"Or that," Savage allowed, though her voice didn't sound like she believed it any more than I fully did.
The man at the wagon didn't wait for us to make the first move. He straightened off the wall he'd been leaning against and started toward us at an easy, loose-limbed walk that was somehow more unsettling than if he'd come at a run.
"You two look like you're lost," he said, pleasant enough on the surface, "or like you're exactly where you meant to be, which would be a much bigger problem for you."
"We're looking for a woman," I said. "Dark hair. Came through with some goods that don't belong to her."
"Funny," he said. "I'm looking for two people who are about to walk away from this alley and forget they ever saw this wagon."
Savage's hand had already found the grip of her shield strapped across her back, slow and steady, the way you'd reach for a cup of water rather than a weapon, and I felt my own pulse climb into that particular cold, clear register I'd learned to recognize during my time in Yomi's grid.
"Last chance to walk," the man said, and drew his blade in the same motion as the last word left his mouth, which told me he'd never actually meant to give us the choice at all.
He came in fast, faster than his easy stance had suggested he could move, and I stepped back and loosed at the same time, an arrow that clipped his shoulder rather than his chest because he'd read the shot half a second before I released it and turned into it instead of away.
Savage met his second strike with her shield raised, the impact ringing loud off the stone walls of the alley, and I heard her grunt with the effort of it, her boots skidding a few inches back over dust and old refuse before she planted them again. He was strong, clearly trained past whatever an ordinary hired guard usually needed to be, and I understood, watching the exchange, that Inari's coin had bought her a good deal better than an amateur.
I split into three, scattering wide through the mouth of the alley, and put a real arrow into his exposed flank while his attention chased the decoy nearest his blind side. It caught him, a good clean hit, and he staggered a half step before recovering with the kind of discipline that told me pain wasn't new to him.
"Enough of that," he said, and threw something small and dark toward the ground between us that burst into a thick gray smoke the instant it struck stone, choking and sudden, and for a few seconds I lost him entirely, the alley narrowing down to nothing but the sting in my eyes and the sound of Savage cursing somewhere close.
When the smoke cleared enough to see through, he'd closed the distance on me instead of Savage, his blade already swinging in low toward my ribs in a strike that would have opened me clean if I hadn't thrown myself sideways into a stack of crates that came apart under me in a spray of splintered wood and someone's spilled dye.
I came up with the dagger instead of the bow, no time to nock anything at that range, and he was already on me again, faster than I liked, faster than I had answer for with a blade this unfamiliar in my hand. Savage's shield caught his next swing from the side before it could land, buying me the half second I needed to scramble back to my feet.
"Go for the bow, idiot, you're better with it," she snapped, already trading blows with him herself, her sword arm working in short brutal arcs that he matched blow for blow, the two of them locked into something close and ugly and entirely too even for my comfort.
I put my back against the alley wall, nocked, and waited for the opening Savage was buying me with every second she stood in that man's way.
It came when he overextended on a swing meant to end her, a heartbeat of full commitment with nothing held back to cover the follow-through, and I loosed straight into the gap it left along his side.
The arrow caught him below the ribs, deep, and he folded around it with a sound that wasn't quite a shout and wasn't quite anything else either, and Savage's boot found his chest a half second later and put him flat on the ground, her sword coming to rest at his throat before he'd even finished falling.
"Yield," Savage said, breathing hard, "or don't. Genuinely don't care either way at this point."
He looked up at her, and then past her, at me, and something calculating moved behind his eyes even flat on his back with a sword at his throat and an arrow in his side.
"She paid well," he said, wheezing slightly around it. "Better than either of you're about to. Kill me if you're going to. I'm not telling you where she went for free."
"Wasn't planning to ask nicely twice," Savage said, and looked to me. "Finish it. He's not going to talk regardless, and I'm not leaving him breathing behind us to warn her."
I stepped closer, arrow already nocked, and the man on the ground looked straight up at me the whole way, no fear in it that I could find anywhere, just a kind of tired professional acceptance, the specific calm of a man who'd made peace with this exact ending a long time before it actually arrived.
I want to be honest about what happened in the next handful of seconds, because I think it matters more than almost anything else that's happened to me since Hallowmere.
I looked at him. He looked back. And I felt nothing climb up my throat to stop me. No hitch. No half second of hesitation where my whole body used to rebel against my own hands. It was, if I'm being fully truthful about it, the easiest thing I'd done all day, easier than the fight itself had been, and some small distant part of me noted that fact with the same flat, unbothered curiosity Yomi herself might have used, and did not like what that noticing implied.