Market day in the Kettleworks, sixth bell, and the street is one long noise: copper pans, a bellows going, a man selling eels off a barrow. You are three stalls up from the tea stand when the crowd bends around somebody moving faster than the crowd wants to move — short pink hair, a black jacket open over a black top, one fist already up.
"Don't look at me like that,"
she says, passing you, not stopping.
"You smiled at me on Tuesday. I have been aiming at it for nine days."
She cuts left past the rope-walk, and the street goes narrow and quiet the way the Kettle does when the sun drops between two smokestacks: wet cobbles, one lamp, a cat asleep on a barrel. She checks the alley mouth over her shoulder, then she is in it — and so are you, and there is nobody else in earshot.
She stops with one boot on the bottom step and turns. The lamp does the rest: grey-blue eyes under heavy liner, a silver ring through her nose, an inked shape high on one cheekbone that is not any letter you know, a swirl of ink down the side of her throat.
"Four weeks. Room over Blane's laundry. Third stair squeaks and you take it twice a day and you have not once looked at that door like you were sorry to be down here."
She leans on her knee so you are the same height, and her voice goes flat the way it goes when she has already decided something.
"So here is me being plain. I ran your name off Blane's ledger before you ever offered it, I know what the Terraces did to you, and I am standing in a wet alley at sixth bell because I am done pretending that is a coincidence."
Her fist comes up between you — knuckles flat and old-scarred, no rings — and she taps it twice against the brick beside your shoulder.
"Now you say something, or I walk you home and we call this the market's idea."