“You shouldn’t be out here,” she said, as she drew close enough.

  The girl jumped and swore, then apologised. “Sorry! You scared the life out of me.”

  It took a moment for her to remember to drop her eyes as she should have, and that interested YeoWoo. Had the human only been briefly in service, or was there something else behind that almost instinctive lack of respect?

  “The owner lets me come out for a smoke every few hours,” the girl said, as if uneasy to not answer an unasked question. “He says it’s all right. I think he likes the quiet when I’m gone.”

  “The owner, or your owner?” YeoWoo asked. Reckless, perhaps, but there was a sense of straightforwardness about this girl.

  The girl looked away and toward the building, but not before YeoWoo saw the slightly bitter twist of her mouth. “You’re one of them, are you? I’m not interested in…doing stuff with behindkind women.”

  “I’m not here for that.”

  “I’m not interested if it’s for a behindkind man, either.”

  “Is that why you’re sweating away in a kitchen?” YeoWoo asked. It wasn’t that it was unusual for Contracts to be more unwilling to sell their bodies than they had been to sell their souls, but many of them did think of it as a slightly better way to work off their debts, considering the kind of rewards that often went along with such work.

  “Rather that than let them get everything,” said the girl, spitting on the ground. It was a peculiarly Korean thing to do, but more on the older, male ahjussi side than the younger, female agassi side.

  YeoWoo recognised a fellow, deep-seated anger, and her interest grew. “You can’t tell me that someone put you under contract just to have you working in a kitchen.”

  Again, there was that bitter twist of the mouth. “That’s a nice way of saying it. “Put”. Everyone around here is so freakin’ polite when they talk about the way things get done.”

  “Behindkind don’t have much in the way of conscience, but what they do have is easy to soothe when they make things look nice on paper,” said YeoWoo. “If they don’t think of you as a person, it’s easy to buy, sell, kill.”

  “I thought you were behindkind.”

  “I am,” YeoWoo said, and she knew that her own smile was as bitter as the girl’s had been. “But I got here by blood. I was human once.”

  She saw the fierce eagerness in the girl’s eyes, the way her mouth opened to ask what YeoWoo knew would be a question of how a human could become behindkind, and said before the girl could ask, “If you were meant for something else, how did you end up here?”

  There was a moment of recalibration, then the girl shrugged. “I wasn’t strong enough for what they wanted.”

  “What did they want?”

  “That’s hard to say,” the girl said, and breathed out a stream of smoke. “If you know what I mean.”

  “Ah,” said YeoWoo. “They built it into your contract, did they?”

  The human shrugged one shoulder. “I suppose so. All I know for sure is that even if I wanted to talk about it, I couldn’t. I didn’t get to see the contract—it all happened before I knew anything about it. Someone grabbed me in the street three months ago, and that was that. They said my dad was tired of looking after me and sold me off; I told them to get stuffed and that no one could sell me, but it turns out they can. I don’t seem to be able to run away, anyway.”

  “How long are you in for?”

  The girl looked across at her. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I like making trouble,” YeoWoo said. She knew this girl—had very nearly been this girl when she was younger. “And I don’t much like behindkind.”

  “Seven years,” said the girl, blowing a stream of smoke up toward the smoggy sky beyond the tendrilled black power lines above. The day was already heavy with yellow dust, and the smoke was indistinguishable from the rest of the miasma in seconds. “I hear that’s the usual.”

  “What will you do when you get away? Go back to your parents?”

  The girl’s eyes met hers, dark with anger. “Why would I do that? There’s only my mum and step-dad, now, and they didn’t want me in the first place. Even if dad was the one who sold me, they didn’t want me either.”

  “I’d want to make my father look at me and see what he’d done,” YeoWoo said. “Maybe I’d take a few tricks I’d learned along the way with me.”

  The girl grinned for the first time. “That’s something to look forward to. I have a few things up my sleeve; I wasn’t good enough for what the first lot wanted me for, but I can do a few things now that they’ve trained me. I don’t want to kill anyone, but it’d be nice to make him look at me again.”

  “There’s also the matter of the payment he got from you,” YeoWoo pointed out. She was well aware of the need for a goal in mind when it came to living through unpleasant years. “He didn’t sell you for free, and if you haven’t seen any of the payment, there’s that payment to be made.”

  The girl gestured down at her thin body. “My parents probably wouldn’t even recognise me if I did go back, anyway: I’m not really myself these days. I didn’t smoke before, either,” she added, throwing the stub on the ground and grinding it out with the toe of her boot. “But I like the idea of getting a bit of payment at the end of this, even if he never knows it’s me.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said YeoWoo, grinning a rather toothy grin. “And you never know when you might get the chance for a bit of payment sooner.”

  YeoWoo could feel the yellow dust fairly crawling down her throat and lumping there by the time she got back home. To her relief, the pungent, sweet scent of omija tea was lingering warmly in the hall, and when she put her head around the door of the sunroom, both Athelas and Camellia were there.

  Camellia, who unceasingly knew the weather and what particular tea was best for which day, must have also predicted when she would arrive, because she was currently pouring tea that still steamed as YeoWoo walked through the door. Athelas sat on the two-seater couch that faced the window and had its back to the door, which would have surprised YeoWoo if she hadn’t suspected that Athelas merely didn’t wish to see her.

  Just to annoy him, she sat with her back to the window on one of the faded brocade and wooden chairs, blue chima fluttering down around her on the brocade. The sunshine warmed her back, and making sure that Athelas couldn’t fail to see her warmed YeoWoo a little more.

  He sent her a faintly pained look, though he must have spent some time by the stream, because his face looked healthier. He said, “I trust you are not going to pretend that you ran into any difficulties after I left you.”

  YeoWoo stared at him, then burst into laughter. “You’re far more likely to run into difficulties than I am!” she said. “Even if your Lord Sero wasn’t waiting in the café just to glare at us and let us know he’s watching us, you can’t tell me that you haven’t seen the couple of behindkind following us the last couple of times we’ve gone through the Gongdeok market, just waiting for me to leave you alone so they can take you in!”

  He didn’t try to tell her anything of the kind—nor did he answer anything to do with Lord Sero—but he did say, “Then I can only assume you wish to present your pleased appearance to me, in order to inform me that despite my departure, you did very well in your investigations.”

  “I wouldn’t say very well,” YeoWoo said, more seriously. “But I learnt a lot about the contract trade in Myeongdong in particular, and most of the threads I followed today seem to lead right back to the DDP café—or at least to contracts that aren’t strictly above-board. I could persuade a couple of the contracts I talked to today to testify without a great deal of difficulty, I think.”

  “How delightful,” remarked Athelas. “Peregrine will no doubt be pleased.”

  “I’m not going to Peregrine,” YeoWoo said. There was still by far too much yet to figure out, and to lay out in evidential lines. If she went to the elder with what she had now, they might be able to get to the nymph before the den mother killed her, and they might be able to collar the couple of contracts she’d spoken to today, but that was nothing like the absolute certainty that Peregrine had spoken of being necessary before he acted. “Not yet. I need to have more in hand than a few contracts on the stand and one rescued sea nymph I haven’t even contacted yet. You heard Peregrine say that they need to have permission to go for the physical paperwork before they go in. Nothing will stick legally, otherwise.”

  “You don’t fancy that they’re doing anything illegal enough to allow Peregrine to get the necessary permission? How very surprising!”

  “No,” YeoWoo said, accepting a cup of tea from Camellia. She could almost already feel it coating her throat and dislodging the yellow dust there. “They’re definitely purchasing illegal Contracts. They’re even going after humans—I talked to a human girl this afternoon whose father sold her. There’s something brewing there, either at the café or in Myeongdong, but I don’t know what; I doubt I’ll get the chance to find out, either. If I’d had someone else with me, I might have been able to cover a bit more ground.”

  Athelas shifted almost imperceptibly against the couch, and YeoWoo saw that he had whitened, while faint lines formed around the sides of his nose as if he’d smelt something bad.

  He said, “My dear, I beg you will not ask me again to assist you. I am already fully occupied with finding young Harrow, and I am not remotely interested in the contract trade. I’m aware that at least half of the workers around Myeongdong are contracts that didn’t make it elsewhere; it’s really not very surprising that you found one there, human or otherwise.”

  YeoWoo’s voice was scornful. “You know there’s something as horrible as this going on, and you don’t want to make sure that no one else goes through it? No wonder you’re trying to sneak into a wedding at your age instead of being a valued guest.”

  She thought his nostrils whitened even more, but he said coolly, “A no doubt very commendable attitude, my dear. One can’t help but suspect that the only reason that you’re so very set on getting into this business is that you’ll get something out of it. Why should I allow myself to be used?”

  “We agreed that we’d make use of each other,” countered YeoWoo, avoiding answering the accusation in the first part of his reply. It wasn’t true; she helped where she could, and at least she didn’t damage people by using them the way that the Steward did. “I thought the Steward was more of an anarchist than that. Don’t you want to take down a behindkind institute?”

  “As you’ve pointed out, I once did something of the kind,” he said. “It cost me everything. And unless everything goes exactly right with whatever you and the elder are set on doing, your quarry will simply slip through your fingers, taking with them as much of their stock as they can manage, and start again elsewhere. But they will not do so until they have so thoroughly punished the stock they remove that not one of them dares to speak a word out of turn again.”

  “Perhaps some tea,” said Camellia’s voice, unintrusive and matter-of-fact.

  And for the first time, YeoWoo understood. “You were a contract too, weren’t you?”

  She had learned a great deal about the Steward’s life once she knew who he was, but that particular fact hadn’t been included in any of the information she’d found.

  “I don’t believe that was in any file you might have seen,” Athelas said, accepting a cup of fragrant omija tea from Camellia and crossing one leg over the other. There was not a shred of emotion to his face, not a tremor to the hand that held his teacup; he was almost stone.

  Camellia sat down on the other side of the couch, but not on the seat. Her bare foot on the seat and her backside on the broad, cushioned arm of the couch, she leaned her arm along the back of it and settled there, catlike. Athelas shifted position very slightly as if in response, and YeoWoo, understanding that, too, very nearly gave vent to the caustic laugh that caught in her throat. She was far more interested in getting an answer out of Athelas for her preceding question; the fact that he and Camellia—or at the very least, he—were shifting for the best position when it came to keeping an eye on the other, was amusing but not important. The two of them could work out their own affairs without her.

  “Files weren’t all I had access to,” she told him. “I had access to a lot of rumour. And I also had time to chat with Lord Sero recently, if you remember.”

  There was a brief, almost chiming moment of silence before Athelas said, “Did you indeed? I was not aware that you had nothing but myself to discuss.”

  “There were other things, but we also talked about you,” YeoWoo said. She had no intention of telling him that her suggestion that he had once been a contract himself was wholly based on conjecture, circumstantial evidence, and general vibes. “Look, I understand that contract shopfronts probably aren’t the places you most prefer to be, but I’m not asking you to go back there as a contract. I just want you to negotiate for me like you’ve been doing, and tell me anything that might help the job go more swiftly.”

  “Do you have a particular reason to want to bring down this specific shop?” asked Camellia.

  “Peregrine wants them taken down,” YeoWoo explained “If I do it, he’ll give me some information—probably from the hard drives and computers they recover when the raid goes down. I can’t get in without doing it officially, and he won’t go in unless it’s official.”

  “I might point out that you now have a contact within the organisation,” Athelas murmured. “You might prevail upon the merman to help you in that area. I can think of no one better equipped.”

  “Hired out contracts all have contractual prohibitions from making other agreements that hurt their primary contractor,” YeoWoo pointed out. “You must know that as well as I do. I don’t expect you to go there more often than we agreed on; I just want a bit of information here and there when it will prevent me from taking a wrong step.”

  “I don’t believe I agreed to assist with this area of the investigation,” Athelas said. “And if we are each to be trading guesses as to what the other is or is not aware of, I must assume you noticed the way the young merman was looking at you. If you really wish to do a great deal with very little work, I would advise you to use him in whatever way you may.”

  Camellia, her brown eyes lightening with a touch of gold, set a quiet and surprisingly discomforting look on YeoWoo.

  “What are you talking about?” YeoWoo demanded. She didn’t appreciate the kind of implications Athelas was making—or perhaps she simply didn’t appreciate the inference that Camellia was making from those implications.

  “Ah,” said Athelas, swinging his foot gently. His face had regained its colour, and a great deal of its mobility. “Then you didn’t notice. I must congratulate you upon your successful hoodwinking of the den mother at least—and the sister, it would seem—but if I’m not very much mistaken, Marazul is not convinced. He suspects that you are not the cold, red-in-tooth-and-claw fox that he might have been inclined to think you before he met you.”

  Camellia laughed softly, and settled back against the couch, propping her chin on her palm.

  “It’s not that he’s not convinced; he’s just cheekier than most contracts,” YeoWoo said dismissively.

  “I must beg to differ, my dear. The merman is many things, but he is not cheeky, nor is he inclined to be brave or to risk any kind of injury to himself.”

  “I find him cheeky,” YeoWoo said bluntly.

  “Indeed. I do not. Thus,” Athelas finished, “the conclusion.”

  “Just make sure you give me the same protections in our contracts that he has against hurting his main contractors,” YeoWoo said, irritated. “And we won’t have to worry about cheekiness.”

  “Will we not?” said Athelas, but his voice was light. “I really wonder!”

  TROUBLE IN PARADISE

  Athelas found his morning cup of tea interrupted by the buzz of his phone in his breast pocket. His thoughts had been vexing him and worrying him in turn since the day previous, when Zero had made a show of his notice in the contract café, but Athelas would still have preferred to be left to them. If he couldn’t comfort himself that either Zero or the Pet were following him because they thought any better of him, at least he could reflect that a channel seemed to have been opened—a channel that he could more or less allow to proceed naturally as he worked from within on his own more delicate work. Athelas might have liked to have known exactly why Zero had now taken a closer interest, but he was not prepared to avoid that interest.

  Given the nature of his more delicate work, Athelas sighed faintly and set his teacup down precisely on the table beside him at the buzz of the phone, catching Camellia’s eye from across the room as he pulled it out of his pocket.

  She had, he thought as he mechanically looked down at the email notification from Marazul, which no doubt contained an address as his proof of use, an exceptionally good instinct for knowing when something was afoot. Athelas took his time unlocking his phone and tapping the notification, trying to dispel the feeling of heaviness that might have come from Zero’s interest but was more likely to have come from the environment in which he had seen his former master. He felt weary from the events of the previous day, as well as it had gone, but it occurred to him that there was no reason to be sighing at anything that took him away from the necessity of visiting the contract café again.

  It was also impolitic: Camellia might not expect to see him energetic and bright about the matter on which she had set him, but it would be unwise to be seen as apathetic toward the human boy’s plight. He had found Camellia in the sunroom with the tea when he came down that morning, sitting in the window in a shimmer of chlorophyll green that danced in the mingled sunlight and steam from the teapot. Having learned something of her instinct for knowing when something important was happening, Athelas suspected that she had been waiting for him. Anyone looking at her, however, would have thought she was simply resting in the window seat, her back against the cushioned wall and her feet propped on the seat with her bangled arms draping gracefully over them. If it wasn’t for the chlorophyll green and the magenta pompom earrings she wore, she could almost have been a pre-Raphaelite painting.