But this isn't a spice market."
Amarel opened his mouth to retort when a young voice cut in.
"Eight hundred."
The three turned.
A girl was leaning against the shop's rusty hatch. Work suit, hair hastily tied back, bright green eyes. In her hand she held a bag of mechanical parts: the same girl the two had seen earlier through the window.
"Third-generation universal collector, used but tested. It's worth eight hundred. And you know it."
The mechanic darkened. "Not your business."
"Oh, it is."
She set the bag on the floor and stepped forward. "My father runs a transport company on Vala. I've seen too many guys like you jack prices on people who don't have a choice."
Amarel started laughing. "Well look who it is! Told you, Law—'not yet.'"
Law narrowed his eyes at the girl. "You're not invited."
"Relax, I wasn't trying to crash your dinner." Jean nodded at the ship behind them. "But if you don't want to pay double for nothing, you'd better listen."
The mechanic snorted, raising his hands. "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.
The man cursed under his breath and went back behind the counter to rummage.
Amarel nudged Law with an elbow. "I 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 an almost imperceptible smile at Amarel. Law noticed, and rolled his eyes.
"And before you ask: no, I'm not just going to watch 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 carriage, no. On this one." Jean folded her arms. "You need someone who knows the routes, the markets, and how not to get fleeced by every station shopkeep."
Amarel laughed even louder. "I say yes."
Law shot him a glare. "We… have things to do."
Jean didn't seem surprised. "Things to do?"
"None of your business."
The girl turned toward the ship. The side hatch was ajar, left like that by the mechanics as they unloaded parts. Jean slipped in without asking permission.
"Hey!" Law reached her in two long strides.
Too late. The girl was already crouched by a container, running her fingers over the electronic seal. She studied it for a moment, then smirked.
"You know this stamp is fake, right?" she said. "Not from a registered depot."
Amarel went still. Law planted himself in front of her, icy. "Where do you think you're looking?"
"Oh, nowhere. It's just that my father runs a transport company. I can spot these seals with my eyes closed." Jean tapped the crate twice. "You've got contraband."
Jean ran her thumb over the edge of the seal a second time, as if to be sure. The station's noise filtered in from the hangar in waves: hammers, voices, crackling announcements. Inside the hold, instead, lingered that smell of warm metal and suspended dust typical of ships that never rest.
"You've got contraband," she repeated, softer. It wasn't a threat. It was a fact.
"Yeah, yeah, I heard you. And what would that change?" Law hadn't moved. Two steps from her, arms at his sides, the prosthesis beaded with condensation.
Jean straightened, flicking a speck of paint from her suit. "It changes how we talk, that's all. If I pretend I didn't see, you pay me off with a 'thanks and bye.' If I don't pretend, we negotiate."
Amarel narrowed his eyes, amused. "Interesting definition of 'negotiate.'"
"Call it what you want." Jean looked at him first, then at Law. "I don't plan on ruining my life by turning you in to inspectors. But I'm also not letting the chance get pulled out from under my nose."
"The chance of what?" Law asked.
"Of stopping rotting here," she answered without a beat. "And of not leaving my father alone in a war you can't win by standing still."
That word—father—hung between the crates, as if it had its own specific weight.
Amarel motioned for her to go on with his hand.
Jean drew a breath, as if to set the rhythm. "My father's name is Orval. 'Viridis Starways' Transport Company—two atmospheric forklifts and two interurban trucks on Vala, no ship of our own; for orbit we rely on whoever we can. In recent cycles we've been 'relying' on the same people every time."
"Vala, First Quadrant… ah. The Tide," Amarel enunciated.
The Tide. It wasn't an organization in and of itself, at least not on paper. It was House N'Vely's Second Circle—the one that didn't parade in imperial halls but bent over the docks, customs offices, and alleys of port cities. No glittering crests or ornate uniforms: just seals, ledgers, and knives held low.
The name had… various meanings.
Jean nodded. "The Tide. At first it was protection. Two men at the office, a handshake, a stamp on the card. 'No trouble with customs, no surprise inspections.' A tax, sure. But we were small: paying meant breathing. Then came the 'adjustments.'"
She wet her dry lips—dry anger. "First five percent, then ten, then fifteen. And it wasn't enough. We had to use their depots, their warehouses, their brokers. Every piece of our work went through them. And every piece crumbled into fees."
Law watched her without interrupting. Those wary, attentive eyes seemed to weigh every syllable, like a perfectly calibrated scale.
"Dad held out." Jean tugged at the loose sleeve of her suit, nervous. Her confidence was wavering. "'We hold on, we get our contracts back, we don't budge on price.' Talk of a decent man."
A half-smile, bitter and trembling. "But that's not how they think. They punctured our tanks twice. Made a load of spare parts 'disappear' saying it was 'internal customs.' They made our best driver sick with fear: one day he found my sister's dog in his trunk, asleep. Just asleep. But you get it?"
"…," Amarel grimaced.
"I started learning everything I could." Jean's eyes lit for a moment—not pride, rather that cool thrill when you understand a mechanism and start using it. "Cargo codes, ground routes, orbital routes, customs tricks, real seals and remade ones. My father always says I learned 'out of anger.' He's not entirely wrong."
She tapped the fake seal on their crate twice. "This, for example, comes from a set of cheap remade stamps that moves between K-7 and the Black Belt. You can tell by the micro-fractal along the lower edge: the real ones have a needle-eye pattern, these a kind of spiderweb."
"And how do you know it's a spiderweb?" Amarel asked, curious.
"Because my father tried to buy them," Jean said flatly. "To stay afloat. I forbade it. It would only have given us a wider noose. The Tide sees it. And if they see it, they tighten."
Silence. From the hangar someone whistled an off-key tune; a trolley clattered over a grate.
"So you want to get on a smugglers' ship to… save another one?" Law didn't really believe it: he was looking for the crack in her argument.
"I want to stop being steamrolled." Jean met his gaze. "And I want to do it with people who can move where I can't. In return, I take you where you can't go."
Amarel studied her, serious. "And 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 a second, measuring the sentence like a mechanic measures torque. "…you make movements. Not chatter."
Law's face lit. Something shifted in his eyes, a brief reflection of the earlier tavern, of the line tossed away and caught by Amarel like a shiny coin. Then he shook his head.
"We're already in the middle of a job."
Amarel smirked. "Come on, I want to see Snow's face when we show up three instead of two."
"This is serious."
Law turned to Jean. "And if I say no?" he asked.
"Then I leave," Jean replied. "I'm not running to denounce anyone, I don't need to. But I go home and start counting the cracks on the warehouse walls again 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 shot back, amused. "You could've kept quiet, bargained for 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 swindled on a collector price. It changes if I start moving loads the Tide doesn't get to touch." She paused. "And if I get my father out of their net."
"Does your father know you're here?" Law asked.
"No."
"Mh."
"No, he wouldn't have let me. He'd have said you don't play games with the big fish." Her jaw trembled for an instant, almost imperceptible. "But I see them every day. I see how they look at him when he walks into the wrong office at the station. I see how he pretends not to notice the two who always change places at the bar across from our warehouse. I see how he checks the door twice every night before lights out. It's not work anymore. It's… siege."
Amarel drew a slow breath, as if the word had entered his lungs.
"Do you have proof?" Law asked.
"I have names." Jean bent down, unfastened a side pocket of her suit, and pulled out a small dented datapad. Lists, arrows, and maps appeared on the screen, drawn by impatient fingers."This is the ring of 'brokers' who are actually collectors. This is the 'safe' depot where parcels vanish. This is the route where they make convoys go missing. This other is the time window when they look the other way on extra embarkations." She scrolled. "And here I've got the maritime patrol schedules along the Vala North margin. Not official. But they never change."
Law took the datapad. His callused fingers—one natural and the other metal—held it with the same care he'd give a detonator. He scrolled too, fast. Every mark looked like a pebble left in a forest—precise, recognizable. He studied in silence, eyes darting quickly between the lines. Now and then he seemed about to speak, but held back.
"Where does it come from?" he asked, without looking up.
"I listen. I watch. I ask questions while I'm buying parts," Jean explained. "And I have a friend who works the scale at the upper port. She doesn't ask questions, but she sees everything."
"You're putting her in danger," Law commented.
"They are putting her there," Jean set her jaw for a second, then eased it. "But 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 something she'd repeated to herself many times.
Law turned to Amarel with a smile. "That's rhetoric. Next time we invite her to make the toast."
Amarel smirked and leaned back against the hold's post, arms crossed. "Okay, okay. Let's suppose—and I do mean suppose—we take you aboard. What do you do right now that's worth the spot?"
"I make sure no one touches your stuff." Jean opened her bag and pulled out a roll of translucent film and a device the size of a book.
"Mh?"
She unrolled it and stretched it out for them. The inner weave caught the light in a fine pattern. "Inverse-weave film. Laid over a seal, it duplicates its codes. With the cold matrix—" she raised the device. "—I add a second layer: a nice 'unloaded and verified' stamp. Result? For thirty hours this crate is invisible."
"Invisible?" Amarel tilted his head.
"To systems, yes. Anyone scanning it sees it as already checked goods, awaiting recataloging. No one wants to dirty their hands with warehouse bureaucracy: we turn into dirty paper, and no one touches dirty paper."
Law stared at her, unmoving. "How long do you need?"
"Fifteen minutes." Jean was already bending over the crate. "And we leave the stuff on the ship. After, if we want to get out of the station, it's the only way."
Silence weighed like lead. At last Law nodded, curt. "Fifteen minutes. Not one more."
Jean worked quickly, wrapping the film around the seal, calibrating the matrix with a display that blinked green and red. Every so often there was a short beep, like an artificial heart. Amarel watched, curious, while Law kept an eye on the hangar door.
When time was up, the seal flashed blue, then went neutral again.
Jean wiped her brow. "There. Now it's just boring luggage."
"For how long?" Law asked.
"Thirty hours, I said. After that, the film collapses and the old code resurfaces."
Amarel whistled. "Just enough to go and come back. I like it."
Law nodded. "Then let's go."
--
K-7's passenger terminal was a hive of neon and tinny voices. Hundreds of travelers pushed crates, animals sealed in glass cages, bulging suitcases. The air was saturated with spices and fuel.
Line 6 to Alay awaited them at the east corridor: an old, flaking cylinder with scratched portholes and narrow seats. The sign flickered: Departure: 19:10.
"And there it is, our noble steed," Amarel commented, laughing. "See, Law? You were right!"
Law grunted in reply.
Jean shook her head. "Ah, by the way, I took a closer look at your shuttle… it's done for. What the hell did you do to it?"
Amarel stared at Law. "I'm never letting you near a cockpit again."
They boarded the shuttlebus. Inside it smelled of sweat and filters never changed. Exhausted miners dozed, merchants clutched their bags, and a preacher murmured words in a broken tongue.
Jean sat by the window, bag tight on her knees. Amarel flopped down beside her, still amused by the absurdity of it all. Law sat across from them, rigid.
"Let's hope Snow doesn't take too long. Amarel, check the site for someone to buy the goods when we're back."
"Okay."
The bus shuddered, peeled away from the dock with a metallic groan. The crackling loudspeaker voice announced departure.
The station slid away, slow, lit by tired neon. Jean looked out, hiding a smile she didn't want to show. Amarel drummed his fingers on the seat, as always. Law snorted and rested his head on his hand.
Thirty hours. Not thirty-two. Not twenty-five. Thirty.
And with that silent countdown, the three set off together for the first time.