Chapter One: The Essence Dealer

He’d cornered her on her way toward the Ropes, a knife in his hand and a glint in his gimlet eyes. She’d made for tantalising prey, she imagined: five foot nothing, starkly young-looking, and lacking just enough East Erimoor grit to suggest she wasn’t East Erimoor at all. What he’d wanted from her was anyone’s guess--money, food, an unwilling body--but it made no matter either way. 

He’d dragged her into a side alley with little fanfare, his scarecrow frame belying a wiry strength, and it was to her own surprise that Kallan Van Tel found the knife sliding into his gut, her gloved hand around the hilt. 

She’d had the blade for well over a year now, her own concession to living in the mouldering cesspit that was East Erimoor. It stayed in her pocket constantly, untouched, the metal shiny with disuse. 

Whatever instinct found her in that moment surprised her and her assailant both. His shock mirrored hers, the coruscating gleam of his eyes drilling into hers, fever-bright with his drug of choice. The knife slid into his middle, as a blade through butter, his own knife clattering to the ground, fingers nerveless. Kallan felt something give way beneath the pressure, something she felt echoed in her own gut. A sort of breakage. The violence, and the ease with which she fell into it, set her pulse into a rapid-fire. This shouldn’t be my life. 

Her father should be here to protect her, to protect she and her mother both. But he was gone, and Kallan was the protector now, with her brittle bones and her brittle blade. 

There was a strange gnawing in her stomach, a hunger that said hurt more, take more. And it was that instinct, more than anything, that had her retracting her knife and wheeling away. 

This place had disassembled her and patched her back together cruel and callous. She knew it.

She stepped out of the alley with all the calmness she could muster, slipping her bloodied blade into her coat pocket. It was too dim on the Ropes to check herself thoroughly for blood, but a quick once over had her convinced she’d emerged largely unscathed. At any rate, no one on the Ropes would blink at a girl caked in blood, whether victim or perpetrator. 

She began the meandering trek through the winding streets, her boots throwing up thick grey slush still lingering from the mid-December snows. Winter had a tendency to pummel East Erimoor like a battering ram, leaving its constituents bruised and broken. Kallan had experienced only one cold season in East Erimoor, and yet it had been enough for her to discover how quickly people sickened, how quickly they starved. The crueller conditions gave rise to a crueller people, and as with the man she’d left bleeding in the alley, the only justice dispensed this side of the river was doled out by the people themselves: bodies riddled with stab wounds; bloated corpses in the Vesk.

 In the daytime, the Ropes was nothing more than a winding stretch of coastline, putrid with the stench of fish and raucous with the bustle of dockworkers. At night, however--and only certain nights, at that--the Ropes became a hub of illegal trade. Kal had been here at least a dozen times before, though rarely for anything more nefarious than a switchblade or an opioid. 

Kal avoided the eyes of the people she passed, her face masked with careful indifference. It was a hard line to walk: unassuming enough to be ignored, but intimidating enough to avoid being prey. Nevertheless, as easy as eyes were to avoid, auras were less so. Anaemic yellows and cloudy greys and muddy browns and deep, ominous blacks. Kallan had long ago concluded that although there was no foolproof way to discern a person’s true nature from their Essence, a muddier aura did tend to indicate a darker disposition, like a fruit rotting from the inside out, corrupted at its very core.  

Kal’s own Essence was certainly not without blemish. 

The Essence dealer kept his wares in a shadowed corner of the market, set far away enough from the other sellers that he could slip away unnoticed if he found himself in need of a quick getaway. He was a ghoul of a man, reed-thin, pointy-faced, and hollow-cheeked, his hair hanging in lank, greasy clumps about his shoulders. His aura, flickering around his body like a lightbulb about to blow, was the dingy yellow of spoilt milk. 

He grunted when he caught sight of Kal. “What’re you doing here, kid?”

Kid. The irony almost choked her. She could feel the stiffness of her gloves where the blood had begun to crust the leather. “Looking for you, Essence dealer.”

The man rapped his fingers against the scarred surface of the tabletop; the circle of light cast by the paraffin lamp shivered. “No idea what you’re talking about.”

Kal’s gaze drifted over the assortment of gleaming, wicked-sharp knives, to the bullets, curiously engraved with the insignia of the Constabulary. Items commonplace enough on the Ropes that a passerby would be unlikely to suspect he have a proclivity for selling anything even more nefarious. 

She took one of the knives by the hilt, her eyes briefly reflected in the blade’s metal. Green eyes. Eyes that reminded her of a different time, a different face. The grief gripped her for a moment, intensely enough that she found that her breathing had shallowed. It somehow still surprised her--the pain of it. Time passed, the world spun on, yet Kallan’s grief remained untouched, the purest part of her. 

She put the blade back and packaged the grief away alongside it. “I have something worth your while,” she hedged. “But only if you have something worth my while.”

He squinted at her dubiously. “Oh, yeah?”

Kal cast a surreptitious glance down the Ropes and reached for the buckles on her satchel. No one was paying them any mind, but that was hardly a surprise; the Essence dealer was known for his particular talent for discretion. It had cost Kal a hefty sum just to garner confirmation that he did, in fact, traffic Essence.

Oh, yeah, he sells Essence, all right, Graves had said, but he’d been preoccupied examining the watch Kallan had given him through his crooked monocle. It was 24-carat gold, inscribed with the infamous Van Tel name. An irreplaceable piece of jewellery worth far more than the information she was getting for it, in Kal’s opinion. You better have something interesting to exchange, mind you.

Graves was an old, robbing b*****d. Well past seventy--the oldest harbourmaster in Erimoor. But he’d made a habit of knowing everything about everybody, his fingers somehow always on the ever-ticking pulse of East Erimoor. 

Kal raised the satchel’s interior for the Essence dealer’s perusal, still keeping the bulk of the bag hidden from prying eyes. She cradled it with the sort of caution reserved for babies or bombs. She knew she held something equal parts delicate and detonable. 

The man peered inside. Kallan saw the scepticism slough away, leaving his face pale and eerily expressionless. “What’s your surname?” he asked, half breathless.

Kal snapped the satchel closed with vigour. She’d been taken for a fool this side of the river more times than she cared to admit. She’d been ransacked, ripped off, robbed blind. She knew better than to take out her wares without seeing his first. “Colson.”

“Yeah, right, and I’m the chancellor. Pull another one.” 

“What’s it matter who I am? Do you have what I want or not?”

The knife-like contours of the Essence dealer’s body were taut now, every part of him coiled tight with tension, like a trap about to spring. “Depends. Why do you want it?” 

“My mother, she’s sick.”

“The dying kind of sick?”

Kal’s arms wound tighter around the satchel, nerveless fingers burrowing into the material. “I wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t.” 

“And you want to buy her some time.”

Time is a precious commodity, Kallan, and we are running out. She is running out.  

The jarring echo of her father’s voice brought to mind the nights he spent sequestered in his workshop. The inception of a vile thing; the excruciating, inevitable aftermath.

Hands around her shoulders, bruising and bracing. What has he done what has he done what has he done--

 Something in Kallan’s chest gave a painful squeeze. The memories hit her like this sometimes, with excessive force, with a demand to be felt. And when they did she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe--

 “As much as I can.” She infused as much normalcy into her tone as possible, trying to smooth away the serrated edge of her panic. She couldn’t let the dealer see her come unwound. The people on the Ropes were ravenous vultures, each of them hungry and hunting, carrion birds that would feast on her entrails and grind her carcass up for bonemeal. Any indication of weakness and they’d pounce upon her. 

The dealer considered her for a moment, eyes hard and reflective as glimmer-glass. There were obvious risks for him in dealing with someone like her. Or there would’ve been, were she still Kallan Van Tel, West Erimoor heiress, and not Kallan Colson, beggarly bottom-dweller. In this way, strangely, East Erimoor equalised them all. When you stripped away riches and status, what you were left with was the bare bones of humanity beneath: hatred and hunger.

“You saw what was in this bag,” she said. “I’m risking far more than you.” 

A flicker behind his eyes, something hard and haunted. Then his gaze sliced downward, to his knapsack bundled unassumingly beneath the table. He reached for it unhappily, before withdrawing perhaps the only pretty thing Kallan had ever seen on the Ropes. It appeared to be a jewellery box, incongruously elegant when contrasted against the hand that held it. The surface was carved from a rich mahogany, embellished with an intricate pattern of knots and whorls. On its lid two words had been engraved in a pearlescent silver, eleven letters inscribed with a deft hand: Born blessed.

“Vasparian gold,” she breathed. 

A material of utmost fascination--particularly to her father. The only known material capable of containing human Essence. The majority of Erimoor and Greater Vasparia were almost religiously zealous in their preservation of Essence, their belief that it was a thing to be protected, conserved, and revered. To the desperate minority, however, just as with everything else--flesh, food, freedom--it was a commodity to be bought and sold. 

Kallan glanced again at the inscription and couldn’t help but laugh, dry and derisive. “Born blessed.”

“Valentius words,” said the dealer. “I suppose those fuckers are born blessed. The rest of us, however…” 

Between one eyeblink and the next, he had a key out of his pocket and slotted into the box’s lock. His gaze was set fixedly on Kallan as he lifted the lid, eyes shadowed. 

Kal tipped forward, pulse rabbiting, a sound ringing in her head like the city’s bells, high and hollering. 

Inside was a collection of Vasparian gold vials, each of them almost irradiated with Essence light. The colour of it was hard to quantify. It had a sort of nacreous sheen that seemed to shift shades on a whim. Unlike human Essence, which settled into certain colours and contours depending on the disposition of the person, raw Essence appeared to be in a constant state of flux: mercurial, changeable, restless. An iridescent kaleidoscope of colour. 

The Essence dealer cocked a brow at her expression. “You can see it even through the Vasparian gold?” 

“I can see the light it emanates,”  

“In detail?” 

Kal’s gaze flicked up to his. “Just a white glow,” she lied.   

The dealer eyed her for a moment longer before nodding. “So?” 

“So what?” 

“Are you still committed to buying it? You know what those toffs say. All that shite about Essence being sacred, blessed, the very ‘life spark of humanity’.” 

“I don’t have the time to be sentimental.” 

He snorted. “No. Not many of us do these days.” 

Without further fanfare, he produced a pair of gloves from his pocket, slipped them on, and picked up a vial. “Careful as you take it, girl.” He held the vial out. “Careful now. You might feel a small shock.”

Kallan didn’t make a sound as the vial met with the leather of her gloves. She felt a warmth radiating from fingertip, to wrist, to throat, a trickling heat that lit up every nerve, every vein. It took her a moment to realise the dealer was surveying her consideringly. She looked back at him as she slipped the vial into the breast pocket of her duster, face scoured clean of emotion, eyes defiant. The warmth bled out of her. 

“Payment,” he said shortly. 

Kal carefully slipped her satchel off her shoulder and onto his table. She had agonised for weeks over what she might have to offer him that would be considered equal to his wares. Gold wouldn’t do it--at least, not any amount she could feasibly obtain, not even if she saved and scrimped and stole for a year. Neither she nor her mother had any jewellery or trinkets, having sold anything of worth after Kal’s father had passed and left them penniless. At any rate, gold and baubles weren’t the sorts of things you offered in recompense for something as hard to obtain as Essence, and doing so would make her look naive, as though she didn’t know how this game was played. 

After much thought, she’d whittled her options down to two: tool or toxin. Both were liable to get her knee-deep in s**t if she were found to be the original owner. Her choice had ultimately come down to which of the two would unequivocally get her the Essence. The toxin was her own invention, brewed by her own hand--she’d been quite the aspiring chemist once--but it wasn’t irreplaceable. The tool, however, had been an invention of Julian Van Tel’s. The world would never see its like again.  

The Essence dealer watched as Kal drew the square-shaped object out of her bag and placed it on the table before him, carefully concealed by a filthy old rag.

“Show me,” he ordered.

Kal, although vexed by the commandeering tone, bit back a smile. If nothing else, he’d betrayed his eagerness. She peeled away the edges of the rag, exposing the object to the dealer’s perusal. “Look your fill.”

The object atop the Essence dealer’s table was entirely unassuming: a square of bronze metal smoothed down at the corners. Pretty, to be sure, but nothing noticeably remarkable. The dealer seemed to agree. “Doesn’t look like much.” 

“This,” Kallan said sharply, “is worth more than everything you own. I assure you.” She turned the object over, exposing the real feature of notice--the two letters etched into the metal: VT. 

The dealer’s breath whistled between his teeth. “This really is a Van Tel invention.” 

“One of his best,” Kal admitted, turning the object back over. “The wiring is constructed from Vasparian gold.” 

The dealer just about choked. “Vasparian gold wiring?” 

“It conducts a very small amount of Essence. The reader on here”--Kal tapped the black strip at the top of the object, currently showing six noughts--“details what that Essence in question is worth. Time-wise, that is.” 

The dealer looked at her again. His gaze was different now, shadowed with something Kallan couldn’t name. “I forgot,” he said slowly, “that he had a daughter.” 

Kal wondered if her mere ownership of the invention had made her suspect, or if she’d done something foolish to give herself away. Perhaps it was the way she held it: half reverence, half disgust. Or perhaps it was the way she described its functioning--the automatic knowledge of someone who had once known the mind that had conceived it. 

Kal eyed him steadily. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The dealer nodded in unspoken agreement to let the matter drop. “How does it work precisely?” he asked. He still hadn’t made an attempt to take the invention. His caution surprised Kal, though perhaps it shouldn’t have. Her father’s legacy was tainted now. A clouded gem, sullied, its worth lessened by its impurities.  

“It’s called a Vitameter. Prototype. The only one of its kind. It measures the aura. How much one has left.”

The dealer’s eyes went wide and wondering. “It measures how much life they have left?”

Kal nodded. “Natural lifespan, without interference.”

“Interference?”

“It can only read Essence. It can’t predict the future. It can’t account for accidents, murders”--she swallowed thickly--“suicides.”

“Does it work?”

“Are you daft?” she snapped. Something had annoyed her, although she couldn’t say if it was the suggestion of her father’s incompetence or the whole bloody evening. “It’s a Van Tel original. Of course it works. If you doubt me, feel free to try it.” 

The dealer waved her off, as she’d known he would--a man who dealt in Essence was hardly likely to bleed his own into an unknown machine--the soiled sleeve of his shirt slipping down with the movement. A tattoo was briefly exposed to the sickly yellow glow of the lamplight, the visage jarring enough that it swayed Kal’s attention momentarily. At first glance, she suspected it was a prison tattoo: six numbers harshly inked across the intricate network of veins at his inner wrist. 170100.

But then she caught sight of the symbol beneath it, too small to make out properly in the dimness, but comprised of three overlapping circles that teased the edges of Kal’s memory with frustrating familiarity. The number teased her too--a date, perhaps?--if only because it was two days after her birthday. The seventeenth day of the first month of the New Millennium. 

The Essence dealer shrugged down his sleeve, eyes flashing briefly with something close to panic, and busied himself with re-bundling the Vitameter in its rags.

Kal gave herself a moment--just a moment--to mourn it. Something inside of her throbbed with that old grief, somehow still sharp and shiny. She forced her mind away from it, forced herself not to think of it, of this final piece of her father’s legacy, in a dirty old bag waiting to be sold by a lowlife criminal. No choice, no choice. The refrain rattled around in the cage of her skull, monotonous and deeply bitter.  

She was caught on the cusp of two very incongruent feelings. She loved her father; it grieved her to barter away this last piece of him. She hated him; it was a relief to throw away this last reminder of him. 

“Are we done here?”

The dealer nodded. His gaze was on her again, pupils big and black in the thin, yellow light of the Ropes. Kallan could name it now, that look in his eyes.

Pity.

The weight of it suffocated her, had her staggering away from the table. With a shaky exhalation, Kal checked for the vial of Essence in her pocket, turned smartly on her heel, and began home.

She took only one minor detour, her feet faltering as she slid soundlessly into the side alley. She saw the man. He was slumped against the wall, one hand pressed to his gut. His blood, black in the dimness, seeped between his splayed fingers. Kal smelled metal; could see the blood encrusted on her pretty black gloves. 

What have you done what have you done what have you done-- 

She bent double and heaved once, violently, expelling the meagre contents of her stomach against the alley wall. Then she turned and left without a backward glance. 

She did not notice the boy who watched her from the shadows, bright-eyed and curious.