“You mean trappers?”
“I don’t.” Alden’s jaw tightened. “I mean Couriers.Breakers.But while we’re having this lovely conversation, is there anyone else you may have led to my doorstep?”
Nate ducked his chin. Something twisted in his chest, tight and sore, stung by the bite of Alden’s sharp tongue. “No.”
“Then it’s no bother.” Alden waved his hand dismissively. He closed the book and opened the lockbox beside it with a key pulled from a hidden space beneath the desk. “Let’s take care of your achy head so I can work in peace.”
He held up a small vial.
Nate shrank back. “Alden. No.”
Alden rolled his eyes. “I’m not looking to make a customer out of you. You’re not good for the money, and you smell like wet ash.”
Nate caught the vial Alden tossed with a flick of his wrist. Dark, purplish liquid swirled against the glass. “What is it, then?”
“Gathos City meds. Not the latest concoction from the Breakers, but it will make you sleep and stop your head from hurting.” He made a beckoning motion with his pale fingers. “It’s also expensive. If you’re not drinking it, I will.”
That wasn’t an idle threat. Nate recalled the jittery, bright-eyed high that Alden had been on earlier and gulped the spicy tincture down. He coughed and gasped at the tingling burn trickling from his throat to his belly.
“I thought Remedy tasted bad.” Stinging tears welled up as Nate wiped his mouth. “This tastes like gasolex.”
Alden laughed. “That’s the spirit.” He crossed the room like a dancer and sank down onto the cushions beside Nate to pry the vial out of his hand.
“You promise it wasn’t chem?” Nate asked, a thread of guilt running through him. What if he’d done exactly what Reed suspected?
“It really matters to you, doesn’t it?” Alden twirled the vial in his fingers. A crease formed between his thin eyebrows. Nate couldn’t tell if it was sadness or wonder.
“Yes.”
“I promise it isn’t chem. Real doctors in Gathos City give this to people with real headaches. I can’t say I obtained it legally, but it’s perfectly proper.” He touched Nate’s nose. “Your reputation remains spotless.”
Sheepish relief washed over Nate. Alden had done many things, had whittled Nate’s trust down to a bruised remnant, but he’d never tried to push chem on him. He’d even locked it up at night, especially early on, when Nate’s grief had made him itch to feel anything else.
Nate wiped his nose where Alden had touched and missed, poking his cheek instead. The pain dampened. And his head started floating away.
He gave Alden an accusing squint.
“I said it was medicine. I didn’t say it wasn’t strong.” Alden watched him, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Did you really do what you said? Save those people from the train?”
“I climbed up and opened doors. It’s easy for a Tinkerer.”
A soft, odd smile graced Alden’s face. He stood without a word, and as the fabric of his robe swirled beside Nate, the tincture kicked in. Nate tilted down into the bed and closed his eyes.
At thirteen, Nate had been fresh on the streets, still soft from his childhood in the city and four years of sheltered life with Bernice. He was smaller than other kids his age—and unprepared. Spooked by the sound of someone picking the lock at Bernice’s door, he’d scooped up what he could and climbed out the window and down the fire escape.
When a trapper with a belt full of leashes had chased him down a narrow alley, he’d hidden on the back stoop of a shop, cramming himself under a rain barrel platform.
Alden had opened the back door, tossed the trapper a credit, and thanked her for finding his “cousin.” Still shaking, Nate had let Alden push him over to a rusted fuse box connected to a snarl of taped-up wires running up the brick wall.
“I’ve heard of you. The little Tinkerer. You set up the alarm system at the herbalist’s on 9th.”
“How do you know that?” Nate asked, wondering for the first time if the Old Gods were real and this boy was one of them. He only looked a little older, but he spoke in the tired way adults did.
“The streets talk. I listen.”
Alden stayed very close to the door and picked at his fingernails while Nate worked. He didn’t look like anyone Nate had ever seen. He wore his hair long and his body swathed in an embroidered robe like one of the mothy old nightgowns in Bernice’s closet.
“They say you were with an old woman.”
