Godekker was waiting. Once the Attolian was down and I left the shed, he put his hand out.

“Four hennat,” he said.

“You said two before.”

“I’m a fool to risk this,” he said. “Damned stupid to risk my neck for runaways and you as obvious as a wart on a lady’s nose.”

That was heartening—did I have a brand I didn’t know about, glowing on my forehead?

“Four hennat,” said Godekker.

I had little choice. I opened the Attolian’s wallet, keeping Godekker from seeing the contents, and pulled out two coins. “Two hennat now. Two more when we leave,” I said.

He wanted four up front. I said no.

“Then three more tomorrow,” he said, crossing his arms.

“That’s all I have!” But I was already giving in. There was more in my purse, and I could see the indecision in Godekker’s eyes. I didn’t want him turning us in for a reward.

“You can get more,” he said, his voice brimming with resentment. “You’ll be able to go anywhere in the city—and so will he.” He indicated the Attolian lying in the shed with a jut of his chin.

Why couldn’t Godekker? That was when my sluggish mind finally put two and two together. He didn’t usually go uphill, where his shabbiness might lead to unwanted attention. He’d noticed the talk of bounty hunters in the market, and when he saw me, at my wit’s end, he’d known me for what I was. Not because I was so obviously an escaped slave, but because like knows like.

“You aren’t a freedman,” I said.

I frightened him. In an instant he had snatched up a club from a pile of junk, and all I could do was leap backward, my hands in the air. “Five hennat,” I said. “You can have all five hennat.”

He still looked as if he might swing at me.

“I’ll give you all five of the hennat now. Right now. Can you—can you just give us something to eat?” I pleaded, and he calmed down. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry and I am very grateful to you for letting us stay here.”

“Could have turned you over myself,” he reminded me.

“Yes, you could have. Thank you for helping us,” I said.

“Could still do it,” he said.

That was what I feared most. I took a breath and let it out slowly. There was a fine line between frightening him and letting him think he had us entirely at his mercy. “No,” I said.

I had directed my master’s household for most of my life. I had managed his free employees and his slaves, and each person and each situation required a particular approach. Sometimes I could swing my master’s authority like a club, but often I needed to persuade people to respect my position. I gave Godekker the look I used on slaves who resented me because I, too, was a slave and they didn’t think I had any business ordering them around. Gentle with them, I explained my authority, always making them see that we were on the same side, both slaves, both capable of treating the other with the respect we were denied by free men.

“No,” I said again, quietly but quite firmly. “Godekker, you cannot. I will tell them you are also an escaped slave, and we will all three be doomed.”

He shuffled his feet and made to lift the club.

“We can work together, Godekker. My friend and I can pass more easily for free men. We can help you.”

I lowered my hands and held them out to him, palms up. “Be my friend, Godekker,” I said. “Be my friend in need, and as Shesmegah is my witness, I will repay you someday.”

I waited while he wavered between fear and greed and a naked longing that made me pity him. At last he tipped the wooden handle back into the trash heap beside him and laid his hands on mine.

“Friend, Godekker,” I said.

“Friend . . . ,” and he paused and looked up at me expectantly.

In for a goat, in for a sheep, I thought. “Kamet,” I told him.

“Friend, Kamet,” he said. “But I still want the five hennat.”

I slept until Godekker came back with food. I think he meant to catch me unawares, but he should have known better. We slaves are light sleepers. He looked at me strangely where I lay on the floor, while the Attolian had the bed and both of our thin blankets, but he didn’t say anything, just held up the bunches of carrots and greens he’d brought. I didn’t completely trust Godekker, so I didn’t dare sleep more. Eating a little of the food helped keep me awake.

There was a stack of stones to make a fireplace and a clay pipe to make a chimney in one corner. It was more functional than it looked. I used the single clay pot to cook up some of the vegetables in water so the Attolian might drink the broth when he woke. When I was done with that, I went out to pace the tiny yard. The walls above were windowless, which made the yard private but bleak. Two of the walls reached high above my head, while the remaining side of the triangular yard was lower, a single story with a sloping roof above it. Judging by a boarded-up door and dessicated piles of straw and manure, it was a stable and its stable boys had once wheeled barrows of used bedding out of the passageway before the quake had made the walls unsafe.

I paused in my pacing and poked through the piles of junk with my toe. There were some nice pots and a few very pretty floor tiles.

“Found those at a burned-out villa,” said Godekker, sitting on a broken piece of a stone pillar with his knees up around his ears and his arms hanging down in front of him. He looked like a buzzard. “I scavenge and then sell what I find.” It was a living, but not a profitable one, clearly.

“How long?” I asked.

“Seven years,” said Godekker.

“Field-worker?” I asked.

He nodded.

“From near here?”

“No, of course not,” he said. “And I won’t say where, so don’t ask.”

I shook my head. I wouldn’t have asked.

Godekker rocked himself back and forth while I stood there thinking of the Namreen hunting me and the rewards they would post. Or maybe they’d found my master’s plaque next to the slave dead under the rockslide and no one was looking for me at all. Maybe the bounty hunters in the market were after a different slave. I didn’t know. I would never know. I looked at Godekker and wondered if he still worried about pursuit. He stood and stalked past me.

“You worry forever,” he said over his shoulder. “You’ll never feel safe.”

That’s what I’d thought.

Godekker ducked in through the low doorway but was only inside for a minute before he charged out again. “That’s not a drunk,” he said, outraged.

“It’s not the plague, though. It’s been all day, and there’s no sign of it,” I assured him as I jumped to my feet.

“How would you know? You’ve probably killed us both!”

I frankly stared. “What fool doesn’t know what the plague looks like?” I asked, and then realized the obvious answer—an uneducated escaped slave living alone hand to mouth in the dead end of a disused alley. So I wiped the insulting expression off my face and carefully described the plague signs, trying to sound as reasonable as possible, and Godekker settled down a bit. I think the what-kind-of-an-idiot-look probably convinced him more than the rational explanation, though.