The slums of Ridahr offered no warm welcome, but Helas needed none.

She mazed quickly through the unlit narrow streets with Callas on her shoulder, grimacing at the smell of urine and feces. The stink was better here than the prison toilets in Wildhold—only by a small margin—but worse than the slums of Bolstaor thanks to the constant heat.

No matter, though. She hadn’t planned to stay long. After all, Andreges thought she was here to investigate a rumor that orphans were disappear off the streets.

“I’m only going to take a quick look around,” she’d told him, and as expected, he’d met her with a chastising frown as if that could stop her from doing more. “I’ll even go during the day, but you know there’s no one else who’ll care enough to look into a few missing orphans.”

He’d nodded his acquiescence to her plan with a sigh, and she’d left without giving him a moment to reconsider. Now that she was here, he’d probably realized he’d made a mistake letting her go without asking more questions.

While his gut might’ve told him to hold off sending her to scope out Magazzinàre’s possible warehouses in the slums, her gut told her they didn’t have time. They needed to pinpoint which location to put their focus as soon as possible.

From Helas’s shoulder, Callas ruffled her feathers as rats ran along the walls and crawled through the garbage piles. A tiefling walked past, holding a chicken by its neck and a rotten quarter piece of bread in one hand. She gave a dirty look, but Helas kept walking; that was the best way through the slums.

On the next block, she found a young half-elf wearing rags and a dirty shirt held a baby in his arms while he slept by a trash heap. She squatted in front of them, offering a small purse with enough coin to get them off the streets for a few months.

“Is the kid yours?” she asked as the purse left her hand.

The half-elf peered into it, green eyes widening and a flush bursting across their face. They couldn’t be more than twenty years old. “Will you take the money away if it is my child? Or will you take the child if not?”

“Neither.”

A nod. “The child is my sister’s… but she’s…” The half-elf settled their gaze on the baby. “It’s just me now. Been that way since she gave birth.”

“What happened to your sister?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard the story before.” Probably a difficult pregnancy and an even more difficult time affording the potions necessary to get through it. If the sister wasn’t already dead, she probably wouldn’t be alive for much longer.

The half-elf hid the purse as they stood, cradling the baby with one arm. “Listen. Whoever you are, thank you for your help. But it’s not safe here. Especially for people asking questions. You should go.”

A long time ago, Helas would’ve pressed them to answer more questions, but she let them go. She even smiled and waved when the half-elf glanced over her shoulder before turning a corner.

Once they were out of sight, she continued deeper into the slums. She found more people like the half-elf—willing to take her money and answer a few questions. Many of them had persistent injuries or illnesses. Not a single person was under the age of eighteen as far as she could tell.

Maybe the rumor wasn’t a rumor. Perhaps it was a half-truth.

In the heart of the slums, she let Callas loose and awakened her senses across the neighborhood. The noises of life enveloped her. The sound of cooking and eating. The rustling of cleaning and working. The screams of fighting and fucking. The wheeze of a final breath taken and the wail of an uncomfortable baby.

Then a child’s shriek a few blocks north.

Helas took off at a run, sending Callas ahead of her to find a brown-skinned girl with curly red hair no older than ten stumbling down a dark alleyway and clutching her throat. As the child fell to her knees, grasping for breath, Helas arrived to catch her. Blood poured down her front.

“H-he—” the child croaked.

Help was what Helas heard.

“I’m here. Don’t talk.” Helas pressed her hand against the child’s and reached into her bag for a healing potion, but a voice stopped her.

“I’m a healer!” Down the block, an old woman with skin wrinkled and orange from too much sun hurried toward them as quickly as her shuffling feet would allow. Her hair was long and white, pulled back into a tight bun. “Put pressure on the wound!”

The child shook in her arms. “N-n—”

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No.

But what was the kid saying no to?

“What else should I do?” Helas continued applying pressure, but she left the healing potion in her bag. She wouldn’t let the kid die in her arms. She also wouldn’t squander the opportunity to see how this trap play out.

“You’ve done enough, dear,” the healer said as she kneeled. With weathered hands, she moved Helas’s hand and the child’s hand to replace them with her own. “I’ll help the kid.”

“Will you?” Helas took the bait, loosening her expression into one of worry.

The healer nodded generously. “I can heal it until a certain point, but after that, potions are what’ll get the child through it. I’ve got a shop just right there.” She smiled as she pointed with a now bloodied hand.

Across the street, Helas eyed the abandoned warehouse building. There was no signage, but she knew the location to be one of the possible Magazzinàre warehouses. Very convenient. Too much of a coincidence.

“You have healing potions then?” Helas asked. The warehouse was clearly not in use, so she could tell Andreges this one was a dead lead. But she wanted to get inside the shop. “I’ve got the money. Whatever it takes.”

“Plenty. Pick the kid up and follow me.” The healer pulled her hands away, but the girl’s throat was still a gory mess that hid her healing handiwork.

Helas did as asked. She even feigned weakness, making a show of effort to carry the child. In her arms, the girl kept feeling her blood slickened throat. She shivered and whimpering, clearly afraid of what was happening.

The healer’s shop was around the side of the warehouse. A nondescript door led to a room in the basement lit with a few hanging candles. Inside, it was small and cramped and shelves were lined with dusty potion bottles that didn’t fool Helas.

She picked up one, uncorked the bottle, and sniffed its contents. “It smells like rat piss.”

The healer paid no mind. “Maybe that’s a bad one.” She didn’t even bother to see which potion Helas was talking about and disappeared past another door. “Put the kid back here. I have a room for patients.”

“Don—’t…” The girl grasped at Helas’s clothes as she followed the healer into the next room.

“—Hurry up now. Over here.”

There was an unmade, small bed in the corner. Perfect size for a child. Helas put the girl on it and noticed how her frail body fit into the sunken mattress. As soon as she was laying down, the girl seemed to fall unconscious, but her breathing was strong and regular.

“Will she be alright?” Helas asked as the healer washed her hands in a molding sink in the corner of the room.

“Of course. Just trust me.”

Helas sat at the foot of the bed as Callas swooped into the room and nestled onto her shoulder again. Now that the healer’s trap had worked, it was time to craft her own.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” Helas said, straightening her back, “but I doubt there’s a single healing potion in here that can help this child. You don’t seem very good at making potions if they smell like rat piss.”

The healer wiped her wet hands on her dirty linen tunic as she bent over a row of small potion bottles on a table near the bed. “Then you’ll simply have to let me do my work to see that you can trust me. I don’t know what happened to that batch, but—”

“—But what?” Helas continued. “It’s a common problem with anti-nausea potions. They don’t go bad. They’re made bad. You need to use fresh ingredients. No older than three days and high quality as well. They shouldn’t be used more than once or twice, and they must be processed properly.”

The healer picked up two small bottles, her expression calm but her jaw clenched. “And where did you learn all this? You don’t look even half my age, and yet you seem to know so much.”

The likelihood that this old woman was even half of Helas’s age was very low. She held out a hand for the healer to pass over the bottles, and in the woman’s moment of hesitation, snatched them out of her hands.

“What are—”

“Where I learned about potions doesn’t matter.” She smelled the contents of the bottles. Basic healing potions good only for remedying a stuffed nose or a sore throat. “How much?”

She eyed me wearily. “Ten silver a piece. Half a potion a day for four days. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll give you the money back and I’ll craft a stronger healing potion for you.”

The con was simple. Sell lesser healing potions at a higher price to keep people sick and wounded. When those lesser potions didn’t work, people would return willing to pay more money for the promise of stronger potions until they couldn’t anymore. When those potions didn’t work, the only options left would be to pay more money or let them die.

Maybe the kid was in on it, too, but that seemed unlikely. What kid would sign up to choke on their own blood? But desperation often made the possibility of death seem worth it for a few coins.

Helas counted out the money for the healer. “I’ll take them.”

“If you’d like, you can also leave the child here with me.” The money disappeared into the healer’s pocket quicker than Helas had taken it out of her own.

How many times had this child been left here?

Helas helped the unconscious girl drink half a bottle and put the rest into her bag. Then she took the kid into her arms again, this time without a struggle.

“Why would I do that when I won’t be back?” Helas asked with a smile.

The healer didn’t bother following them out, and the girl didn’t wake while Helas navigated them out of the slums and into the red-light district. Geram would complain about the new addition to their apartment, but he had a soft spot that would keep those complaints quiet.

Once in the spare bedroom, Helas laid the child down in a bed far too large for her and tucked her under the covers. She cleaned the kid’s neck of blood and found the healer had done a half decent job closing the wound.

An hour later, the girl was as good as new, and she woke up with a jolt.

“You’re safe, kid,” Helas said. “What’s your name?”

The girl looked around, her eyes brightening as she took in her new surroundings. “Ifi.”

“Ifi what?”

“Ifiya.” She sat up, felt her neck with an open palm with startling nonchalance. “I don’t have a last name, if that’s what you were asking, but I like it when people call me Ifi. I don’t know my age either, but everyone thinks I’m nine, ten, or eleven. I don’t have a home. Oh, and I don’t have any money. So there’s no reason to kill me.”

Helas laughed. She liked the kid. “You’re right about that. Killing you would be an honest waste of my time, especially after going to the trouble of bringing you here and healing you up properly. I’ve got a better idea for you.”

The kid blinked. “Like what?”

“I need someone to run a few errands for me from time to time. But more than that, I’ve heard that there are orphans going missing in the slums. What do you know?”