Turn 2 of 7

Slide the token into the vault and deal with Ferris later

You scoop the token off the desk and cross to the vault in two strides. The vault is a ironbox set into the wall behind your chair, hand-forged by a smith who understood that some things should not be easy to open. You spin the combination — your birth year backwards, then the date you passed your broker's examination — and the door swings heavy on its pins. Inside, nine paired tokens sit in their felt-lined slots, waiting for discharge. You set the unmarked tenth on the bare steel floor of the lowest shelf, where it sits like a plum dropped on snow. You close the vault. The dial spins under your palm and locks with a sound like a bone setting.

Della is still watching you through the counter window. You shake your head — not yet — and she lifts her hand off the front door latch and steps back to her ledger. Good girl. She has been with you three years and has learned the most important lesson a broker's apprentice can learn: when to wait. The front door stays locked. The knocking at the back continues, patient, unhurried, two raps and a pause and three.

"Della," you say. "The front room. Close the shutters."

She does not ask why. She pulls the interior shutters across the counter window and you hear her settling into her stool on the other side, pen scratching as she returns to the morning's ledger entries. The counter window goes dark. Your office is a box of brass and iron and old wood, and the only light now comes through the slats above your desk, thin bars of gold that have moved a half-inch toward the vault since you noticed the token. The knocking stops.

You wait. Five seconds. Ten. The alley is quiet — no footsteps receding, no scrape of boots on cobblestone. Ferris is still there, standing on the other side of a door he has never approached before in eleven years of professional rivalry. You know what it means that he came to the back. The front door is public, witnessed, a thing the street can see. The back door is for conversations that cannot afford witnesses. Whatever he has heard, he does not want anyone else to know he has heard it.

His voice comes through the wood, muffled but clear enough.

"I know you're in there. I know what came in your satchel this morning. Open the door, or I go to the Wardens with what I know — and then we both have a problem neither of us can broker our way out of."

The token sits in your vault, warm through three inches of iron. You can feel it the way you feel a storm front — a pressure behind your eyes, a weight that has nothing to do with the scale. Ferris Oleander is a man who trades on information the way you trade on trust, and he has just told you he has enough of the first to threaten the second. The question is whether he is bluffing, whether he actually knows what the token is, or whether he knows only that something irregular arrived and hopes you will confirm it by reacting.