Chương 169: 16. One-Eyed Marro 3

"... What?" The words fell out of my mouth before I could do anything dignified with them. Not that I could be blamed for it. When you come to negotiate smuggled passage in the middle of the night, and the man's first substantive condition turns out to be not thirty gold coins, half upfront or deaths en route are not my liability, but rather let me sell you first—maintaining the composed, worldly bearing of a man who has seen everything becomes a genuinely unreasonable expectation.

Especially when I had never, in fact, seen everything.

"Wait—" I raised one hand, trying to clear the smoke that had just detonated inside my skull.

"When you say sell—is that the same sell I'm thinking of?" One-Eyed Marro looked at me with a patience that was almost offensive.

"Depends on how you normally define the word."

"I don't normally have occasion to define it as it applies to myself!"

"Congratulations." He spread his hands.

"Your life experience just got considerably richer tonight." I nearly lost my breath entirely. That was the most infuriating thing about this man—not that he said unpleasant things. It was that he said unpleasant things with the exact facial expression of someone discussing mild weather, as though auctioning human beings by the pound was simply a slightly more specialized form of evening entertainment than drinking. Ignicia, for her part, hadn't moved a single muscle in her face.

She stood beside me, the oil lamp cutting a cold, clean line along her profile beneath her hood—the silhouette of a blade that hadn't been drawn yet, but that everyone in the room already understood would draw blood.

"Explain," she said flatly.

"Simple enough." Marro hooked a low wooden stool toward himself with the toe of his boot but didn't sit—just leaned against the repair frame beside it.

"Tomorrow at noon, there's a consignment moving through the port auction house. Servants, debt defaulters, a few unfortunate souls their families decided to liquidate, and two crates of undeclared spices. That place runs on eyes and ears. I need you two to walk in with me—in front of everyone who can see—and get registered under my name."

"Registered under your name," I repeated, frowning.

"Meaning from that moment on, as far as Blackbeard Bay is concerned, you're my property."

"I want you to know there is not a single word in that sentence that provides any comfort whatsoever."

"Of course not," he said, with complete reasonableness.

"Comfortable business doesn't come to me." I genuinely wanted to engrave that sentence on a headstone and present it to him. Assuming I survived long enough to locate an appropriate rock. I kept my temper contained and tried to sound like someone who still intended to continue this negotiation.

"Why does it have to be this way? You run smuggling routes. You move people off the charts. Why not just load us onto the ship quietly and go?" Marro smiled. Not a large smile—just the slight upward pull at the corner of his mouth—but it carried the unmistakable flavor of you've finally asked something worth answering.

"Because you two are conspicuous, boy." He raised one hand and pointed at me first.

"You. Inland accent. The calluses on your sword hand are thicker than anything you'd get from rigging. You walk into a room and your eyes go straight to the exits and windows without you even noticing—like someone who learned to be afraid of dying before he finished learning how to fight." Then that single exposed eye moved, slowly, to Ignicia.

"And her—" He paused half a beat. His voice dropped slightly, which somehow made it more dangerous rather than less.

"She doesn't look like cargo. She doesn't look like a woman. She looks like trouble itself put on a cloak and walked into my shed." I very much wanted to argue the point that she was, in fact, also a woman.

But then I remembered the image of her, not long ago, carrying two torpedoes across her shoulders, taking a mouthful of gasoline, and erupting like a small and deeply indignant volcano—and I decided that advocating for her inclusion in the ordinary woman category would be, frankly, a disservice to every ordinary woman in the world. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. Ignicia didn't appear offended. If anything, she looked faintly like she agreed.

"So?" she said. Marro raised two fingers.

"First: if you board my ship directly tonight, you're announcing to every set of eyes in this port that two unknown individuals are making a run for it. And this place has no shortage of people who'll trade someone else's whereabouts for a round of drinks." A third finger joined the other two.

"Second: if someone is actually chasing you—and given the way you smell, I'd bet serious money it's more than one party—they'll have people watching the docks, the warehouses, the harbor mouth, and every captain like me who handles work that doesn't get written down. Two people quietly vanishing is the most visible thing you can do."

"Third—" His voice dropped a register.

"Once you're registered as my property, this stops being two people disappearing and becomes two pieces of merchandise changing hands. In Blackbeard Bay, the chain of custody on goods is taken more seriously than human life. Do you follow?" I opened my mouth. Nothing came out immediately. Because—damn it all—he was making sense. Not a little sense. A great deal of it. The worse the place, the more complete its own internal logic tends to be. People were worthless; goods had value.

Names couldn't be trusted; ownership could. The moment we became someone's registered property in full public view, we stopped being trackable as people and became trackable as cargo—and cargo moved through entirely different channels. I was still assembling this absurd, almost elegant logic in my head when Ignicia spoke.

"That's not all of it, though." Marro looked at her. For the first time, something genuinely interested surfaced in his eye.

"Oh?" Ignicia raised one hand and drew her hood back slightly, exposing the lower half of her face. Her voice remained as level as still water, but I could hear clearly that she wasn't negotiating anymore. She was dissecting.

"You don't just want to provide us cover," she said.

"You want to use us to take a reading of the water." The air inside the repair shed shifted—like something had drawn a knife tip very lightly across it. I didn't quite follow, but Marro didn't deny it. So I made the executive decision to keep my mouth shut. Inserting myself into this particular exchange would only demonstrate that I was present to lower the average intelligence of the room. Ignicia continued.

"You don't know which faction is hunting us. You don't know how many informants they've placed in this port. If we're publicly registered under your name tomorrow, whoever reacts most strongly is whoever has the most to lose. Whoever asks questions too quickly, whoever starts bidding too eagerly, whoever comes to you privately afterward—you'll see all of it." She lifted her eyes. The gold of her irises contracted to a fine point in the lamplight.

"You intend to use us as bait. And in the process, you get to map every current running through this port." There it was. The moment I understood, my stomach understood along with it—and expressed its understanding with a very specific kind of discomfort. This calculating son of a nautical disaster wasn't just planning to disguise us as merchandise. He was planning to put us on the table and see which flies arrived first. Marro was quiet for two seconds. Then he laughed. More genuine than any of the previous times.

Which, paradoxically, made it more unsettling.

"I'm starting to understand why the boy next to you is still alive," he said.

"I think about that question quite often myself," I said, before I could stop myself.

"Luck, mostly," he said, without a moment's hesitation.

"You are genuinely unpleasant to talk to."

"People who stay alive generally don't need to be pleasant." Every sentence more reasonable than the last. Insufferable. Ignicia ignored our exchange with the serene detachment of someone who had long since stopped expecting it to produce anything useful.

"And there's more," she said, her voice unchanged.

"If the pursuers actually bid to acquire us, you can drive the price up in real time. Whether we ultimately sail on your ship or not—you don't lose either way." Marro didn't smile this time. He simply watched her with his single eye, still and steady. And for the first time, I recognized clearly what that look was. It wasn't the way a man looks at a beautiful woman. It wasn't the way a black-market captain appraises merchandise.

It was the look one predator gives another when it realizes the creature across from it also knows how to read the wind. Brief. Dangerous. Carrying the particular quality of so you bite too.

"You calculate well," he said finally.

"As do you," Ignicia returned, without ceremony. I stood between them and experienced a feeling I found difficult to name precisely. Something like: I came here expecting to negotiate boat fare with a smuggling captain, and somehow the situation had transformed into two apex predators conducting a mutual threat assessment across a workbench, while I—the only full-blooded human present—was generously permitted to remain in the room and provide the emotional response of a normal person who is appropriately alarmed.

I hadn't applied for that role. I wasn't certain I was qualified for it. But it appeared to be mine regardless. I cleared my throat and physically dragged the negotiation back toward the territory of whether any of us needed to survive this.

"All right. Assuming she's right—" I glanced at Ignicia first, then fixed my eyes on Marro.

"I still have questions."

"Ask," Marro said.

"First: if this is a staged auction, who's doing the buying? Second: you said she plays high-value merchandise—what exactly am I doing? Actually working as a cargo handler? Third—" I drew a slow breath.

"This sell you once of yours. How far does it actually go?" I held his gaze.

"Are we performing a scene, or do we genuinely get tied to a platform while people shout numbers?" The moment those words landed, one of the two men sharpening boarding hooks in the corner finally looked up—with an expression that contained, unmistakably, a degree of anticipation. Marro, however, simply pressed both hands flat on the table, leaned forward, and brought his single eye level with mine. Close.

Close enough that I caught the smell of him—sea, iron, gunpowder, and the particular cold that settles into a man after years of alcohol have soaked all the way through to the bone.

"Boy," he said.

"You've finally found the part you should actually be afraid of." My spine went rigid. And beside me, in that precise instant, Ignicia laughed. It was barely audible—the softest possible breath of sound through her nose. But in the silence of that repair shed, in that moment suspended between threat and promise, it was the most audible thing in the room.