In a recent scry-survey of the city, the academics had sent out a note of some interest to the average citizen: the docks now occupy as much space as the city itself.

Known as the Rat King docks due to their crazily-sprawling, chaotic arrangement, the docks are an ever-shifting waypoint for fishers, traders, adventurers, and anything else anybody can think to do on water. The name is a little misleading, though, and Saila suspects that it, like so much else in the city, was chosen to confuse outsiders: unlike the wheeling, self-knotted body of a Rat King, the docks branch out like lakeweed from various points around the city in distinctly separate clusters.

Due in part to their proximity to the freshest catches and the newest imports, the water markets on the docks are eternally lively, even in a mostly-commercial district like the central edge. Water taxis take chattering passengers to and fro from the various clusters, bells ring wildly as boats slosh by each other with countless near misses, and the shouts of experienced sailors rise above it all, sometimes in song, sometimes in swears.

Docks sprawl out to sand bars where children wade, noisy as birds, while their parents wash laundry. Serpents will surface to bask on the docks, much to the irritation of the crews who just want to get back to their boats after a long night of drinking, thank you, and wide-winged birds are constantly coming down to the water to snatch at any silver glint of a thing they think might be a fish. Usually it is; sometimes it’s a bit too much fish and the bird is the one that ends up being snatched.

At night lights come on and cookfires flare up, and instruments come out and voices get loosened from coarse throats, and Saila can hear the song on the breeze, can hear it, can hear it.

“I figured you’d want meat,” Bastion says, and Saila would take that as a jab but he got double meat. They’re sitting on the edge of a dock painted bright blue, bumping up and down as the waves wash in from the passing boats. Saila has her feet tucked under her, mostly to keep her bum dry. Bastion has his feet trailing into the water like a crazy person, which makes Saila want to bodily drag him to shore and shake him by the ear.

But she’s being overcautious, she supposes: there’s a crew of small brown children with various permutations of tail and ear and horn splashing wildly  on a sandbar right nearby. Their older siblings are reviewing what look like oiled nautical charts with serious, compact expressions. One of them has a beer bottle clenched in one hand, another a clear bottle of spirits lashed to her waist. Saila spends a moment inspecting the scene in confusion before she realizes that the ‘children’ all have tattoos and beards, and seem to be grizzled sailors of a race she’s simply unfamiliar with. 

What a broad place the world is, she muses philosophically, and unwraps the riverweed paper from around her breakfast. The oil stain is growing on it, and if she lets it spread too far her fingers will get dirty as she eats.

 “I prefer to avoid meat,” Saila says, touching the chewy crust of her rolled rice-bread pancake cautiously. Still too hot.

“Any reason?” Bastion asks, pulling his feet up quickly—a mouth surfaces in the water, something pale and round and flapping, grabbing for where he’d been a moment ago. Saila squeaks, but Bastion was too quick. The mouth gives an irritated flap before its owner vanishes down into the blood-red depths again.

The bathing crew, noticing the commotion, eagerly draw their weapons and start kicking around in the water even more. Treasure hunters, probably. Saila wishes them luck.

“Bucking the stereotype,” Saila says before she can stop herself. She glances at Bastion from the corner of her eye, but he’s busy touching his food cautiously as she is. They’d struck just as the vendor had peeled the wraps from the coals; the rolled bread feels like it just left the surface of the sun, which is well and good, but Bastion looks like he could probably eat a few extra meals and still come out of it trim as a fox. It feels cruel to make him wait to eat.

“S’why I like meat,” Bastion agrees as if she hasn’t said anything noteworthy. His feet are back in the water and Saila can’t stop staring, worried, at them. The claws flex as he talks. “Everybody always saw the ears and assumed I knew how to play pipe and just ate zucchini, and that on full moons only.”

“Crescent moons too, then?”

“Yeah,” he agrees, swinging himself so that he can lean on the dock with his feet stretched out safe in front of him. Saila silently heaves a sigh of relief.

“Dreadfully edgy of you,” she says, and after a moment of thought she turns herself so she’s facing him instead of the water. Bastion gives her a mildly appraising look, but most of his attention is still clearly on his tempting, but dangerous, breakfast-to-be. Feeling daring and hoping she doesn’t regret it, Saila asks, “Is that why you have all those piercings?”

“A tradition of the guard,” Bastion says, finally unpeeling the paper from around his breakfast with obvious impatience. The heavy smell of fat-fish wafts around them in a cloud. Some of the sauce drips out and he ducks down to lick it from his hand. “Every time the doctors declare you dead, you get a piercing. Most people go for bone. It’s traditional.”

Saila’s mouth falls open, just a little, as her eyes rove back over that long line of golden studs and small hoops and studs again. She shuts it again without saying anything, pulling herself back further into her shawl so her hair falls around her in a protective shell. 

“I’m made well, I guess,” he says, snorting softly in a manner Saila thinks means he’s amused. He seems to have read her reaction clearly enough despite her best efforts. “Didn’t get picked as captain for nothing.”

“Is it true…” Saila starts, ducking down and in toward him just a little, tilting her head so her hair falls just so and her eyes glance up through her lashes. She doesn’t mean to do it, exactly, but persuading people is what she does when she’s not dealing with papers, Strings, or cleaning, and this is how it’s always worked best: with a sweet look and a tip of the shoulders, a little bat of the lashes or two. Even her eyes play in her favor, there: merchants are, to the one, suckers for novelty.

Bastion narrows his eyes at her suspiciously, which isn’t the usual response. It amuses Saila despite herself. “Is it true that the Two Kings ordain the captain?”

“Nobody knows exactly,” Bastion says, hunkering down and in toward her as well, his claws digging into the surface-rotten wood as he leans, “but the way it happened for me is, I woke up and found my name written on the roster up top.”

Saila arranges her features to look impressed but has no clue, just none, what that means. Bastion might make a good merchant, because he sniffs out her confusion in an instant and raises his eyebrows.

“In the hall where we all eat and meet up and get assignments, there’s a big list of everybody’s name, what patrol they’ll be on for the day, other things. And over all of those names is a big slab of stone that’s pitch black. They says it’s from the underdepths.”

“So the top slab says who’s captain?” Saila asks, tilting her head. Bastion starts to tip his head too, then stops himself; Saila isn’t sure what to make of that. She pushes her hair out of her face a little and tucks her knees in, scooches closer. The wood is wet through her leggings.

“The name shows up carved into it. Mine, this time.” Bastion looks down to his breakfast, suddenly turning self-conscious. His ears pin back a little. 

Saila lets him eat while she puzzles that through.

“The previous captain died a while back….”

“Hyphen. He went in a fight against a kraken two summers ago,” Bastion agrees, spilling sauce on his hands again, licking it off again. He’s a bit of a messy eater, though he’s eager to catch drips when they happen. 

It’s sort of endearing.

Absolutely not allowed, no, Saila reminds herself. Soon enough they’ll part ways, and Bastion will go off to try and get killed some more and she’ll do her business figures in her books and touch samples when they arrive in the post, and they will never meet again. Maybe she’ll read the newspaper about him or something fun like that.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Saila bursts out, trying to sound sincere. Of course, she avoids krakens on sheer principle alone for that very reason. She has a growing suspicion that the guard might be filled entirely with death-seeking idiots.

“Didn’t like him,” Bastion says very seriously. “He didn’t care about making the city any better, just good enough. I think he wasted his tenure.”

“Isn’t good enough good enough?” Saila asks weakly. Bastion’s eyes fall to her breakfast; he raises an eyebrow. 

She takes the hint and nibbles a little more. It’s good, but she’s not hungry. She’s never hungry.

Quiet falls between them. Saila mentally gives herself a series of hard pinches: she’s made it awkward when she should have just kept agreeing.

The crew on the sandbar is loading into a large, flat boat with a sail made out of what looks like bamboo. A few of them are still poking enthusiastically in the shallows with pikes. Saila hopes they don’t find what they’re looking for; she’s had more than enough excitement for the day. Hell, she’s probably used up her entire year’s allotment.

Bastion glances up from his near-finished breakfast to look her so intently in the face that Saila, with her roll of rice-bread halfway to her mouth, freezes and looks back in alarm. They sit like that for a breath in, a breath out.

Satisfied by whatever he found in her, Bastion turns back to his own roll, fitting his mouth around the last of it with a type of precision Saila usually sees in fisherwomen pulling in their boats to dock. Uneasily, Saila returns to eating.

“I want the city to be better,” Bastion says firmly, peeling off a piece of crust and prodding at the lump of bird in his sash. “Safer for every citizen. Less difficult for people who already have it hard.”

“Hm,” says Saila, thinking of a sea of tents in faded colors, of puddles of filthy water, of bodies in the streets and a smell that sticks to you as if to remind you: you’re next. “The city is better than it used to be. The Kings helped.”

“Better,” Bastion insists, pressing the bread to the bird’s beak when it emerges from its little hiding spot. “I want killing to be investigated like theft is, for one thing.”

“Oh,” Saila says. The bird gives the bread a little prod with its beak, then takes it and promptly drops it. “Is that why you came when you overheard my call?”

“Yes,” Bastion says, his eyes burning blue, his face serious and his brows drawn. His rapier catches the light for a moment, glorious and brightly luminous. “The Guard can do more for the people. We should and we will.”

“Good luck,” Saila says, “didn’t I tell you not to make promises you can’t keep?” and she tries for biting but ends up sounding more sincere than she wants.

“You did,” Bastion says, “and I won’t," and he sounds more sincere than she wants too.