The wanderers, the lost and the hungry. That is who the runners take. I was none of those things and yet I was there, taking the last of my apprenticeship interviews, desperate. I’d sat six already and none had been quite like this.

“What is the most important quality we look for in a runner?”

I paused, sensing a trap. The answer seemed so obvious. In order to be a runner, you needed to be able to run.

“Natural ability?” I knew I was wrong the moment the words dissipated into the air. Scrambling, I continued. “Speed, endurance, survival skills?”

The woman sat across from shook her head slowly. Her face was weathered, tanned and freckled by the elements, lined with crags like the mountains that were just within eyesight if I went the top of the hill, skirts hiked up in my hands and breath coming heavily. But only then if I peered hard.

There were no decisions made yet. Or if there were, I was not aware of them. My future was as blank as the seven sheets of paper, each proudly stamped with my name that had sat before each of my interviewers. The last sat in that very room, like a wall between us that I could climb if only I knew the answer.

“What do you want from your life?”

“I-“

I did not know what to say. The chef had given me a practical test, sorting vegetables into types, chopping them finely and preparing a simple meal. The bespectacled older woman had examined my hands, turning them over and peering intently before declaring them unsuitable for the delicate art of jewellery making.

This morning I had crept out before daybreak, a pair of simple linen trousers hidden under my skirts. It was not that my mother would have disapproved; she had her own trousers, for gardening and the like. Clothes suited for mud and muck and grime, for labour of the kind that she hoped her daughter would one day not have to partake in. I simply had not wanted to explain it to her.

This was a numbers game and one I had thought carefully about all winter. There were forty odd apprenticeship masters, each one taking on a handful of students to teach their craft to. An applicant could sit as many interviews as they liked. Take too many and you would be underprepared for each, coming off as uninspired and ultimately forgettable. Take too few and you risked only selecting popular disciplines.

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Lori, Andrew and I had counted out the odds over and over, looking for the safest path to success. Some professions, like soldiering, took on many young people, looking only for rule-focused minds and some muscles. Others, like silver-smithing or clock-making took on just a couple. I had tactically selected six professions that I predicted would be in varied demand, based on what I knew of the state of the city and the interests of the eighteen year olds that I knew. At least, it had been six, but I was struck by doubt on the verge of dropping the slip off. I’d taken one last look down it and selected, virtually at random, from the least popular choices. Runner.

It was hard. It was dirty. They were respected but separate from society, gathering in their own groups on the edge of the city, solemn faced one moment in concentration as they darted down the street but a half hour later laughing uproariously perched on a street-side table at a the kind of pub my mother would have my ear for frequenting. In short, they were odd folk.

This thought provoked me to try one last time.

“Aloofness.” The woman looked down at me, her eyes refocusing from where they had slipped over my shoulder. I pressed on doggedly. “Your other question I mean. About qualities. People don’t much like runners, begging your pardon mistress. My uncle, he doffs his hat and gets out of their way on the street, but he won’t share a smoke with one. Not that they would!”

Runners wouldn’t smoke; surely, what with that awful cough it could give you. I’d heard them sometimes, the older men, hacking their lungs up with a burning end hanging from their fingers. Nobody could run like that, not for leagues upon leagues.

“They’ve got to be at peace with that, haven’t they? Being out there, alone, and being in here and being kind of alone too, just surrounded by other people.”

When the interview was over and she’d shaken my hand I judged that my outlook was poor. A number of similarly odd and stilted questions had followed, none of which involved me making use of my donned trousers to run anywhere! Not that that would have impressed the mistress much either, but at least the relevance of the test would have been evident to me.

She paused as she showed me out.

“Aloofness. It was not the answer that I was looking for.” Her fingers tapped on the edge of the door and her sleeve slipped down. On her forearm were inky blank lines, snaking down into obscurity. I could see only the edge of the design but it was enough to guess – wings, a luck token of the fleet-footed.

“But it was, I suppose, an answer.”