The next morning Silas followed a darting Sable through the side roads and back alleys of the nicer parts of The Gray Depths near the Academy, the surrounding residential buildings more like highrises than cramped apartments. The only other person he encountered at such an early hour was a man in a vaguely official-looking work uniform, long sleeved gray coveralls with a fancy crest on a red shield-shaped patch on the left side of his chest.

The workman muttered to himself as he used a pry bar to remove the final leg from a rather large desk it seemed someone left in the alley. He tossed the leg into a wide, low and flat metal pull wagon nearly the width of the alley with a pitch black interior, and the wooden leg just disappeared into the void. He tested the weight of the desk and shook his head.

The man's constant muttering rose in pitch as his skin rippled, turning hard and chitinous, the shiny black of an ant. His eyes grew round and wide as his head doubled in size while antennae rose from his forehead and mandibles extended to replace his mouth. His arms narrowed, hands disappearing, replaced by short, spiky, needle-like hairs.

Transformed, the humanoid ant man placed a limb on each side of the desk, then twisted his body to bite down on a corner, his mandibles having no trouble finding purchase. With unexpected ease the desk rose into the air, the man-ant carefully rotating his burden so it just barely fit into the wagon's aperture. He let go, the desk falling into the void.

Silas stood, fascinated, until the man's chitinous skin rippled, once more appearing like a workman Silas wouldn't have thought about twice if they crossed paths in some office building on Earth.

The man glanced Silas's way, then shook his head before continuing down the alley, pulling his wagon along behind.

Sable squeaked at Silas to get his attention, then she zipped away again, leading him down a different path from the one taken by the…trash man? He watched the man pick up a barrel and dump it into the wagon's void. Yeah, he was a trash man. Sanitation specialist. Wagon feeder. Trash voider. Street cleaner. He did have a push broom on the side of the wagon. Street sweeper? Was the broom magic, too?

…He knew quite well the city had a dump. Was the trash just being relocated, then, and not magically annihilated? A mobile portal? A port-a-wagon? Is that how he got transported to the dump?

Shaking his head, Silas hurried to catch up to a squeakily complaining Sable. The rat had scratched at his window last night until he cracked it enough for her to slip out, presumably to arrange the location for this meeting.

"Silas," said Eve, a radar-like circle obscuring the upper right corner of his vision, a minimap containing basic three dimensional outlines of the alley and surrounding buildings. With a white dot at the center for himself and a blue speck for Sable ahead, six distant red dots were shown to encircle them on nearby buildings. "Passive sodar shows we've picked up some group on our tail, up on the rooftops. They just got close enough for us to detect."

Silas had to remind himself what SODAR was. SOnic Detection And Ranging. Acoustic radar. Air-based sonar, basically. Something he found on the internet, which he had theorized his novel's version of Eve should be able to replicate for Cole, with his upgraded hearing. Thus, Silas had included the technology in his story.

He popped his neck, casually glancing up and to the side in the direction of one of the dots. Through the nearby building, he could see the red humanoid blur being overlaid on his vision by Eve, letting him know the tracker's approximate position.

His heart sped up. Were they after him or the rats? Did it matter?

"The wind is moving unnaturally. Magically, one might say. I suspect they are using it to follow and listen. Be careful what you say aloud."

Even better. Why was he doing this again? The rats had already paid him an absurd amount of money. He didn't have a good grasp on the true monetary value of what he could buy with platinum coins, but it seemed like a lot no matter how he did the math, considering his daily expenses were measured in coppers. He could probably stay at the same inn for the rest of his life with the money he already had.

Yet, more money was always better, so here he was walking down back alleys. That, and he wanted to avoid having angry rats come find him again. No one wanted that.

"Sable," he called out, "come here a second." He knelt and held out his hand.

The mouse squeaked at him indignantly, but when he tightened his face and shook his hand the rat seemed to understand his sense of urgency.

She climbed up his hand, keeping a wary eye on Vox who sat happily on Silas's shoulder preening himself.

"Vox," Silas ordered mentally. "Fly up and show me who is on the rooftops. Keep your distance. Don't come back, I'll just unsummon you."

Silas got back an acknowledgement combined with a sense of annoyance directed at whoever it was damaging Vox's calm.

When Vox took off, one of the red dots jumped back out of Eve's sodar range, and shortly thereafter the other dots followed. Above the rooftops, Vox sent back a sense of confusion as he failed to find anyone skulking about.

Silas sent him back, "Just keep circling around to keep them away, I guess. Thanks Bud!"

Vox returned a grumbling acknowledgement, plus the sense he expected to be fed once this excitement reached its conclusion.

"The wind?" he asked Eve.

"Back to normal," she reported.

"Someone was following," Silas explained to Sable. "Might be they left, might be we just can't see them anymore. I think this whole cheese business might be putting myself and you guys in more danger than it is worth. How about we just try again later?"

Sable's angry two squeeks needed no further translation. She hopped down and scurried down the alley, stopping at the next intersection. With a sigh he ran to catch up, but before he did the rat zipped off again.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Five minutes of running through back alleys, not backtracking but certainly zig-zagging around longer than seemed necessary, Sable entered through a crack in a boarded up window of what seemed to be a large warehouse.

A few seconds later there came a click, and the back door slowly swung open.

Inside, lit only by the open door, in an open space free of stacked crates, six large rats waited, including the one bigger than all but the largest dog breeds, Sable's Boss, seeming notably larger than when Silas saw the rat yesterday, its nose likely reaching higher than Silas's new royal blue belt if it chose to look up. From the darkness, countless pairs of eyes reflected back the light.

Boss rat made a noise too powerful to call a squeak. He rumbled.

The five big rats each walked into the shadows, returning with a sack of coins each.

"So, fifty lots of cheese this time?" Silas could do it, but he'd need to dismiss Vox if he didn't want to wait for his mana to regenerate.

"Anything, Vox?" Silas asked his eyes in the sky.

Vox sent back a negative response, while including the sense he was both bored and growing absolutely famished.

"Head on back, then. Treats later." He thought about summoning Ai or Woof, but was there anything to discuss? Better to get the deal done and get out. He preferred dealing with Sable. She fit in his pocket. This Boss of hers wouldn't fit through the neckhole of his wave-patterned blue shirt.

He unsummoned Vox, then started summoning cheese.

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"You're sure the beast is gone?"

"Ain't in the sky. Vanished in a puff of smoke."

"So you're saying there's an invisible dragonling out there now?"

"I still don't see why we backed off."

"You don't mess with dragons, Waddle."

"And had we killed it, we still wouldn't've. Dragons are big trippers. Their hatchlings are bigger than, well, certainly me. Not sure about your wide load."

"I'll give you a—"

"Cut down the chatter," came Boss's voice on the wind. "Skies are clear. We're to recon only. And certainly not cross swords with our city's quieter, more elusive new Hero. Which means, prepare to retreat if he so much as looks in our direction again. The only reason you oar-heads are even here is because we always have to expect the unexpected. 'Prepare for leviathans and you won't need to run from sharks.' Now move in, and move in quietly this time."

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"They're back," announced Eve as Silas summoned his thirty fifth wheel of cheese, pointing out their reappearance on his minimap. Five more Swiss and he'd start on Mozzarella sticks.

"Tell me if they move in, I guess," Silas said, feeling a bit helpless. He could spare the mana to summon Vox again, but to what end? They hadn't left, just waited out of sight. He'd be done and gone soon enough.

"Feels like I'm a drug mule passing product on to the dealers and the cops are closing in."

"How are you not the dealer in this scenario?"

"What would that make the rats, then?"

"Addicts, obviously. Cheese addicts."

"Well isn't that just a nice bucket of truth excrement? I'm a drug dealer."

"In the sense that your clients crave your product, perhaps, but it's hardly detrimental to their health. Just look at what it's doing for them."

Silas stared at the rats who most definitely grew each time he sold them cheese, Boss in particular. Just days ago he barely came up to the middle of Silas's shin. "...You know, I was happier not connecting those particular dots, Eve."

"Apologies, truly. I sometimes forget how you excel at ignoring uncomfortable truths."

"When else have I— No, I don't want to know right now."

"Thanks for proving my point."

Silas shook his head, he didn't have time for Eve's antics. As he started on the mozzarella and a fourth bag slid his way, he told the ginormous rat, "Six people are watching us from the—" He cut off as they backed off almost as fast as when Vox took flight.

"Well," he continued, "a team of six has been trying to get close while we do this, but they're very skittish. Yet, clearly they have very good hearing. At least one with an air or wind-related Bond. Probably not looking for a fight, but I thought you'd want to know."

The boss rumbled again.

"With Sable, we've used one noise for a yes, two for a no."

The boss tilted his head, then nodded it once before shaking it twice.

"Yeah. That works too. She hides a lot, so I can't always see her. Anyhow, if this is a good spot I can pop right in tomorrow on my big rabbit, Lucky. No one will be able to follow me that way. Might notice the mana shifting, because apparently it follows me around, but there's little I can do about that. And, well, if they are here tomorrow, I guess that means they can hear us talking from wherever they're hiding. Not much to do about that, if so."

The boss shook his head.

"No I shouldn't come here tomorrow?"

He shook his head again.

"Something else then?"

Nod.

"Okay. Well, should I just pop back here tomorrow morning?"

Nod.

"Right then." He'd finished summoning the cheese sticks, and they'd all been carted off. "Guess I'll head out."

Nod.

It was a tight fit for Lucky, but with all the spying Silas didn't want to pop back into the alley where anyone might see. He hefted the five sacks of coins into Lucky's not-so-cosmetic-anymore saddlebags, saved the rats' warehouse as her fourth warp point, and warped back to the square in front of the Academy.

Sable almost got left behind, but crawled up Lucky's leg at the last moment.