Rain fell like the city itself was crying grey tears.
Inside the Silver Anchor Company's counting house, the air tasted of damp parchment, cheap pipe smoke, and desperation thick enough to chew.
Isolde sat behind the wide oak desk that had once belonged to her father. No lamps. The dying daylight through cracked windows was kinder to the dark circles under her eyes, but it couldn't hide the fire in her hair: wet copper strands plastered to pale cheeks like fresh blood on snow.
A tremor ran through the old steward's voice. "The Duke's factor just left, Miss. Unless the three thousand crowns are on his desk by tomorrow midnight, the last deep-water berth becomes his… and so do you."
Marriage contract.
Indentured flesh.
The word tasted like rust.
Isolde said nothing. Her right thumb worried the rusted iron ring on her left little finger: turn, turn, turn. The cheap metal had worn a raw red groove into the skin. Pain kept her sharp.
"Where's my uncle?" she asked, voice low, smoky, dangerous.
"In the gambling den behind the fish market. Said it was 'women's business.'"
She laughed once, short and ugly. The sound of a wolf that had finally decided whose throat to rip out.
Knock. Knock.
Heavy, impatient.
The door opened without waiting. A gaoler stinking of wet leather and coal mud tracked black footprints across her priceless Isfarian carpet.
"Out," Isolde said without looking up. "We don't serve drinks here."
"Not drinks, lady."
He slapped two objects onto the desk like a bad hand of cards.
One Zippo, still warm.
One shard of pure white porcelain no bigger than a coin, yet it drank the gloom and threw back a cold, perfect light.
"The dead man in the deep cells says hello."
Isolde's heart punched her ribs.
She rose so fast the chair screeched backward. Fingers closed around the porcelain.
Cold. Hard. Smooth as a lie and twice as sharp.
"He says," the gaoler licked cracked lips, "he knows how to turn mud into this."
A pause for greed to do its work.
"And he knows what your uncle wrote in the dock ledgers that never reached the tax office."
The room narrowed to that single flawless shard.
Isolde's pulse hammered in her ears like forge trips.
Trap or lifeline.
Didn't matter.
A drowning woman will clutch a razor.
"Ready the carriage," she said.
She swept a deep-crimson velvet cloak from the stand. The heavy fabric snapped like a war banner as she strode past the gaoler.
"Dead cells. Now."
Blackstone City, sub-level four.
The air you could chew, thick with rot and human waste.
Li sat against the wall, conserving oxygen, counting heartbeats.
Iron groaned. The door opened.
A scent cut through the filth: cold rain, cedar smoke, and something feral.
He opened his eyes.
She stood beyond the bars, soaked red hair dripping onto stone, green eyes luminous in the torchlight like a wolf that had learned to wear silk. Crimson cloak, travel-stained hem, and murder in her posture.
Without a word she flicked the porcelain shard through the bars.
It rang against the floor like a bell made of ice.
"Talk," she said. One word, edged.
Li picked it up, flicked it with a fingernail. Clear, pure note.
"Porcelain," he said, calm as site safety briefing. "Harder than gold, smoother than silk. Back home we just call it china."
"You made that in a prison cell?" Disbelief and hope warring in her voice.
"Accident debris." He leaned back, ribs protesting. "Three months ago I fell out of the sky. Survived by hauling coal and pulling bellows for the Gilded Hand. Couldn't stand watching them waste half the fuel, so one night I tweaked the air intake angle."
He met her stare.
"Hit thirteen hundred degrees. Your guild's garbage firebrick couldn't take it. Boom. Here I am."
Isolde's fingers found the iron ring again, spinning faster.
Porcelain was legend. A cup of it in the capital was worth a manor. This shard in her palm was either miracle or madness.
And he was offering the recipe.
"What do you want?" she asked. The tremor in her voice wasn't fear; it was a gambler seeing a royal flush.
"First, clear my debt to the guild and walk me out of here tonight."
He raised five soot-black fingers.
"Second, give me the ruins of that forge. The bricks are trash, but ground up they make decent aggregate."
"Third, this business: fifty percent mine. Tech share."
A barked laugh escaped her. "A dead man wants half my empire?"
"Your empire dies tomorrow," Li said, voice flat. "Your uncle's selling you to a corpse with yellow teeth. I'm the only bid on the table."
Silence stretched, broken only by distant water dripping.
Somewhere in the dark, their breathing synced.
Isolde studied him: black hair, black eyes, broken ribs, and a calm that felt like standing next to a loaded ballista.
Same predator scent she smelled on herself.
She thrust her gloved hand through the bars.
"Done. But if your kiln doesn't spit gold, I'll use you for fuel."
Li wrapped his filthy fingers around hers. Calluses met kid leather. Cold, hard, certain.
"You'll be rich enough to be terrified."
In the stinking dark beneath Blackstone, two monsters shook on it.
The deal was sealed with porcelain dust and the promise of fire.
Outside, the rain kept falling, but for the first time in months it sounded like money.