Stella pressed a knee to Luci’s back. The confused girl, already struggling to breathe while stuck to the ground under her own weight, wheezed out what little air she had in her lungs.

“How’s that, princess?” she spat. Stella tugged at the cuffs binding Luci’s arms behind her back. “Enma-blocking manacles, so you can’t use your enma or any aftos.” She leaned in close and grinned smugly in Luci’s face. The translucent knife that Flak had placed on her neck had vanished. “I told you already to be a good girl and do exactly what you’re told. Misbehave again and we’ll cut off that pretty hair of yours.”

Luci stared up at Stella sideways. “Wha—I… I didn’t…” It was too hard to speak, and not only because she was being pressed to the concrete floor. This was all too much for her to make sense of.

A hoarse chuckle echoed through the room. Everyone turned their attention to Flak.

“What a moron!” Flak howled. “Did you seriously think a fence cared about her little dungeoneer? The dungeoneering life is tough, princess. Everyone in the business is putting their lives on the line, so there’s no way they’ll miss an opportunity to make good money. Trust me, I know.” He scratched at the scar on his face.

Whatever will Luci had had to fight gradually subsided. Flak was right. Stella was right. She was horrible. She was useless. She deserved this. This was all her own doing. If only she wasn’t so terrible at controlling her enma, then Vesina wouldn’t have been hurt. She wouldn’t have held Wip back. She wouldn’t have been a useless client. This was her punishment.

Flak strolled over. Stella got off Luci, giving her a moment of respite before Flak kneeled down and grabbed her by the hair. She whimpered from the pain, her skull’s extra weight threatening to rip her hair right out of her scalp. She couldn’t look him in the eye.

“It’s going to take us a couple of days to get in contact with the right folks,” Flak hummed. “In the meantime, you’re going to be a good little princess, alright? No talking, no struggling, no stupid questions. If you behave, I might give you a commoner’s meal, so you can see what it’s like to live like us poor folks.”

At that moment, a wave of nausea struck her. Bile threatened to come up and she barely forced it down, but not before dry retching in Flak’s face.

Flak reeled back, grimacing. “You damned grupp!” He slammed a boot into Luci’s side.

Luci gasped as pain shot up her side. It was agony, she suspected that a rib might be broken, but it still didn’t bother her as much as her violently churning gut. Her stomach had only ever done summersaults like that once before. Between sharp gasps, she struggled to tilt her head towards the door.

“W… w…”

Boom!

Concrete scattered across the floor. Concrete and plaster dust filled the room. Luci coughed it away. The thugs scattered away from the wall facing the street and aimed their weapons towards it, preparing for a fight.

Seconds passed. The dust cleared. Moonlight poured in unabated through a child-sized hole in the wall, the culprit for the dust explosion. A head poked into the opening. It was long and the sides of it were bald, leaving a tuft of hair that poked up from the top of it. The man in the opening smiled. Luci could make out by the moonlight that he was missing some teeth.

“Hugs!” he shouted.

The whole roomed was stunned to silence, Luci not excluded. There were a lot of scenarios she’d imagined would play out today. Wip bursting through the wall and screaming, “Hugs!” was not amongst them. She also didn’t imagine he would follow that up by climbing through said hole in the wall like a spider, ignoring the dozen thugs that aimed their weapons at him, and strolling right up to her.

Wip stared at Luci with his head cocked. “Um, what are you doing?” he asked.

Unfortunately for Wip, Luci couldn’t process the question because there was already an endless stream of them rolling around inside her skull. Had he come to save her? Was he here to exact revenge? Had Stella called him? Were they working together? It was so overwhelming that she’d forgotten that her body ached all over from her fall and that her side hurt from Flak’s kick. At the very least, her stomach had stopped spinning.

From that mess of tangled logic, however, a certain question stood out from the rest. It was a question that she needed to have answered.

“Wait a moment!” Luci cried. “Mr. Wip, why did you come in through the wall. There’s a perfectly good door right next to it.”

Wip peeked over his shoulder, turned back a second later, and shrugged. “It looked like it would break.”

It was at this moment that Luci’s brain overheated and switched off. She’d had a long day.

“Hey!”

Wip turned to Flak and raised his eyebrows, as though seeing him for the first time.

The thug had his gun trained on Wip, and the whole room looked ready for a fight. The tension was so thick that Luci could almost taste it.

“You, er, want to explain what in Gul you’re doing here, ugly?” Flak said, his voice low and threatening.

Wip scratched at his collar. Slowly, he looked up. His eyes widened, as though seeing Flak for the first time. “Um, sorry, I’m talking to Luci, so can you just give me a second?”

“Er, what?” Flak said incredulously.

Ignoring him, Wip pulled a fat, teal crystal from his pocket and showed it to Luci. “I came to give you your money!”

Luci’s mouth worked as she tried to find an appropriate response. There wasn’t one. This whole situation was ridiculous. She gave up and said, “Thank you.”

Wip flashed his half-missing teeth. “Now we can all go to Mr. Dagan’s place and drink beer, and Mori won’t—”

Crack!

Wip stumbled sideways from a strike to the head. He’d been caught by surprise and so had no chance to avoid the attack. Standing in his place was Stella, who twirled a baton in her hand.

“Mr. Wip!” Luci screamed, fearing he’d been hurt.

Stella fixed her white, rabbit-eared beanie. “What kind of an idiot gets surrounded like that?”

Wip stumbled a few steps but then came to a halt. He straightened up, paused, then gave his neck a crack. Electricity coursed along his whole body.

“Sorry, but I’m not falling for that trick again,” Wip said. He stuffed the dan back into his pocket, turned, and grinned at Stella. Then, suddenly, his expression turned dark.

Luci’s stomach churned as sparks erupted from his body. Wip moved so quickly that Luci didn’t see what he did next, only the aftereffects.

Stella flew across the room. She crashed hard into a rusted pigeonhole unit which then slowly fell on top of her, making a racket. The thugs all stared at the fallen cabinet aghast, stunned by how quickly it had all happened.

Luci was already worming her way to the cabinet. “No! What are you doing, Mr. Wip?” she wailed. “That much enma can kill Ms.… Stella…?”

From under the cabinet, Luci could make out a pair of blue eyes on an unfamiliar, thin face. She paused on the spot. What had happened to Stella?

One of the thugs cried out, “Missy!” and bolted over to the collapsed pigeonhole unit. He dropped his afto and, with a grunt, tried and failed to raise the heavy cabinet off of the unconscious woman.

Wip bent over and picked up Missy’s beanie, which had fallen off her head once he’d kicked her. His eyes widened. “Oh, it’s a costume! Cool.”

Flak clicked his tongue and backed up a few steps. “Everyone, spread out. Get ready to fight.”

At his orders, the thugs covered each corner of the room and pointed an assortment of aftos at him.

Flak waved his gun at Wip. “You, ugly! I’ll give you ten seconds to sod off and I’ll forget this all happened. Last thing I need is my moneybag to get hurt because of—”

A cacophony of hooting and hollering echoed through the room. Everyone’s heads whipped about as they tried to find the source of the strange noise. Except for Wip, who pulled out his phone from his pocket. As he did so, the noise grew louder.

Wip showed the phone to Luci. “Look, I figured out how to make my own ringtones.”

Luci realised with stark horror what she was hearing. That sound, the battle cry of a thousand monkilyxes, was practically ingrained onto her soul.

“Did you record us while we were fighting on floor four?” Luci cried.

The screeching was interspersed by the tak, thak, whack! of Wip’s staff splattering monkilyxes. In the background, Luci faintly heard her own voice screaming, “Did you seriously think that I, the Daughter of the Waxing Moon, can’t kill a few of these weakling monsters?” The rest of the soundtrack featured Luci cackling madly over the screaming of monkilyxes.

Luci’s cheeks burned. It was bad enough that she’d said those crazy things, but hearing it playing back to her? She wished she’d just jumped off the Katarasi Bridge earlier.

“But, phones,” Luci stuttered, trying to make sense of Wip’s actions. “They don’t work in…”

“Oh, yeah. I used this.”

Wip pulled a small object from his pocket that looked like a twisted, green conch shell—another warped afto. He fiddled with it, and it made an exact copy of the sound that was playing from his phone, except much, much louder. Luci’s cheeks couldn’t get any redder.

Flak, with one hand pressed to his ear, shouted, “Hey, ignore me again and—”

“Sorry, I can’t hear you!” Wip shouted over the top of him. “Anyway, I need to answer this call. Last time I didn’t, I nearly died.”

He slapped the conch to his ear, blinked in confusion, then pulled the afto from his ear. “Oh, right. This doesn’t stop once it starts.”

Wip looked around for a way to silence the afto, before grinning nervously and smashing it onto the ground. The afto shattered to bits and the sound died out with it. Then he slapped his phone to his ear.

“Hello, is this Stella?” An unintelligible voice screeched on the other end. “Okay, I just wanted to make sure… Yes, I’m giving her the money now… She’s in the Shanties… No, she’s lying on the floor…” He lowered the phone and turned to Luci. “Stella wants to know why you’re lying on the floor.”

Luci wasn’t listening. She’d just worked out that she’d been played by the thugs and she’d gone pink from forehead to neck. Stella was fine. Everything was fine. Except for her, because she’d fallen for this dumb ruse.

“I’m so stupid,” she mumbled. “A full-fledged fool. A dithering dolt. A capering clown.”

Wip pressed the phone against his ear. “She says she’s being a clown. Oh, I think I hit the loudspeaker.”

“AM I DAMNED JOKE TO YOU?” Stella’s voice boomed through the room.

Luci stared at him in astonishment. The thugs exchanged confused stares as they waited for their leader to give orders. Flak, however, was watching the scene as though he was trying to decide if this was funny or just sad. Wip grinned without a care in the world.

“Do you think I don’t know you’re screwing with me?” Stella screamed. “You better explain what’s going on there. Right. Now!”

The mirth in Wip’s eyes faded. He fixed a narrowed-eyed gaze on Flak. “They’re all wearing black. I think that means they’re in the Cartel, but I don’t know for sure. Some people just like wearing black.” His gaze slowly shifted to the floor. “They’ve hurt Luci.”

Stella paused for a moment, then her tone shifted from outraged to dead serious. “Wip. Help her.”