Episode 045| Black-Market Rift Goods

Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 4 · 9:23 p.m. · Saint Tranya, Underground · Beyond the Line

The ones who came were 2 men, one to a side. They didn't lay a hand on Lika, but the angle they boxed him in at meant that whichever way he turned, he'd be going where they wanted.

Lika didn't resist.

The one he'd come to see was further down anyway, further in. These 2 men taking him deeper beyond the line only saved him the trouble of finding the way. He pushed his hands into his coat pockets and went along with them, toward where the warm-yellow lamps clustered thicker.

That knot of cold, a degree lower than the air, clung half a step off his rear left, and came along too.

---

Only once he'd walked in did Lika see clearly what this market was really selling.

On most of the stalls, the same one thing sat out on the tables.

It was lumps of crystal, irregular, palm-sized, the broken faces like sugar someone had snapped apart by force. They gave off a faint light of their own — very pale, white shot through with green, nothing at all like the steady warm glow of the Source Stone. This light shook, in pulses, the way something not yet all the way dead still pants for breath.

Lika knew that light. Down under the Rift at S-17-R, he'd seen the same frequency of thing, crawling on the inner walls of the ice crystal.

---

These things had been salvaged out of the Rift.

He looked behind the stalls. A man had just climbed up out of some downward passage, a dozen-odd of these crystals in the net sack on his back, soaked through, face gone white, and the moment he was up people were crowding around him. Nobody asked where he'd gotten them — down here, asking where something came from broke the rules. They only asked one thing: how many, how much.

Boxed in and walked deeper, Lika pieced the economy of it together in his head as he went.

Up on the surface, these past months everyone had been fretting over one thing: the Source Stone was running out. Stockpiles bottoming out, rationing tightening, even the company in his own name — the one that drew sixty percent of the whole city's power — had a board arguing over how to cut its energy draw in half.

That was the story up top.

Down here was the flip side of that same story. The scarcer the Source Stone, the more these crystals salvaged out of the Rift were worth. They were unstable, they didn't keep, you couldn't ask where they came from — but they put out power, and in a city running out of power, anything that put out power was hard currency. The whole of beyond the line was built on this one line: someone with the nerve to go down into the Rift and salvage, someone up top to buy it, sell it, and skim the cut in between.

---

Lika stopped at one stall, reached out, and picked up a lump.

In his palm, the crystal shook worse than it had looked. Through his skin he could feel the thing pulsing, pulse by pulse — not quite like current, more like some kind of "command" not yet wholly dispersed. He'd handled every sort of energy material, and not one of them had ever given him this feeling in his hand — that it had once been something else.

The stallkeeper's eyes fastened on him at once. "Know your goods?"

Lika set the crystal back down. "Just looking."

---

He went on deeper, and the absurdity of it thickened in him.

Up on the surface, the man at his wits' end over the energy crisis, the one at the board table calling to cut the draw in half — that was him. The company that drew more power than any other in the whole city hung in his name. And right now, that man was being boxed in by 2 underlings beyond the line, walking through a black market that made its money off that same source-stone crisis — a black market that he, the board director, had never once known existed.

He'd lived above this city for more years than he could count. He'd watched it from above.

Not once had he looked up at it from below.

---

At the deepest end of the market, the lamps thinned out all at once.

Ahead stood a wall welded together out of whole sheets of old-city armour plating. On it there was no mark of the kind slapped up offhand beyond the line — there was a proper, stencil-sprayed insignia. A door opened in the middle of the wall, and the men standing at it were not like the ones packing up stalls outside — they stood straight, their hands never idle, their eyes running once over everyone who came near.

The 2 men boxing Lika in slowed their steps. One of them lowered his voice and said something to the man at the door.

Lika didn't catch it. But he saw the man at the door hear it out, lift his eyes, and turn his gaze on him.

That look was not like the sentry's "Appraisal." It was a man's eyes, plain and simple, doing the looking — looking at a piece of trouble whose rank couldn't be measured, weighing whether he was worth the people inside sparing a little of their time for.

【Ch. 045 End · Saint Tranya, Underground, Beyond the Line】