Welton knew one thing for sure: He wasn't going to extend any sort of olive branch to Havid. He wasn't going to go near the man. His exile from Doople's apartment, therefore, was permanent.

He thought this as he trudged across one of the bridges that crossed the Sedge, no particular destination in mind. Forash, he knew, had several lovely bridges which arced majestically over the water, attracting tourists from far away to come and visit each in turn, and this was none of those. It had rust all over. It bowed precariously in the middle. It rattled in the wind.

But if it wasn't safe, he reasoned, it'd be chained off, wouldn't it? Or at least there would be a sign posted.

A ripple of thunder sounded in the near distance.

There hadn't been any clouds earlier, he thought. They'd rolled in while Doople was chewing him out. Appropriate, he thought. How appropriate.

What was he going to do now?

He needed somewhere to stay, obviously. He could go back to the hostels-

He didn't have any money. He kept forgetting about that. He wasn't used to it at all. Some craven part of him kept insisting it would be an easy problem to fix - he just needed to get in touch with his parents, make some apologies, debase himself a little. Promise to come home. The promise could turn out to be a lie, couldn't it? It could turn out to be a lie or not, and he wouldn't even have to decide yet when he said it. He could go home or not go home, his choice. He could tell them what they wanted to hear, then think things over. So it wouldn't be like he was lying to their faces, as such. It would just be... an expression of overconfidence in a particular future. Meanwhile, they'd send him some money, easy, because it meant little to them and they'd hate to think of their son being poor.

So the craven part of him argued.

His pride, of course, would have none of it, and some other part as well. He had to move forward in life, not backwards. He had to figure this out for himself.

But if he didn't go begging to his parents for money, he had no money. And if he had no money, he had nowhere to stay. He didn't want to sleep on the street, that was for sure.

He racked his brain. Maybe Salmidon would put him up for a night or two? No, that was ridiculous.

Rakkel had gotten away with staying at her hostel without paying, he thought. The lady had just handed over the key card and gone back to sleep. Of course, there was no way Welton was ever going near that particular hostel again. But maybe he could pull off the same thing at a different one. Maybe he could pull off the same thing at all of them, one by one, slinking away without paying every morning and checking into a new one when night fell.

And then what?

His hooves clanked on the metal grille of the bridge's floor. One of his favorite things about being a pig was that he could go barefoot - but here it seemed treacherous. The holes in the grille caught at his hoof-tips greedily. They were the perfect size, almost, for his hoof-toes to slip right in. He imagined getting his leg stuck. He imagined tripping and breaking a bone, or getting a leg so hopelessly stuck he couldn't remove it. He imagined lying there on top of the bridge, yammering and pleading for help as the first raindrops came down, his cries drowned out by the river.

The first raindrops came down.

Hadn't he packed an umbrella somewhere in his duffel? He set it down by the side of the bridge and rooted through it.

These were his familiar, old things: His clothes, his books, his personal possessions from across the days of his childhood. He'd gotten this umbrella - he pulled it out from under a pair of pants - many, many years ago, on a trip upriver with his family. They'd forgotten to pack him one, and then it had begun to rain. So they'd gone to this little outpost on the river, where they'd had a furious argument with the trader over nothing much in particular and then bought the fanciest, classiest umbrella available - the one with the self-repairing fabric and the reinforced handle. Welton, a mere spectator to the arrangement, had it jammed into his hands, whereupon he went outside and immediately lost it to the wind. He'd last spotted it upside down in the river, handle like a mast, drifting slowly away.

They'd dragged Welton back into the shop to shout at him for a while, then to have another argument with the trader, and finally to purchase a replacement umbrella. Except there weren't any fancy umbrellas left. He had a vague recollection that the fancy umbrella had been the trader's own, personal umbrella. They'd bullied the trader into selling it after spotting it in the umbrella stand next to the door.

So they'd bought this plain one instead. It was a simple but durable folding umbrella of pink cloth and red wood. He'd insisted on the pink one because it was the color of pigs. His parents had insisted that pink wasn't a respectable color, but at this point, their patience had already worn thin and they gave up quickly. It'd been one of the few times he'd actually had his way over theirs.

Over the years, he'd needed to patch it a couple of times, and to repair the folding mechanism several times. Later, he'd also sewn some photovoltaic film onto the cloth to power a little LED he'd installed in the handle as an emergency flashlight.

It was only an umbrella, at the end of the day. But he had history with it.

He put it up now, keeping the handle loop wrapped tightly around his wrist, as he always did. The rain dribbled onto it. He kept walking.

He reached the other side of the bridge without incident. He did not break a leg, or trap a foot, or plunge into the river below as the bridge collapsed beneath him. Whatever awful trajectory his life was on, it didn't point quite so steeply downwards as that. Though you never knew how things might turn out, he thought. Fantasies fleeted through his mind about toppling from the bridge, landing on a passing boat, and being taken in by a band of roving river-pirates. He imagined finding camaraderie, eventually becoming their captain, playing out his days raiding villages with his boisterous crew. Many years later, he thought, he'd look back and reflect on what his life might have been like if the bridge hadn't chosen to collapse at that fortuitous moment.

Except it hadn't, and now he had to find out the hard way.

Oh well. If nothing else, he was sure there must be someone in this city who needed the services of a holo-scribe.

In fact, come to think of it, he knew just where to look.

The porpoise wore a shiny yellow rain hat, a shiny yellow rain coat, a pair of shiny yellow boots, and a green backpack. They dripped on the floor. Their round grey snout, also wet with rain, looked just as shiny as the hat and the boots.

"Hi," they said. "You're Rakkel?"

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Rakkel nodded, confused.

"I was paid to come here and tell you that Madame Flore wants to meet with you," they said. "And to bring you to her."

"What, really? Already? How did she even know I was here?" Rakkel tried to remember if xe'd mentioned Doople's shop during their conversation yesterday. Xe didn't think xe had.

"No idea. All I know is, I'm supposed to fetch you back to a particular location, and then I get the second half of my payment." They looked around. "This isn't really what I was expecting," they said. "What is this place? Oh, my name's Essabrou, by the way."

"Charmed," said Rakkel. "It's a meat... food... shop." Xe looked over at Doople.

"It's the finest late-night eatery in this half of the city," he said. "I sell vat meat buns, dumplings, meat stew, gyros, refreshing beverages, and the like." He smiled proudly for just a moment.

"Right, that," said Rakkel.

"An eatery?" asked the porpoise. "Do you do fish?"

"Not my specialty, but I've got some. The fried cod tacos are pretty decent - that'd be my recommendation if it's fish you're after. Technically not open for business right now, though."

Essabrou looked over at the empty stew bowl where Rakkel had been sitting. "Oh, no worries," they said. "That's fine."

"Sorry, it's just that most of the equipment's shut down and it takes time to cook. Rakkel's a special guest," he added. "But you're welcome to stay here until the rain stops."

"No," said Essabrou, quickly. "I like the rain."

"But Rakkel-"

"It's fine," said Rakkel, who'd already put on xir poncho again. "I might as well get this over with."

Doople nodded. "Suit yourself. You're welcome back any time, of course. And if you need a place to stay-"

"I don't want to take Welton's bunk," said Rakkel.

"Eh, you can take mine again if it comes to that," said Doople. "I don't mind."

Rakkel didn't want to do that, but xe didn't want to argue, either. Xe merely said, "Thanks," and followed Essabrou out the door.

"Madame Flore didn't tell me you'd be another bio modder," said Essabrou as they walked out of the alley and into the street.

"Yup, I am," said Rakkel. Not, xe thought, that it really needed confirmation. The fluffy ears and all made it pretty obvious.

"I'm a porpoise. Not, as most people assume, a dolphin. I like to get that out up front," they said. "There's never a good time to bring it up naturally in conversation."

"What's the difference?" asked Rakkel, genuinely curious.

"Our snouts are much blunter, for one," they said. "And our teeth are different."

"Ah."

"And you're some kind of raccoon?"

"A lemur," said Rakkel.

"Huh. Okay."

"Kind of like a monkey."

"Ah," said Essabrou. "Gotcha."

"What does she want me for?" asked Rakkel.

"Who? Madame Flore?"

"Yeah."

"I don't really know. All she told me was that she wanted me to fetch you, and that she'd pay me a thousand credits up front, a thousand on delivery. For that kind of money, I'm not so keen on being impolite and asking nosy questions."

"Is that a lot for this sort of thing?"

"Isn't it?" Essabrou stared at Rakkel. "They pay me seventeen credits a day to unload cargo. Of course, they're underpaying me, but still."

"Interesting," said Rakkel. "She seems very ready to throw money around. She's paying me five thousand a day to do nothing."

"What? To do nothing?"

"She said she might call on me later with some more specific job," clarified Rakkel. "Which is what this is, I assume."

"What's the job?"

"No idea yet."

"I mean in general."

"Still no idea."

Essabrou whistled. They had a strong whistle. "Maybe she's insane," they said. "Giving away so much money for so little."

"I don't like her," said Rakkel. "Listen, I don't know you or anything, but you should stay away from her. I don't even know how she knew I was at Doople's place. And she tried to... well, she helped me set up an account," xe said. "To keep my money in."

"Yeah, she did one for me, too. Is that bad? She just seemed friendly to me."

"But now she controls your account," said Rakkel.

"Does she? Well, that's fine, right? Makes it easier for her to deposit credits. Just as long as it links properly to my global account, I'm fine, right?"

"Your global account?"

"Yeah, for the other river cities. I've never even been to Forash before, and I'm leaving again in a couple of days, so it's not like I need my city account for much. Just to keep the money until I transfer it over."

"How do you get a global account?"

"Sign up for one at any terminal connected to the River Cities Financial Network."

"I see," said Rakkel. "Interesting. Mme. Flore didn't mention that to me."

"She didn't talk about it with me, either, come to think of it," said Essabrou. "But of course I already had one from when I signed on as a stevedore. Have to collect my pay somehow."

"Does nobody around here use coins?"

"What're coins?"

Rakkel felt disappointed. Xe'd been looking forward to coins. Xe'd read all about them, and had a small collection back home. The fascinating thing about coins, xe thought, was how useless they were as objects. Just little round bits of metal, too small and too thick to serve as practical tools for almost any purpose. And the art on them! Images and text and flourishes and the portraits of famous people long dead and forgotten, all in a kind of aimless mishmash over both sides. Almost elegant in its pointlessness. It fell short of being real art, but still showed more artistry than most mundane objects. Most of the coins xe got xir paws on had become hideously corroded or worn down, so part of the fun was figuring out how to clean and restore them, or in some cases, how to even figure out what they'd originally looked like before their faces had smoothed over beyond recognition. Xe'd written a computer program just to detect minute patterns in their textures and coloration. The program helped, but one couldn't ever be certain one had gotten it right.

"Coins are little bits of metal used for money," xe explained.

"Huh? Little bits of... but, why?"

"For one thing, you don't need to have a computer account just to have money," xe said.

"Okay, but then how do you transfer it?"

"Just by handing it over."

"Oh," said Essabrou. "Right. Of course."

They looked embarrassed, so Rakkel changed the subject. "What's a stevedore?" xe asked.

"A cargo handler. It's not a great job, but it's the only one I could find. People don't want to hire a body modder."

"They don't?"

"That's what's so exciting about Madame Flore! She's one herself, so she doesn't care. I'm hoping I can talk her into keeping me around. I could keep doing courier jobs for her. I know the rivers pretty well, so I could do courier jobs for her between cities, even."

"Sure," agreed Rakkel, "might be fun. But there's got to be someone else who'd hire you to do that. Doesn't she creep you out?"

"What, because she's a shark?"

"No," Rakkel began to say, but then xe wondered if that was all there was to xir suspicions. She hadn't, when it came down to it, actually done anything malicious. Had she?

How had she been able to find Rakkel so easily? Rakkel didn't even know xe was going back to Doople's xirself until earlier in the morning. And xe'd only been there for about an hour, tops.

"Where is she meeting me, anyway?" xe asked.

"She said a gazebo in the park. Dunno, though. It wasn't raining then. Are you going to run away?"

"I'd have just not gone with you in the first place," said Rakkel. "But I bet she'd keep coming after me if I did run away. I'm better off turning down her offer to her face. Whatever it winds up being."

"Will you turn her down for sure? I don't get what you're worried about. She just seemed friendly to me," they said again. "Maybe she'll have a really easy job for you that'll pay stupid amounts of credits. If she's willing to give out five thousand a day for nothing, who knows what she'll give you for actual work?"

Rakkel had to admit that having the five thousand from today did feel good, in that it meant that a lot of problems xe'd otherwise have were prematurely solved. Food, for one, and shelter. But then again, xe'd solved them anyway - admittedly through luck, and xe didn't want to lean on Doople's good will too hard - but it wasn't as though xe really needed the credits for anything. Besides, it sounded as though the five thousand xe already had would go a long way if xe didn't donate them all to a creepy AR device repair guy again. Xe didn't need more.

Except xe did need them as a buy-in, xe thought, remembering how xe'd felt yesterday when xe realized xe'd lost everything xe had to sell and wasn't sure xe'd get anything in return for it. The game of the marketplace still enticed xir. Wasn't that why xe'd come to this city to begin with? But Xe needed something new to sell, and xe didn't see how to get that for free. With more money, xe could buy the metal to make more rings, or other jewelry, or maybe something else entirely.

"It's over there," said Essabrou, pointing through the rain.

It wasn't a large park. Just a big, triangular grassy patch in between where the streets met at an angle, and then another city block worth of grass and trees jutting out from the triangle's side. The gazebo sat in the middle like a self-important turtle, blurred and dim, housing the possibility of a seated figure.

A hulking, black car was parked at one edge of the grassy triangle. Rakkel hadn't seen many cars before. Xe looked at it with interest.

"Hurry up," added Essabrou. "She said she'd give me a bonus if I brought you back soon enough."

Rakkel followed across the wet grass.