9. Proper Jobs

Alistair counted the shards twice before he nodded and tied the pouch shut again.

One hundred shards.

The little crystals seemed almost weightless inside his pouch, but they had still taken a lot of effort to count. He could have taken a single large shard worth the same amount, and for a moment the practicality of that had tempted him. In the end, he chose the smaller pieces. Loose shards were far more useful for someone who had to save on every purchase. Owning that much still felt unnatural.

Across the desk, Steward Lucien had not entirely succeeded in hiding his surprise. He had expected Alistair to drag the job out for longer than a week, but Alistair had finished it in five days, less if the first half-day and this short final inspection were counted. For a few seconds, the old man simply looked at him over the rims of his spectacles, clearly measuring the result against that assumption. Then, just as quickly, he came up with an explanation that satisfied him. His expression smoothed. Somewhere in Lucien’s mind, Alistair had become a boy with some narrow, highly practical working class that happened to suit that specific task. Once that thought took hold, the steward no longer looked troubled by the matter.

The clerk was less willing to let it go. Alistair noticed the difference only after the pouch was back in his sleeve and his mind loosened from the hard, narrow focus the job had demanded. The clerk was watching him with an attention that held more than curiosity. A faint, unpleasant tension behind the man’s eyes.

With the keener instincts his high WIS had given him, Alistair finally understood his mistake. He had come to Verevain to disappear, and within days he had made himself memorable to the exact people he should have been most careful around.

He silently promised himself not to do anything so conspicuous again.

His first instinct was to leave and never return to the steward’s office, which would have been the safer choice. Unfortunately, safety had begun to compete with something else. Once Lucien asked whether he might be interested in another unwanted job, Alistair felt the answer rise in him before caution could object. Earning shards had already become dangerously satisfying. More than that, the life he had started building in the last few days had shifted his sense of what was necessary faster than he liked. Morning bread no longer seemed enough. A breakfast with an egg had become normal. The visits to the bakery no longer felt like indulgence but like small pauses to recover. Even his hunger had changed, increasing considerably. Freedom, it turned out, was expensive.

He stayed where he was and listened.

“This one is less offensive than the channels,” Lucien said, folding his hands over a scatter of papers. “Still difficult to hire, but for different reasons. The problem is the working hours.”

“What time?” Alistair asked.

“A few hours before dawn.”

Alistair knew what it meant to rise before sunrise. Slaves did that whenever their owners wanted more work from them. But Lucien was not talking about dawn. He meant the deep middle stretch of night, when most people were asleep.

The work itself was simple enough. A certain flower grew around Verevain and much of the surrounding land. During the day, the plant absorbed starflow from the yellow star. During the night, it processed that stored energy and finally bloomed. Then, as soon as the morning light touched it again, the flower withered away into nothing. The bloom had little value on its own, but mixed properly into feed it improved the production and quality of cattle milk. Verevain did not have much need for that advantage, but Dorelle and the nearby villages did, so the town gathered the flowers and traded them inland.

Under normal circumstances, a small group of unclassed youths handled the work. But the recent passage of the ascension island had disrupted that arrangement. Some of the usual gatherers had gone to ascend. Others were still away or newly occupied. The town needed hands to fill the gap, at least for a while.

“It pays by amount,” Lucien said. “One shard per ten flowers. The usual yield is seventy to a hundred over the blooming window if the gatherer knows where to go and moves quickly enough. There is work enough for perhaps two months more.”

Two months was long enough to matter. Alistair kept his face still while his thoughts moved faster.

The pay sounded poor at first, and for anyone doing it alone, perhaps it was. The work happened in darkness, which meant concealment. And it was paid by collected quantity, so he could use clones for it. With the right choice of classes and a little practice, he might gather twice the normal amount, perhaps more. Two hundred flowers in a night would mean twenty shards. It would not cover all his expenses now that he had started eating more, but it would help. Combined with daytime work, it might even allow him to save shards. The lack of sleep would be a problem, but not necessarily a fatal one.

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“I’ll take it,” he said.

Lucien gave him a brief, unreadable look, then nodded. This arrangement needed no written contract; Alistair only had to bring the flowers to a designated warehouse near the market before dawn reached them. The town would count the haul there and pay on the spot. After that, the blooms would be sealed into prepared crates before morning light could spoil them.

By the time he stepped back into the street, he had secured one long-term job and learned something new about himself. He was not ready to stop chasing work. Hunger was part of it, but leveling had become addictive. He had done it only once, but it had been enough. The thought of pulling himself farther and farther away from the weak, half-starved slave he had been was too satisfying to surrender easily.