The water worked.
It always did.
Rajan came up first, gasping, one hand already raised in a reflex that had no target. He sat upright and looked around the unfamiliar room with the expression of a man who had been dropped into a situation without the relevant documents.
Veer made a sound. It was not a word. It was the sound of a person whose body had been informed, against its will, that sleep was over. He sat up slowly, hair plastered flat on one side, water running down his jaw, and looked at Aarav with an expression of such complete and genuine betrayal that it could have been framed.
"You threw water on us," Rajan said.
"Cold water," Veer added, with the gravity of a man presenting evidence at trial.
"We don't have jobs," Aarav said. "Get up."
Rajan exhaled through his nose, long and controlled, the exhale of a man making a deliberate choice not to say the thing he wanted to say. He got up and went to the washroom. Veer looked at the ceiling for one final moment, as though lodging a complaint with whatever force governed such things, and followed.
They were ready within twenty minutes.
---
They stepped out into the North-West Borough and Aarav understood immediately why Sean had called it better than where he'd started — because this was still, by any measure, not good.
The smell hit first. Sewer water and old garbage and the particular sourness of a street that was cleaned irregularly if at all. The roads were narrow, the stone beneath their feet uneven and dark with accumulated grime. The buildings leaned slightly toward each other overhead as though tired of standing straight. Laundry hung between windows, grey-brown, the colour of things washed in water that wasn't entirely clean to begin with.
The people moving through the streets were poor in the specific, honest way of people who had never been anything else — clothes mended past the point of mending, faces weathered, eyes that moved with the careful awareness of people who had learned to keep track of what was around them. And among them, indistinguishable at first glance, the refugees. Same clothes, same faces, same careful eyes. The borough had absorbed so many of them that the line between citizen and newcomer had simply dissolved somewhere along the way.
There was no work here. That was obvious within ten minutes of walking. The shops were tiny and already staffed. The alleys had nothing moving through them that needed organising. A man selling vegetables from a cart eyed them briefly and looked away. Nobody here hired strangers for anything that paid.
"There's nothing here," Rajan said.
"No," Aarav agreed.
"So where do we go?"
"Let's go to West Borough. It's adjacent, no river crossing. Middle class area, proper businesses." He kept walking. "We'll find something there."
"Let's go then," Veer said simply.
They left.
---
While walking, Aarav told them about Sean.
"I met our neighbour this morning. His name is Sean," he said. "He's also a Silva refugee."
"What's he like?" Rajan asked.
"Normal, I would say. A factory worker with steady income." Aarav stepped around a puddle of something he chose not to identify. "He said he came to Eloria around two and a half years ago. Started living in this borough about six months back."
"I guess we can trust him," Rajan said.
"Probably. He was polite enough."
"How lucky," Veer said, "that we got a polite neighbour."
Nobody had anything to add to that. They walked the rest of the way in comfortable silence, and by the time the streets began to widen and the smell of the sewers faded behind them, the North-West Borough had already started to feel like something they'd left rather than something they lived in.
---
The West Borough was a different world in the modest way that adjacent places can be entirely different from each other. The streets were clean. The buildings stood straight. The people walking through them wore clothes that were ordinary but whole. Small shops sat between residential buildings — a bakery, a hardware supplier, a tailor with samples hanging visible from the doorway.
It was not wealthy. But it was decent, and decency, Aarav was beginning to understand, was its own distinct category in a city like this.
They found the textile merchant at the edge of a small commercial lane. He was standing outside his shop with the posture of a man who had a problem. A large delivery had arrived earlier than expected and his regular assistant alone couldn't manage the volume. The crates needed to be sorted and shelved in a specific system before the morning trade began.
He looked the three of them over with moderate scepticism.
"You know how to organise properly? Not just stack things anywhere?"
"Yes," Aarav said.
He explained his system twice, with the careful anxiety of a man who had seen it done wrong before and hadn't forgotten it. Aarav listened both times, asked one question, and then set them to work.
They finished in under an hour. When the merchant came to check, he walked through the storage room slowly, running his eyes across the arrangement without speaking. Then he stood still for a moment.
"I didn't expect it done this fast," he said, almost to himself.
He paid them fifty Drel without being prompted.
By ten in the morning they had found two more jobs in the West Borough — a brief unloading work at a provisions store and a cleaning job at a boarding house whose regular cleaner hadn't shown up. Between everything, one hundred and ten Drel.
Aarav counted it, divided it, kept a portion back.
"South Borough," he said. "Let's go."
---
They crossed the Padvani River on the Carrath City Bridge into the Central Borough — wide pavements, government buildings with clean facades, large market halls, people walking with the purposeful efficiency of people who had appointments and intended to keep them.
They didn't linger. Aarav found the shared carriage line, paid the fare, and they climbed in. The other passengers were working people, plainly dressed, carrying bags and lunch pails. The carriage moved south.
---
They had been travelling perhaps fifteen minutes when the noise reached them.
It started as ordinary city sound. Then it sharpened.
"Give me my raid share! Five Solun! That was the agreement!"
The carriage slowed slightly. Through the open side Aarav could make out a commotion some distance down a side street — two figures, a small crowd gathered around them, the unmistakable body language of an argument that had long passed its early stages. Too far to read the details clearly. The voices carried better than anything else.
"You weren't useful! I'm not paying a full share to someone who went down in the first ten minutes!"
Aarav turned to the man sitting beside him. Working age, patched jacket, lunch pail between his feet. He kept his voice low and his tone easy.
"Excuse me, sir. Sorry to bother you. I'm new to the city, just arrived recently. Do you happen to know what that's about?"
The man squinted toward the commotion. "Hard to say for certain from this distance. But from what I'm hearing—" he paused as another burst of shouting carried over, "—sounds like two adventurers having a loot sharing dispute. Happens after raids sometimes, when someone feels the split wasn't fair."
"Adventurers," Aarav said.
"Mm. They take contracts through the guild. Dungeons, monster hunts, old ruins. Go in as a party, split whatever they find afterward." A small shrug. "When someone decides the split wasn't earned equally, you get this."
Aarav nodded. Five Solun. He ran it quietly. One Solun, fifty Venn. One Venn, one hundred Drel. Five Solun was twenty-five thousand Drel. He and Rajan and Veer had worked through the entire morning for one hundred and ten.
Twenty-five thousand.
And they were arguing about it in the street like a personal wound. Which, he supposed, it was.
"Do dungeons actually exist here?" Veer said, from Aarav's other side.
The man turned and looked at Veer with an expression that took a moment to fully form — the expression of a person who has just been asked something so fundamentally obvious that the brain requires a brief pause to confirm the question was real.
He looked at Aarav. Then back at Veer.
"Where are you people from?" he said.
"Far away," Rajan said pleasantly.
Aarav said nothing. He looked out at the road and made a note, privately and firmly, that Rajan and Veer were going to get all three of them killed if they were not more careful. He also noted something else — something more useful.
He didn't know enough about this world, and that was simply true. But there was a difference between not knowing something and announcing it. Everyone around them had grown up with dungeons as ordinary fact. Nobody announced their ignorance of cobblestones. He could ask careful questions, listen, watch — and when he didn't know something, stay quiet and let the world assume otherwise.
That was sufficient. For now.
The carriage rolled on through the South Bridge, crossing the Padvani a second time, the river running grey and indifferent below. On the other side, the city changed register entirely.
---
The South Borough announced itself before they were fully through.
It wasn't one thing. It was everything at once — the width of the roads, the height of the buildings, the quality of light falling on better surfaces and reflecting back more cleanly. Rows of townhouses lined both sides of the main avenue, tall and straight, their facades pale dressed stone that had been maintained rather than merely endured. Tall windows caught the afternoon sun. Wrought iron balconies ran along the upper floors, narrow and decorative. The roads were evenly paved, the pavements wide enough that people could walk without adjusting their course for anyone.
The smell was different too. Fresh bread, something floral, the faint drift of expensive tobacco from a man outside a private club watching the street with the comfortable ease of someone surveying something that belonged to him in some general sense. Merchants in well-cut coats. Women in full-skirted dresses. Private carriages with matched horses and drivers sitting straight on the box.
The whole borough had the texture of a place where urgency was a problem that money solved before it arrived.
Aarav looked at all of it. Then he looked at his own clothes — plain, clean enough, but unmistakably from the other side of the river. The Magic Translator sat at his collar where everyone could see it.
The looks started almost immediately. Not dramatic — nobody stopped or said anything. Just the slight pause in someone's step, eyes moving over the three of them and away with the deliberateness of people choosing not to see something they had already seen. A merchant's gaze passed over Aarav the way a gaze passes over furniture — present, registered, not worth engaging with.
It was a specific kind of dismissal. The effortless condescension of people who had never had to think of certain other people as fully real. He had read about it. He had not expected to feel it quite so cleanly.
He brushed it off. There was nothing else to do with it.
"We need to find Faulkner's manor," he said.
Finding it required asking two people. The first was a young man carrying packages who glanced at them briefly, gestured vaguely up a side street, and kept walking without breaking pace. The second was an older woman walking a small dog who stopped properly, looked at them with the careful courtesy of someone maintaining elegance while keeping her distance, and told them precisely — fifty-three, Calloway Street — with the air of someone performing a small civic duty.
They thanked her. She nodded once and walked on.
Calloway Street was quieter than the main avenue, lined on both sides with mature trees whose branches met overhead and filtered the afternoon light into something dappled and cool. The townhouses here were larger, set further back from the road, with proper front gardens behind iron fencing.
And at the end of it — the manor.
Aarav stopped walking.
It sat behind tall iron gates with finials at the top, the kind that existed partly for security and partly to make a point. Beyond them, a gravel path ran straight to the main entrance, flanked by manicured hedges trimmed to an exact height. The building itself was three storeys of pale stone, symmetrical and assured, large windows on every floor, broad front steps leading to a door wide enough for two people abreast. Ivy grew along the left wing, controlled and decorative. A garden extended around both sides — flower beds, a fountain, the dark shape of topiary visible in glimpses.
It was, without question, the finest building he had seen since arriving in this world.
We are going to clean this, he thought. All of it.
He looked at Rajan. Rajan was looking at the manor with an expression that suggested he was doing similar calculations and arriving at similarly large numbers.
Veer said nothing. He just stared.
The gate waited.