The Ashloaf was losing.
Sarrek Ashscale stood behind the counter of his bakery on a Steelday morning and watched three customers walk past his door toward the new Korthane bread stall at the end of the lane. The third one — a regular, a Human clerk from the records office named Jalen who had bought two half-mark loaves every Steelday for six years — glanced at Sarrek's display window, shrugged, and kept walking.
The shrug hurt more than losing the sale. A shrug meant Jalen had already decided — he was choosing elsewhere. That was the distance between a customer who might come back and a customer who never would.
