"Go," Savage told them, once the last crate was loaded onto our own borrowed cart. "Fast, and far, and don't ever let either of us see either of your faces again, because next time I might not be in a listening mood."
"Thank you," Inari said, to both of us, and there was nothing performed left in it at all.
We watched them go, cart rattling off down the narrow row and out of sight around a corner, and Savage let out a long breath through her nose that seemed to take some real weight down with it.
"You handled that better than I would have," she said.
"I nearly didn't handle the other half of it at all," I said, thinking of the man bleeding out slow in the alley behind us, the ease with which I'd almost finished him. "That's the part I can't stop turning over."
Savage looked at me sideways, and for once there wasn't a single sharp edge in it.
"Then keep turning it over," she said. "The day you stop being bothered by how easy that got is the day I stop walking next to you, Jon. Not because I'd hate you for it. Because I'd be too scared of you to trust my own back to yours anymore."
I didn't have an answer for that. I filed it away instead, next to everything else, and we made our way back toward the guild hall where Namey and Luxy would already be waiting, the last of Adachi's stolen goods rattling softly behind us in a cart that had started this whole errand as a simple favor and ended it as something far harder to name.
The Corvane guild hall sat near the city's central square, a broad stone building with a hundred small notices pinned to boards outside its doors, bounties and lost cargo and requests for escorts phrased in the particular clipped, hopeful desperation of people who'd run out of other options. Inside, the noise dropped to something closer to a murmur, adventurers of every stripe clustered around long tables comparing scars and rumors in equal measure, and I spotted Namey and Luxy tucked into a corner booth almost immediately, Namey hunched over a spread of papers with the particular fixed intensity he got when a problem had properly hooked into him.
"There you two are," Luxy said, brightening at the sight of us, though her eyes went quickly to the fresh scrapes along Savage's knuckles and something in her expression sharpened. "I take it the detour got complicated."
"Understatement," Savage said, dropping into the booth across from them with a groan that was half exhaustion and half performance.
"Where's the merchant's wife?" Namey asked, not looking up from his papers yet.
"Gone," I said. "Free. Long story, and I'll tell it properly, but it's not the story we walked into that cave expecting."
That got his attention. He finally looked up, glasses catching the lamplight, and studied both our faces with the careful, assessing attention he usually reserved for a fight he hadn't finished planning yet.
"Tell me," he said.
I told him. All of it, the mercenary Inari had hired, the fight in the alley, the moment with the bow half drawn and Savage's voice cutting through it, Inari's confession behind the counter, the decision to let her go and split the truth from the verdict the way I had. Namey listened without interrupting once, which from him was its own kind of tell, and Luxy's face moved through something complicated and mostly sympathetic as I spoke, and Savage sat with her arms crossed, adding a correction here and there in a flatter voice than usual, the particular flatness of someone still working through their own part of it privately.
"You should have killed him," Namey said, once I'd finished, and it took me a second to understand he meant the mercenary, not Adachi. "Not out of cruelty. Out of practicality. A man like that remembers faces, Jon, and remembers grudges, and Corvane's not so large a city that he won't cross paths with one of us again eventually, better armed and a good deal less charitable than he was today."
"I know the risk," I said. "I decided it anyway."
"I'm not telling you it was the wrong call," Namey said, holding up both hands. "I'm telling you it was the harder one, and I want you to actually notice that you keep choosing the harder one lately, because a version of you existed not that long ago who'd have taken the safer, colder option and never once looked back at it afterward. I think that's worth something. I also think it's worth being honest that it's a cost, not a virtue that comes free."
"Everything's a cost lately," I said, and heard how tired that came out sounding.
"Speaking of costs," Luxy said, gently steering us somewhere else, "Namey's found something. He's been sitting on it for the better part of an hour, working up the nerve to actually say it out loud, from the look of him."
Namey's jaw tightened, and he pulled one paper free from the spread in front of him, turning it around to face the rest of us. It was a shipping manifest, or something close enough to one, columns of cramped handwriting listing quantities and destinations and a small stamped sigil at the top corner that I didn't recognize at first, an ash-grey circle with a jagged line cut through its middle like a crack running through glass.
"Found this on the mercenary's body," Savage said, before I could ask. "Grabbed it off him while you two were staring each other down over whether to finish him. Figured anyone who charges a full year's coin to guard a runaway merchant's wife might be carrying something worth a second look."
"It's coded," Namey said. "Genesis internal shorthand, the kind we used for supply routing between server clusters back when I still had a desk there. I helped design part of this exact numbering system myself, four years ago, back before any of it meant anything worse than moving inventory around efficiently." His finger traced down the column of destinations, each one a town name I half recognized: Daenia, three others I didn't know, one that made my stomach drop the moment I read it, Hallowmere, dated weeks before the raid that had ended it. "These aren't goods. Look at the unit descriptions. 'Modified cores, variant seven, live.' That's not cloth or grain or anything a real merchant would ever ship in a locked crate guarded by hired muscle. That's a component. Something built to be installed."