Nadir bought his boots before the woman could sell them to someone else.
For two evenings, he wore them around the orphanage with his trousers tucked into the tops. They were brown, with black laces that had belonged to another pair, and one was noticeably darker than the other. He refused to consider this a fault.
"You can only see one side of me at a time," he told Ivo.
"I can see both of them now."
"Then stand somewhere else."
Henry watched from his bed, where he was trying to read a page before the light failed. He had begun taking the book upstairs when Ivo finished with it. Sometimes he understood a whole sentence without stopping; sometimes a word he had read the night before seemed entirely unfamiliar. Mrs. Vautrin said that was ordinary. He disliked it anyway.
Nadir's trial came and went. He returned with dust in his hair and complaints about a man who put damaged straps among the good ones, then went back for two more mornings at Mrs. Aksoy's request. By the following week, his name was written beside three mornings in her book.
He still slept in the same bed and left his stockings in the same places. But Henry could no longer assume that they would walk to work together.
On the morning the street was closed, Besson sent Henry and Ivo to clear a passage behind a row of workshops.
The builders had finished repairing a roof and left broken tiles scattered between the houses. Henry filled baskets while Ivo carried them to a cart. Above them, a woman shook a rug from a window, adding a fine rain of dust to the work already waiting below.
Ivo looked up.
"Thank you," he called.
The window shut.
Besson arrived shortly before noon. He inspected the cart, tugged at a loose sideboard, and whistled for the man holding the horse farther down the passage.
Henry looked at him. His mouth had barely opened.
"How did you do that?"
"[Whistle]." Besson waited for the cart driver to notice him. "Useful when people are pretending not to hear."
"Is that your talent?" Ivo asked.
"It is."
"Can you make it louder?"
"No. I can whistle with my mouth shut and my teeth clenched. My father could do nearly as well with two fingers, though he always insisted mine sounded better." He whistled again. "There. He's decided to join us."
Henry had never wondered what Besson's talent might be. He had keys, a ledger, and enough work to give some of it to other people. That had seemed sufficient explanation for him.
They were lifting the last basket when a door banged open at the far end of the passage.
A woman came out backward, dragging a boy by his shirt. He was older than Henry and had lost a shoe. Behind them, something struck wood with a heavy, repeated sound.
"Get away from the doors!" she shouted. "There's something underneath!"
Besson put the basket down.
"Leave it. Both of you, out to the street."
Ivo was already moving. Henry followed, stepping over a length of broken gutter. The woman from the window appeared again, but Besson waved her back inside and pointed toward the front of the house.
At the street entrance, the boy without a shoe was trying to explain.
"It came through the floor. We thought the drain had broken, and then—"
His mother pulled him farther away. Besson caught a passing delivery man by the sleeve.
"Watch post. Tell them a creature's come up behind the workshops. Through a cellar. We haven't seen how big."
The man abandoned his handcart and ran.
Henry could still hear the blows. There was a pause between them, long enough each time for him to hope they had stopped.
Then a door split.
He flinched so hard that his shoulder struck Ivo's. Neither said anything.
Besson pushed them ahead of him into a baker's shop across the street. Two other workers followed. The baker hurried them behind the counter, then began fastening his shutters with hands that kept missing the catches.
Through the narrowing gap, Henry saw the cart horse rear. The driver dragged it toward the square. A basket overturned beneath a wheel, scattering broken tiles across the stones.
The last shutter closed.
Inside, the shop smelled of warm bread. Henry found that more unsettling than the noise outside. He had bought bread here with his mother. She would ask for yesterday's loaves, and the baker would reach beneath the counter, sometimes adding a roll if the basket was nearly empty.
There were rolls on the counter now. Someone had left half of one beside the scales.
"Away from the glass," Besson said.
Henry moved.
They waited in the room behind the ovens. The baker's wife brought his two daughters down from upstairs and made them sit on flour sacks. One girl was crying quietly. The other kept asking whether the horse had got away.
After a while, voices called along the street. A watchman knocked at the front and told the baker to keep everyone indoors.
"They've sent for slayers," the baker reported when he returned. "Nobody's to use the passage."
"What rank?" Ivo asked.
"He didn't say."
Ivo leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He looked almost angry at having to sit there.
Henry could understand wanting to leave. He could not understand wanting to leave in the direction Ivo kept looking.
The slayers arrived while the baker was worrying about his second batch of loaves.
Henry heard boots, a few short instructions, and the scrape of something heavy being dragged across the street. The shop had grown hot. Besson had taken off his coat, and the younger girl had fallen asleep against her sister.
A man outside called for everyone in the adjoining houses to move to their upper floors.
Then came a sound like a shovel driven into gravel, followed by a crash that made the shelves tremble.
The sleeping girl woke and began to cry.
Henry held his knees. He wanted someone to tell him exactly what was happening, even if it was bad. The voices beyond the shutters were too calm to explain the crashing, and the crashing was too loud for him to trust the voices.
Something struck the front of the shop.
The baker's wife covered both children's ears. Ivo stood, but Besson caught his sleeve and pulled him down again.
"Stay where you are."
There were two more impacts. A man swore. After that, Henry heard only footsteps and someone asking for a rope.
They waited much longer than he thought they should have to.
When the watchman finally returned, he allowed them out through the shop's side door. The baker immediately asked about his wall.
"You can look in a moment. Let these people through first."
Henry emerged into sunlight with his shirt sticking to his back.
The creature lay beside the overturned basket. It was shorter than the cart horse, but so broad that its body filled most of the passage entrance. Pale plates overlapped along its back. Beneath them, an exposed joint was pink and wet. One foreleg had folded under its chest; the other ended in a spread of thick, blunt claws.
Henry stopped before he meant to.
One of the slayers was washing a long blade in a bucket. Another, a woman with a strip of cloth tied over her hair, stood beside the cellar boy and his mother. A third had gone into the passage with a watchman.
The woman asked the boy to describe the hole again.
"Was there earth around it? Loose stones?"
He nodded. "It pushed them up. There was water too."
"All right. You did well to get out. You'll stay out until we've checked the rooms underneath."
The boy looked at the body.
"Was it Awakened?"
"Feral."
Henry looked at the bakery. A deep scrape crossed the plaster beside its door. Higher up, several bricks had come loose around the window.
He had known that Feral was the lowest rank. He had not understood how little comfort there was in that.
Ivo watched the man cleaning his blade. He had stopped trying to move closer.
Besson led them toward the square, where the cart driver was waiting with the horse. He counted the workers, checked again, then opened his ledger on the cart's side.
"You can have today's pay now. We're finished here."
"There's still half a load," Henry said.
"And it can stay there." Besson licked his thumb and turned a page. "If the street opens tomorrow, we'll finish it tomorrow."
Henry wanted to ask whether that meant they would lose the afternoon's pay. Before he could, Besson counted out the usual amount and put it into his hand.
"Go on. Tell Mrs. Vautrin where you've been before somebody tells her badly."
They had to walk around the closed street to get home.
For a while, Ivo talked about the slayers. There had been three of them; he wondered which had killed the creature and whether any had gained a level. Henry did not know. Whatever the Echo had told them had been theirs alone to hear.
"I couldn't see what any of their talents were," Ivo said eventually.
"We were behind an oven."
"I know."
They walked on.
Henry's own profile was as familiar as the writing on the market signs. He could call it up whenever he pleased and find [Lift] waiting there. The Echo had never interrupted his work with news of anything changing.
He thought of the creature's front leg and was glad Besson had been standing close enough to tell them to run.
At the orphanage, Mrs. Vautrin listened to the whole account before asking them to show her their hands and turn around. Once satisfied that neither had been hurt, she sat them at the kitchen table with water.
"Were there people in the houses?" she asked.
"They got them upstairs," Henry said. "The slayers were still checking when we left."
She nodded, but did not immediately return to her work.
Nadir arrived before supper. Someone at the receiving yard had heard about the incident, though in that version two buildings had fallen down.
"I went past Besson's," he told them. "He said he'd sent you back."
Ivo began describing the creature. Nadir sat beside Henry and listened, his new boots dusty beneath the table.
Later, when the bowls had been cleared, Henry fetched the reading book. He laid it between himself and Ivo, but neither opened it.
"We could leave it tonight," Ivo said.
Henry was relieved. "All right."
Nadir found a board and a box of counters in the cupboard. The game involved getting six pieces from one end to the other, although his explanation became suspiciously more complicated whenever Ivo was winning. Henry made him start again and explain all the rules before they played another round.
They stayed until Mrs. Vautrin came to put out the lamps. Henry lost twice and won once. As they gathered the counters, Nadir discovered one beneath his boot and blamed it for the last result.
Upstairs, Henry set his wages beside his father's folding rule before putting both safely away. He missed the small pleasure of bringing money home and watching his mother count it into the week's earnings. For a moment, he stood with his hand beneath the pillow, touching the worn wood.
It took him a while to fall asleep. When a cart rattled past outside, he opened his eyes and listened until it was gone. Then he turned toward the room, where Nadir was already snoring, and closed them again.