Chapter Text
After the Dregs have dispersed from the Exchange, off to celebrate another victory, a short, bronze-skinned girl remains. She smooths her choppy dark hair and goes on her way, allowing a small smile to grace her lips. Inej Ghafa has scored a victory for her gang tonight, and though she has never been one to drink and celebrate with them, she will not pretend not to be happy about it.
“Hey, wait.” A tall, lanky boy hurries after her. Jesper knows not to grab her, but he doesn’t need to, anyway—he’s impossible to ignore, for better and for worse. “Why didn’t you tell me Bolliger was dirty?”
Inej doesn’t turn to face him, but she slows her pace, allowing him to catch up. “I didn’t tell anyone,” she points out. “Not like I was excluding you.”
“Yeah, but I’m not just anyone,” he counters. “Be honest with me here. Please. Do you think I’m dirty?”
Inej does turn at that. “Of course I don’t, Jes,” she says. “Not telling you wasn’t personal. I had a plan, and it didn’t require you knowing. There was no reason to tell you.”
It always comes back to reasons, for Inej. She does nothing on a whim.
“Did Kaz know?"
“I did not.”
A sour-faced girl approaches, adjusting her black ponytail with one gloved hand, the other gripping a cane that taps audibly against the ground. “Saints!” Jesper exclaims, a hand over his heart. “Where did you even come from? Has Inej been teaching you to do that?”
“No, you just weren’t paying attention,” Kaz says dismissively. There’s a bit of a rasp to her voice, same as there always is, like she’s perpetually getting over a cold. “I’ll have to remember you’re so easy to startle.”
Inej rolls her eyes. “You can’t keep walking into these things, Dirtyhands,” she says. “If the threats keep coming from you, people will realize you’re pulling them out of your ass sooner or later.”
“Geels had a pistol against your forehead, and you’re scolding me?"
“I’m warning you. I was already planning on threatening his girl, anyway.”
Kaz scoffs. “No one listens to threats for the future. You need to make them think it’s happening now.”
“I think you just enjoyed terrifying him. All that description was unnecessary.”
The other girl smirks faintly. “That was a bonus, I’ll admit.”
Inej may need a reason for everything, but sometimes she suspects Kaz needs none for anything.
“Well, I do appreciate the lifesaving,” she concedes. “Both of you, back to the Crow Club. Have some drinks, help tonight’s story evolve a little. I’ll meet you back there.” She has her own route back.
Inej won’t drink and celebrate with her gang, but she’ll probably stand there in the shadows, watching them. The Wraith isn’t seen unless she wants to be, and tonight, she isn’t really in the mood. Legends are better when the subject isn’t around.
Jesper and Kaz leave, and Inej vanishes into the night.
"Thanks for saving my ass, Kaz. Hey, Kaz, it's impressive how well you improvise these threats. You know, Kaz, you're right. I shouldn't criticize you after you saved me when a guy had a fucking gun to my head!" Frustration is boiling Kaz's blood tonight, and she huffs, gloved fingers tight around her black cane.
"Now, it's not that I don't wholeheartedly agree with you that our shortest friend could use some more manners, but I feel like you're not really one to talk," Jesper remarks.
”Yeah, but this isn’t about me, Jes. Pay attention.” Kaz will concede that she isn’t very well-mannered, either, but she doesn’t feel like considering that right now. She’s just annoyed that she can walk into a parley in progress, make up a fire about to start from nothing but a faint siren, and get a man to stop threatening Inej’s life, and Inej still won’t offer anything more than a reluctant I appreciate it.
“You know I’ve never been good at that.”
“Oh, I do.”
They come up on the entrance to the Crow Club. “I wonder if Inej left any credit for me,” Jesper muses.
Kaz whacks her cane against his legs, light enough to not damage any bones. “No gambling."
”Just one game.”
“No!”
Jesper sighs dramatically. “Fine. But you’re buying me a drink.”
Kaz nods. “The deal is the deal.”
She tries to keep Jesper from gambling whenever she can. A couple months ago, she persuaded Inej to stop setting up credit for him at the Crow Club. Kaz is okay with gambling in most other people, and she knows he probably still does it when she’s not around, but she doesn’t want to witness it.
She likes Jesper. She doesn’t want him to do anything stupid. She doesn’t want to be there when he inevitably does.
Kaz lifts a few kruge off a patron as they enter, enough to buy that drink. The man doesn't look up from his game. They never do. Dirtyhands doesn't get caught in the act.
Inej doesn’t make it back to the Crow Club.
Her mistake was dropping back down to the ground. On the rooftops, she’s untouchable. But she’d taken a shortcut through an alleyway on the ground, and that was where a man had appeared.
She’d thrown Sankt Petyr at him before she knew what was going on, but then he was dodging the knife, lunging at her, and he roughly shoved her to the ground.
Inej should have gotten up and fought back. She could have done it with ease. But—but. But she was pinned in his grasp, and for a heartbeat she was twelve again, and that heartbeat was all the man needed to jab a syringe into her neck.
As her consciousness faded, she saw—a hallucination, it had to have been that. From the needle. She was hallucinating, and that was why it looked like someone had emerged from a wall. Because she got grabbed like an idiot.
That was pretty much as far as her thoughts made it before she was gone.
So now she’s shackled to a chair, arms behind her back. Panic seizes Inej for a moment when she wakes to a stench, and it isn’t made any better when she opens her eyes to an old man in front of her, but then she looks around and comes back to herself. The man’s in robes—university medik robes. She’s smelling ammonia, she realizes.
”I’m awake,” she spits. “Get that away from me.”
He does that, thankfully. Inej takes stock of her situation, stomach dropping when she realizes she can’t feel the cool metal of any of her knives. Whoever’s grabbed her, they have her unarmed.
She looks around the room. And is completely bewildered by it.
She’d expected the Black Tips, out for revenge after that parley. Or some other rival gang, just for the hell of it. But a room like this doesn’t exist anywhere in the Barrel. Barrel rats trying to make a room look nice make it flashy, gaudy, loud. This room has carvings, bookshelves, a DeKappel that must be worth thousands. And a merch-looking man in his forties behind a desk, observing her.
Inej looks at him. “What do you want?”
”Miss Ghafa,” he says instead of answering. “I hope you’re feeling alright.”
”Fine.” She is—a bit of grogginess remains, but the drug doesn’t seem to have had any lasting effects otherwise. "I'll ask again, what do you want?"
He dismisses the medik, who leaves. The mercher stands, and Inej inspects him. He's pretty standard, really. Pale skin, thinning brown hair, suit and tie. A gold pocket watch with a fob shaped like laurel leaves, and a ruby tie pin.
The watch and pin mean something. Inej knows they do. Saints, she wishes she had Kaz here right now. Whatever they are, Kaz would recognize them instantly. Nothing slips out of her mind’s grasp.
Laurel leaves. Ruby pin. Laurel. Red gem. Red laurel.
It clicks.
Inej looks up to meet the mercher’s eyes. “Van Eck,” she says coolly.
Jan van Eck nods just as coolly. “You know me, then?”
As if she could ever not. As if anyone could not know a Councilman, even a Barrel girl. “Of course I do,” she scoffs. “It’d be impressive if I didn’t, given your constant efforts to clean up the Barrel.”
Another nod. “I try to find its people honest work.”
Saints, Inej can’t stand men like him. As if the Barrel is just a pet project, a far-off hypothetical. “There’s nothing honest about your kind.”
”I don’t think you’re in a position to be questioning my integrity, Wraith.” Van Eck spits the name like a curse. She loathes when people do that, take the name of her legend and try to turn it into an insult. “I counted nine knives on your person, and I doubt they’re for cooking.”
Inej shrugs to the best of her ability, testing the strength of her restraints. “I suppose we’re speaking killer to killer, then.” Locks aren’t her forte. Far from it. She’s never needed to learn anything harder than the average window lock—why pick the lock on a door when you can climb the wall outside? Unfortunately, it has her at a disadvantage now. This situation isn’t hopeless—but it’ll be hard to figure out a plan when she still knows so little. “Now tell me what you want to speak to me about.”
Van Eck looks exasperated. “I have a proposition for you, Miss Ghafa. Rather, the Council does.”
Whatever Inej was expecting, it wasn’t that. “And you decided to do it by capturing me instead of just sending a message by runner…why, exactly?”
His lip curls. “We don’t send runners to the Barrel. Additionally, it served as a demonstration.”
A demonstration of what? Inej doesn’t ask that. She’s not getting into that, not while still shackled to this chair. Jan van Eck wants something from her, and she’s leveraging that. “Any chance we could continue this conversation with me standing up?”
Once she’s unshackled, the night takes a turn for the bizarre. A boy walks through a wall again, and that’s the least of it.
Jurda parem. An ordinary stimulant that’s stained Inej’s teeth dozens of times, turned into the catalyst for world-shatteringly powerful Grisha. Its creator held captive in Fjerda’s Ice Court. And a Merchant Council desperate enough to agree to pay Barrel trash thirty million kruge to get him back.
This is the most dangerous job Inej’s ever even heard of. It’d probably be the most dangerous job anyone’s heard of. But if she figures out the right people, if they pull this off…
If they pull this off, anything they have do will be worth it.
Kaz always knows when Inej is near.
She always has, since the night they first met, a night she hates to recall just like all the others like it. Inej Ghafa may be the Ghost of the Barrel, but Dirtyhands is the one person she can’t hide from.
She always knows when Inej is near, which is why she immediately knows when she’s back, several hours after she ought to have been.
It’s been a couple of hours since she unceremoniously kicked Rojakke out on Inej’s orders. He seemed terribly upset by the injustice of it all, but he’d been skimming for weeks, so really, Kaz doesn’t think he has that right. Besides, then he tried to grab her shirt, and everything between that and her probably fracturing his shin is kind of a blur. But the point is, he had it all coming.
She went back to the Slat after that—she knew Jesper wouldn’t stay away from gambling for long, and she doesn’t have it in her to watch. Besides, the Club is always a little too crowded. A little too risky.
Her room at the Slat is up a flight of stairs, even though there’s several perfectly good ground floor rooms. Per Haskell had done it out of spite, when she’d first arrived two years ago. Inej hadn’t mentioned the limp when persuading him to buy Kaz’s contract, and he’d been furious to find she’d spent all that money on a cripple. Then he’d gotten angrier and told Kaz her room was upstairs at the end of the hall, and the rest was history.
He tolerates her now, but it doesn’t really matter. The old man’s a washed-up ass, and everyone knows Inej is the one really in charge, and Inej trusts Kaz. That’s all that really matters.
Kaz is holed up in her room, doing her share of the Crow Club tallies—most of them, really, since she can do them in her head—when she feels Inej enter the Slat. Through a window, probably, since those tend to be her preferred method of entry into places.
"Back and still breathing?" That's Haskell's voice, audible through the thin walls, so clearly his was the window of choice tonight. There’s a grate running from his office to just outside Kaz’s room, which works out well for eavesdropping. She foregoes her cane as she steps closer to it—better to limp a little more than to be heard.
"We won't have a problem with Fifth Harbor again." Kaz can hear a faint smirk in Inej's voice. She always enjoys these moments, coming back to the old man having proven him wrong in one way or another.
A grunt. "Use my door next time." He tells her that every time. She has yet to do it, as far as Kaz knows.
"So I could be waylaid by everyone in the Slat for congratulations?” Inej counters.
”That’s another thing. You should have asked my permission before you dealt with Bolliger.”
Kaz rolls her eyes at that, and she suspects Inej is probably doing the same. “Word would have gotten to him if I had.”
”You think I’d let that happen?” He definitely would.
“I think it’s hard to keep things contained in a place like this.” Inej knows about the grate, doesn’t she? Of course she does, she knows everything. Well, she hasn’t done anything about it yet, so Kaz is probably safe to keep eavesdropping.
"I still don't like it, girl. Big Bolliger was my soldier, not yours." Kaz has to clap a hand over her mouth to keep herself from snorting at that. Surely Haskell doesn't actually think that's true. There's no Dreg under thirty more loyal to him than to Inej, and even he can't have missed that.
"Of course." Inej clearly isn't bothering to argue. Not that Kaz can blame her. Fighting with him is more trouble than it's worth. "I've got a job. I'll need to be gone for a while."
That grabs Kaz's attention. "Big money?" Per Haskell asks.
"That's an understatement."
"Big risk?"
"Also an understatement." Now Kaz needs to know. The best jobs are the ones with as much danger as payout. Low risk and high reward is always a trap.
"Alright, girl." A pause; the old man is probably taking a sip of whatever his drink of choice tonight is. "Make your plans, put together whatever crew you'll need for the job. But you don't do anything before I approve it, you got that?"
"Understood," Inej says, sounding like she wants to slit his throat.
"Are we to be very rich?"
"Rich as all the Saints."
He barks out a laugh. "You're finding religion all of a sudden?"
"No." Inej doesn't elaborate. Kaz has come to the conclusion over the last two years that whatever Inej has against the Saints, it's better to just not know it. "I'm going to talk to Pim. He can pick up the slack while I'm gone."
Something in her stomach turns hollow as she limps back into her room. Pim? Fucking Pim? Why Pim, when Kaz is smarter than him, more trusted, just better? The obvious answer is that Inej intends to bring her along to wherever this job is, but if that's the case, then why wouldn't she have been told about it?
Inej trusts her. She must. But maybe she doesn't trust the others to trust her. The origins of Dirtyhands are a mystery to most of the Barrel, but it's an open secret of sorts among the Dregs. Everyone knows Kaz is an indenture, and everyone knows who owned her contract before Per Haskell. And everyone knows what she was doing there.
Or maybe there wasn't even that consideration. Maybe Inej just had no reason to put Kaz in charge, or to tell her about this job. And there's nothing she'll do without a good reason.
"Dirtyhands."
Speak of the devil. When Kaz looks up, Inej is outside her window. Because why would she use a door when there's a perfectly good window? "My room. Now."
And with that, she vanishes. "Climb the stairs, Kaz," Kaz mutters to herself as she grabs her cane. "I'm outside your window and could easily climb inside with my two good legs, but I won't. Hobble up some stairs for me."
The attic rooms are great for Inej, who could probably climb up a sheer vertical surface and greatly values her privacy. They're her office and bedroom, and she has them all to herself, and it's overall just really great for her. Unfortunately, it is significantly less great for Kaz Brekker, known cripple, who is frequently called to these rooms. But she's done worse things to her bad leg, so she can handle it.
Inej is, of course, already waiting at the top of the stairs when Kaz reaches them. "You take care of Rojakke?"
"Yeah. He got pissy about it; might come looking for trouble."
"I'll have the bouncers stay alert," Inej says as they enter her room. "Close the door behind you."
Kaz obliges. "What's this about?"
Inej begins to flip through the previous days figures, skimming them for any discrepancies. That's their system—Kaz does the bulk of the math, Inej does the bulk of making sure it's all right. "A hell of a job," she says. "With a payout to match. Opinions on four million kruge?"
Everything stops with those words. Kaz feels her heart skip a beat, her breath catch in her throat. "Four million?" With that money, she could pay off her indenture, and then some. She could be free of this city that's brought her nothing but pain—and go where? her brain mockingly asks her. She carefully does not dwell on that question. Regardless of whether there's any other life for her, four million kruge is still the difference between being owned and not being owned. "I'm sure you know the answer to that. What's the catch?"
"That's the kicker." Inej grins at her, looking half mad. "It's probably a suicide mission. But if we slip past that probably, we'll be queens of this city, Kaz."
Kaz carefully does not spend any more time than necessary imagining being the queen of this city with Inej. "I like the sound of that. What exactly is this suicide mission?"
Inej grabs a bottle of hair oil. "We're stealing a prisoner from the Ice Court."
"Oh, for Saints' sake." She doesn't even have it in her to be shocked or horrified. Honestly, this was about the level of danger she was expecting. "Hell of a way to go out, at least."
"Always the optimist, Kaz," Inej remarks, pouring some of the oil into one palm before rubbing her hands together. She begins to run the oil through her dark hair, combing her fingers through the neck-length locks. Kaz carefully does not imagine running her own fingers through that hair. "Get to scheming. I'm going to tell Jesper and Muzzen to be here by dawn, and Wylan to be waiting at the Crow Club tomorrow night. After that, we're spending tonight planning this out."
"Wylan?" Kaz tilts her head. "Four million kruge to break into the Ice Court, and we're taking him?" She wonders if maybe Inej wants this to be a suicide mission.
"I'll explain everything later." Inej fixes her hair, then turns, dark eyes meeting Kaz's. "Look, Kaz. I need your plan. But that plan doesn't have to involve you. I'm not going to make you take this job."
Saints, this job really is suicidal. She's never been offered an out before. She's never wanted one, not really. And now's no exception.
Kaz smirks. "And let someone else have my four million kruge? Not a chance."
She can tell from Inej's determined nod that that's exactly what she expected. "I'll be back in a bit. Oh, and move that DeKappel to the vault. I think it's rolled up under my bed."
Move a painting to the vault and plot to break into the extremely secure Fjerdan military stronghold and royal court. Normal evening activities. "Just so you know, I'm doing the work in here." She has no interest in doing the stairs any more than necessary, especially if she isn't getting much sleep tonight.
"Feel free to. Just don't unlock anything locked."
"If you insist." Kaz would love to pick every lock in here, but Inej's secrets can remain secret, unlike most other people's. "Enjoy the rooftops."
"Enjoy my office." Inej jumps out the window. Do the Suli not have doors?
Alright. Time to figure out a way breaking into the Ice Court won't end in everyone's extremely painful death.
Saints help us all. Kaz is not religious, has believed in nothing since she was nine, but though the Saints aren't there to help, it'll take a hell of a miracle for this to work.