Yuxia was a large city, and electric lampposts on every corner lit the streets, but when the white sky grew dark, the foot traffic disappeared. Fintan approached the next inn with RuTing. He was wary of what he might find, but there was no hiding their eimai. If the Yuxian’s used their eimai for a sip of mist, they needed to find an inn tolerant of RuTing. After all, the government attendant told them she was doing nothing illegal.

  His second pick wasn’t as opulent as his first, but a real hearth burned logs in a sitting room where guests conversed and drank from small two-ounce glass cups barely half full. The bartender poured water and squeezed fresh fruit juice into the tiny cups.

  Although the innkeeper dressed much the same as the first, he wore an apron. They had servers, but he was doing double or triple duty, and he hung his apron on a wooden peg by the counter before speaking to them.

  “Are you here for a room or a drink?” he asked. “We haven’t reached our guest limit.” He cocked his head sideways, and Fintan saw the plaque behind the counter etched in flowing script with a number.

  “A room, if we can,” RuTing said. She gave him her card, and he laughed.

  “I see,” he said. “You are from the Union, aren't you?” RuTing nodded. “You made it to Yuxia without stumbling in the arms of the Adversary. I’m from the Union, too, but I wasn’t so fortunate. I spent years enslaved to the Adversary before I was given freedom, and I found my way here. Thank the Builder the Acolytes didn’t toss me in the river.”

  “You converted?” Fintan asked. For some reason, he felt very comfortable around the innkeeper. He said he was from the Union, but Fintan didn’t even know his name, and he felt a kinship as if he had come home.

  “Absolutely. You won’t find a better patron god,” the innkeeper replied. “We have electricity, and you get used to all the microphones. It’s just like the Union. We had an AI watching our every move. Here, the Xingren listen to every conversation.” The Innkeeper motioned to a perforated metal sphere, which Fintan had seen in the city but assumed was a sensor, which indeed it was. The Union had microphones so the differently abled could interact with the accessibility net—they weren’t spied upon. “I’m sorry I forgot to introduce myself. I am YouRan. I converted to the Builder centuries ago. I would tell you my Union name, but I forgot it’s been so long. You won’t find a better city to settle in than Yuxia. There are more people from the Union than you’d think in the afterlife, but they are all spread out.”

  Fintan found himself nodding along with YouRan. He had to shake himself loose to ask a question.

  “How many nights can we stay for a gilder?” Fintan asked.

  “For a whole gilder, you can stay a week in two rooms. I can’t rent for more than a week at a time. That’s the law. You don’t need to spend your gilders here. A shell a night will do.” YouRan brought out a steel punch tool. The handle was worn, but the spring worked well as YouRan flexed it, and it clicked like the mist fountain. Fintan stared at it with what he assumed was a dumbfounded expression. YouRan once again cocked his head. “They didn’t bother to explain how shells work?”

  “No,” RuTing said. “By the time we got to the front of the line it was near the end of the day.”

  YouRan sighed.

  “That’s no excuse. We pay good taxes so foreigners spend their shells here.” He said the words loudly at the microphone. “But no worries, I will explain. You use your eimai to make purchases that are less than a gilder. We punch a shell out of your card. You can get your card refilled with gilders. We have different punch sizes for different purchases. If you had a gold or titanium card, I would use a smaller punch.”

  “We have two others with us and a small wagon.”

  “I can help you with a room, but I can’t help you with merchandise. This isn’t an economic zone.”

  “Do you know where we can rent a storage unit?” Fintan asked.

  “Not this late in the day,” YouRan said with a sigh. “You will have to go to an unzoned part of the city. You are in for a rough night. I wish there was more I could do to help.” He glanced at the microphone. “Hopefully, I will see you tomorrow.” YouRan walked them to the door. Inside the entrance, a stylized map of the city exploded the uptown into comically large caricatures. Fintan saw the first Inn, the Staked Stallion. This one was named the Easy Squeeze. “I wish I could do more for you, but you can’t bring or sell products here.” His hand pointed at the map, lingering on an area on the outskirts of the city. “The Xingren are flexible with foreigners' Skills, but they don’t like it when people don’t follow the rules. Making gilders isn’t worth jail time.”

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  He opened the door and, as soon as they left, closed the heavy door behind them. The message could be more clear. He didn’t care about talking back to the Xingren about policy, but when it came to commerce, you followed the letter of the law.

  It was nearly night.

  Cherry and WuXin waited at the cart. Cherry was prepared this time. She crouched in the cart bed, holding the plank wood seat with both hands.

  “Are we running again?” she asked.

  “We aren’t welcome here with our merchandise,” RuTing said. “I think we should leave it for the Xingren. YouRan wasn’t kidding when he said the gilders weren’t worth the jail time. His Skill is impressive.”

  “What Skill?” Fintan asked. He grabbed the cart handle. If they left the gold thread for the guards, he would at least move it down the road.

  “I’m not sure what to call it, but he Settled us. I can tell when my emotions are being messed with. I felt like I was at home.”

  “He manifested the idea?” WuXin asked, “Like your illusions?”

  “I think it was a Skill. If you told me about your home, I could create an illusion, but you might not feel the same way about it. I don’t know how to manifest a feeling, so I think it was a Skill. I can tell why the Adversary had no use for him. The place he pointed us to looks dangerous. It’s not worth the thread.”

  Fintan mulled that over, but Cherry threw herself across the cart, hugging her severance.

  “I’m not leaving my thread,” Cherry said, “I’ll sleep outside if I have to.”

  “You will be taken by the Xingren,” Fintan told her. “They have a curfew.”

  They argued while he pulled the cart. Cherry was firm and she added a lot of good points. They didn’t know if they could leave the city if their eimai was punched. It might be the equivalent of debt, and they already made an enemy out of Bannerburg. WuXin didn’t want to leave, but he owed them, so he stayed to help. His gold card could make a difference. Without the gilders from a sale they would be forced to find work sooner, and they didn’t know how to get a job.

  In short, things could be a lot worse and they might get worse without the thread. They kept their voices low while they argued, aware that microphones were on the streets. The further Fintan went to the city's outskirts, the less he had to fear from intrusion. Broken city lights hung from electrical cords. Sometimes, they sparked off the ground. The microphones went missing as well.

  He was surprised they didn’t have cameras, but manufacturing something as delicate as a CMOS sensor and implementing it cost-effectively around the city would be challenging. The Yuxians missed a vital part of materials knowledge but at the same time, deployed advanced machines. Despite the heat, he hadn’t seen a heat pump for cooling.

  At the outer edges, the electric rail stopped, and the roads grew narrower. They looked for any universal symbols of Inns and found a multistory house with boarded windows. Cracks of light from inside, along with laughter, and the occasional pounding on the walls, was the best they could do.

  Fintan approached with trepidation, although he hadn’t seen a guard in a long time. Hydrated or not, he was probably more than a match for whoever was inside, but he wasn’t a fighter—his time spent with RuTing had taught him that much.

  He pushed at the door, but the hinges were reversed, and he had to pull it open. Bright light blinded him, and two feet of hazy smoke leaked out into the dry air.

  The common room didn’t have water, but it did have fire in a sense. Men and women smoked at tables, rolling herb in paper. A few people knelt along the wall where a heavily muscled man watched a set of pipes and a manual clock on his wrist. The pipes broke through the concrete slab, and they were capped with a lock.

  The guests sucked on the pipes inhaling mist and smoke in turns.

  Fintan wasn’t sure where to begin, but RuTing took the lead. She motioned to a server in a short dress.

  “We need a room and no questions for the night,” RuTing said.

  “You can do whatever you want with him down here,” the server said, “But if you want a room, you have to talk to Laoda.”

  Laoda sat in the back with a girl on his knee. His left hand was on her leg, and she giggled, but her hollow eyes said a different story, and they darted to the pipes along the wall. Mist was a commodity, and Laoda owned the pipes.

  “I need a room and no questions,” RuTing repeated.

  Laoda’s eyes traveled her Warrior Goddess outfit, and they stopped every piece of steel with obvious greed. Fintan belatedly realized that outside of the pipes and the weapons, there was no metal in the Inn. Laoda had a rusted dagger strapped to his side. The brown tarnish was flaked with a white crust of dissolution and the red of old dried blood.

  He stood, dropping the girl on the ground.

  “Ten gilders, and you get fifteen minutes on my pipe,” he said.

  “One gilder, and you can keep your pipe to yourself.”

  She threw the gilder, and it hit him on the chest and bounced on the floor. The girl pounced on it and stuffed it in her clothes, but Laoda didn’t move. His eyes stayed on RuTing. Her other hand was on the hilt of her sword. The air was dry. Manifesting would be difficult, but Skills weren’t impossible. What would happen if she cut Laoda in half? Was there enough mist in the Inn for him to reform?

  “Looks like we are entertaining royalty tonight!” Laoda boomed. He collapsed into his chair and grabbed the girl from around her midriff. He fished the missing gilder out of her pants and bit it with metal teeth. “On honest gilder,” he wondered. “Upstairs to your left, pick whichever one you like.”

  The deal was settled, and they left to get the others. They would have to abandon the cart, but they could smuggle the thread into the room.

  Fintan didn’t think he was going to get much sleep tonight.