Chương 172: 17. A Clever Calculation 3

"Good." Having said his piece, Marro set the matter aside with the efficiency of a man filing a transaction that only needed tomorrow's seal to finalize, and turned toward the back of the repair shed.

"Since you've both agreed, stop standing there with the expressions of people who came here for pleasant conversation. From this point on, you're merchandise being prepared for sale. Not guests."

"Hearing you say that has made me feel measurably worse," I muttered.

"That means your brain is still functioning," he said, without looking back.

"The dead tend to have far fewer complaints." This man had a genuine gift for making perfectly ordinary sentences sound like mild hexes. Ignicia and I exchanged a look. She didn't say anything—just lifted her chin slightly, the meaning unmistakable. Move. So I followed, carrying the full weight of how did my life arrive at this specific configuration of terrible, trailing after a self-declared one-eyed ship captain who could, by his own admission, sell us to the highest bidder at any moment.

The back of the shed was worse than the front. Timber frames, tar barrels, stripped planking, coiled rope, iron hooks, half-broken pulleys, and an assortment of heavy objects whose purpose I couldn't identify but which my instincts unanimously agreed should never be allowed near my head—all of it piled together without ceremony.

The floor was layered with damp sawdust and torn cloth, soaked through with machine oil and brine, producing a texture underfoot that communicated clearly: if you fall here, you'll be suffocated by the smell before anyone notices you're dying. Marro kicked open a narrow door. Behind it was a wooden ladder leading down.

"Is this a repair shed or a thieves' den?" I couldn't help asking.

"In Blackbeard Bay, do those two things conflict?" he replied.... They didn't. Not even slightly. Damn it. We followed the ladder down into a low-ceilinged storage room. Small, but cleaner than the space above—at least it didn't smell like the entire ocean had sent its digestive contents as a greeting. Two narrow beds against the wall, a table, an old wooden chest, and in the corner, an iron basin beside a bucket containing something that qualified as water if you were feeling generous.

"You stay here tonight," Marro said.

"Safer than the Old Captain."

"You're saying someone's already watching the Old Captain?" I frowned.

"Not someone's probably watching." He finally turned to look at me directly. In the dim lamplight, his single eye was flat and gray as a nail driven into a reef.

"Someone is definitely watching." My chest tightened.

"That quickly?"

"You thought your arrival was discreet?"

"... You already said that."

"Because you clearly didn't absorb it the first time." Marro leaned against the doorframe, his tone as mild as someone reading off a weather report.

"One strange fast-boat, clearly not local, runs aground on the outer edge of Blackbeard Bay. Two people aboard: a young man, and a woman whose cloak conceals her face but does absolutely nothing to conceal the fact that she's trouble. Both of them drag waterlogged equipment onto shore, walk directly into the Old Captain, and start asking about passage to the Dragon Kingdom's mainland." He paused.

"How many pairs of eyes do you think are treating that as tonight's most profitable piece of information?" I opened my mouth. Then I closed it. The answer was: a great many. Probably more than I was willing to acknowledge.

"Which is why you're keeping us away from there tonight."

"What else?" he said flatly.

"Wait in place for someone to show up with a net?" Ignicia stood nearby, reaching down to test the water in the bucket with her fingertips—checking whether it was usable—before she spoke.

"Your people?" Marro tilted his head toward the ceiling.

"Two upstairs. One at the alley entrance. One already running errands. Before dawn, everything you need for tomorrow gets delivered here."

"Clothes?" I asked.

"Clothes, the collar, duplicates of the auction tags, and a few additional items to make you look the part."

"Look the part," I repeated.

"Meaning look like merchandise that can command a decent price."

"You're finally applying your intelligence correctly." I decided not to argue. Because arguing with this man produced exactly two possible outcomes. First: he wins. Second: he wins, and somehow leaves you feeling you deserved it. Marro finished his instructions but didn't leave immediately. Instead he stayed in the doorway, his gaze settling on Ignicia one more time. Different from before—not probing, not testing. This was something closer to measurement. Not measuring her appearance.

Measuring something more problematic—threat level, operational value, and the likelihood of her overturning the entire operation at an inconvenient moment.

"How far can you hold yourself back tomorrow?" he asked suddenly. I blinked. Ignicia answered as though she had anticipated the question.

"Depends on what they touch."... That answer contains a remarkable amount of operational flexibility. Marro clearly agreed. The corner of his mouth twitched—he almost laughed, and visibly decided against it.

"Neck, arms, jaw—those are standard. Buyers like to check teeth. Brokers like to assess bone structure. The serious bidders want to confirm whether the merchandise bites." My temple pulsed.

"Is everyone in this port professionally unwell?" This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Yes," Marro said without hesitation.

"But it doesn't interfere with their spending." That somehow made it worse. Ignicia's expression hadn't shifted at all. She added, evenly: "And if someone reaches further than that?" The air in the room went quiet for a moment. Marro looked at her. Two full seconds passed before he answered.

"Then they won't live long enough to make a bid." I looked up involuntarily. He said it without a single trace of theater. Not a threat. Not reassurance. Just a statement of fact—the same register one might use to observe that fire burns, or blades cut, or that a man who pushed past a certain line would be dealt with before the situation could develop further. I had assumed this man operated purely on calculation.

It hadn't occurred to me that he'd already factored when the math requires eliminating someone to prevent further loss into the same ledger. Not that this made me feel any better.

"Is that a guarantee?" I asked.

"No," Marro said.

"It's cost management." Right. I retracted the brief, misguided flicker of reassurance I had almost allowed myself. This man could frame providing basic human protection as inventory loss prevention. Truly a singular talent. He finally turned to leave, then stopped at the foot of the ladder.

"One more thing."

"Is there a quota on bad news tonight?" I asked.

"This isn't bad news," he said, glancing back.

"It's a reminder." His eye was level. And cold.

"Once you're inside the auction house tomorrow—regardless of who you see, regardless of what you hear anyone say—don't let your face show that you recognize them." Something tightened in my chest.

"What does that mean?"

"Exactly what it sounds like," he said.

"Blackbeard Bay is the kind of place where, given sufficient funds, someone buried yesterday can reappear at a drinking table tonight. If the people hunting you are more complicated than I'm currently estimating, they won't necessarily come at you wearing their own faces." He didn't finish the thought. He didn't need to. I understood. And understanding it was precisely what made my spine feel wrong. Disguises. Intermediaries. Purchased informants. Borrowed identities.

Eyes concealed inside apparently unrelated crowds—these were things I'd only ever heard about in the darker rumors surrounding the capital's court politics. And now someone was telling me, in the same tone one might use to discuss the quality of the morning catch, that I should treat it as a live operational concern starting tomorrow.

"Get some sleep," Marro said finally.

"Whatever you can manage. Before noon tomorrow, there's one thing you both need to have learned—" His single eye narrowed slightly in the lamplight.

"Stop thinking of yourselves as people." Then he climbed the ladder. The wooden rungs groaned under his boots. The door above closed. After that, the storage room held only me and Ignicia, and one oil lamp that wasn't particularly bright but was extremely talented at making the atmosphere feel worse than it already was. I stood in place for a few seconds. Then I exhaled—long, slow, and complete.

"I have two thoughts." Ignicia pulled her cloak half off and draped it over the bed, her voice even.

"Go ahead."

"First: I want to go back and blow up that speedboat again. Second: I want to put that one-eyed calculating bastard inside it." She made a short sound through her nose. Brief—barely there. But I recognized it. She was laughing.

"You couldn't manage the second one."

"Could you at least offer me a token consolation?"

"If I consoled you, would you sleep better?"

"... No."

"Then there's no practical reason to bother." This woman's efficiency was, at times, genuinely devastating. I set down my equipment and ran through a check. Damp cloth. Flintlock. Remaining ammunition—or rather, what I had mentally reclassified as aerially delivered metal peanuts—plus the assortment of artifacts retrieved from the submarine that still radiated a clear do not handle carelessly energy. That thought made me look at her.

"Do you think Marro can be trusted?" Ignicia sat on the edge of the bed, working loose the tangles the sea wind had put in the ends of her hair. In the amber lamplight, the gold of it looked like fire that had burned down to its last hour.

"Yes." I stared at her.

"... That quickly?"

"Because he doesn't pretend to be trustworthy," she said, looking up at me.

"That type is actually easier to calculate than someone who fills every sentence with promises." That was sound reasoning. Sound reasoning I didn't particularly enjoy.

"He will sell us," I said.

"He will," she agreed, without a moment's hesitation.

"And you still call him trustworthy?"

"Because if he decides to sell, he'll first determine exactly what we're worth." She rested her hands on her knees, her tone as measured as someone analyzing a dangerous creature's behavioral patterns.

"What we need to do isn't hope he suddenly develops a conscience. It's make him understand that delivering us to the Dragon Kingdom is more profitable than liquidating us in Blackbeard Bay." I was quiet for a moment. Then I admitted she was right. Again.

The further this journey went, the more often I found myself arriving at this exact place: the situation ahead was miserable, dangerous, and worthy of profanity—but once the profanity was out of your system, you still had to take the most uncomfortable and most logical road available. I dropped onto the other bed. The frame produced a groan of structural protest.

"Honestly," I said, rubbing my face, "I thought surviving that ancient submarine was the most absurd thing I'd ever do. Turns out human society is what actually causes lasting gastric damage."

"Welcome to port," she said.

"You say that like you're familiar with the sentiment."

"I'm not." Ignicia tilted her head to look at me. There was something in her eyes—faint, almost curious.

"But it's interesting."

"What exactly is interesting about any of this?"

"The people here are more honest than the ones at court." I didn't have an immediate answer for that. She studied the water bucket, apparently weighing whether it was worth using to rinse the salt and grime from her skin, then added:"People at court smile at you first, then sell you. People here at least tell you the price upfront." Damn. She was right about that too.

I found myself suddenly picturing the silk-robed dignitaries of the capital—all their elaborate courtesy, their layered pleasantries, their meticulous etiquette—dropped into Blackbeard Bay for three days. The mental image suggested they would not retain their trousers. Something almost like a laugh moved through me. Not from happiness. The specific kind that surfaces when reality has hit you hard enough and often enough that the only remaining response is a dry, involuntary exhale.

"Are you actually going to wear that collar tomorrow?"

"It's a prop."

"He said you need to look like you could be restrained at any moment."

"I cannot be restrained." She said it with such absolute calm that my mind immediately supplied the image of some unfortunate buyer reaching out a hand, and the subsequent, very definitive end of that buyer's reaching-out career.... Actually. When I considered it from that angle, the party deserving sympathy tomorrow wasn't us. It was whoever walked into that auction house believing themselves to be a discerning connoisseur, and reached toward what was, in practical terms, an active volcano.

"What about me?" I looked down at myself—still damp, still disheveled, still carrying the general aesthetic of a man who had recently lost an argument with the ocean.

"Cargo handler? Escort? Neither of those sounds like a position with any inherent dignity."

"You have a sword," she said.

"That's not really the point."

"To people in that environment, it is." Her analysis was calm and precise.

"A figure who looks worthless but carries a faint edge of alertness and killing intent is the last person anyone thinks to guard against first. If you look like a bodyguard, someone will test you. If you look like genuine day labor, people will look past you. Tomorrow you need to be the second one."

"... I'm beginning to think the hardest thing in the world isn't killing enemies. It's convincingly pretending you're not a threat."

"That means you're getting smarter."

"That doesn't sound like a compliment."

"It isn't." I wrapped both hands around my head and fell back onto the narrow bed, which had the approximate comfort profile of a judicial instrument. The ceiling was low. Through the gaps between the planks, thin threads of light leaked down from above. The place was uncomfortable, the air carried the smell of sea and old timber, and it fell well short of anything resembling security—yet there was something in it, some exhausted quality that said at least tonight we're still alive.

I closed my eyes, but my mind refused to stop. Ancient submarine. Underground shipyard. Torpedoes. Explosion. Leaking speedboat. Blackbeard Bay. The Old Captain. One-Eyed Marro. Auction house. Collar. Disguised as merchandise— All of it churned together, rolling over itself, until it produced one conclusion that was both completely absurd and completely accurate. Before noon tomorrow, I needed to learn how to make myself look convincingly sellable in front of a crowd.

And what made it worse— The genuinely valuable merchandise beside me was handling all of this with considerably more composure than I was.

"Cedric."

"... Yeah?" I hadn't opened my eyes yet when I heard her speak.

"If someone touches my face tomorrow, I'll look at you first." I opened my eyes immediately.

"Look at me for what?" In the dim lamplight, she was leaning against the bedpost, her golden eyes watching me with a calm that bordered on merciless.

"To see whether you remember not to draw your sword." Two seconds of silence. Then I covered my face with both hands.

"Is this a test, or an execution?"

"Is there a meaningful difference?" Yes. One of them, you could theoretically survive. She laughed then—softly, barely audible, the way firelight catches briefly on the edge of a blade and is gone before you can be certain you saw it. And in that moment I understood, with sudden and complete clarity— Tomorrow's hardest part wouldn't be the performance. Wouldn't be walking into the auction house. Wouldn't even be enduring the eyes of people who had no business looking at us the way they would.

It would be remembering, when all of it began, what she had just said—and holding myself back. Until the moment it was actually time to move. I hoped I was capable of it. At minimum, I hoped I managed it before the indignation killed me first.