Grinthal stank worse when it didn't rain.
The salt air clung to the docks like a wet rag, mixing with diesel soot and fishblood until every breath felt like chewing on a corpse. The gulls above were screaming for something dead. Dorian Vale kept his eyes low, his feet fast, and his mouth shut as he weaved through alley shadows.
He ducked beneath a sagging clothesline, past a rusted pipe spitting brown steam, and turned into a slot between buildings so thin only a child could pass without losing skin. He ran it by instinct. No map. No light. Just the memory of bruises and near misses.
Dorian Vale had been a runner for nearly three years. Ran notes, coins, favors, bribes—didn't matter. If it fit in a hand or a mouth, he could carry it. Fast. Quiet. Unseen. That's why Madame Kresh kept him fed. That's why the knucklemen from the Mournpath Crew didn't cave his skull in when he bumped them at the corner. And that's why he was about to risk his entire life for fourteen silver notes.
That's what the sealed pouch was worth. The one he had tucked in his jacket. The one the runner before him had choked on his own blood trying to deliver.
Dorian didn't care what was in it. Only that it wasn't meant to reach a rival boss named Roque the Pig, and Madame Kresh wanted him to deliver it anyway.
So he ran.
Grinthal's underbelly twisted beneath his boots—grates, sunken bridges, wooden walkways barely held together by grime and desperation. He passed a girl no older than ten selling lighters with a flint-spark tongue, and a toothless drunk pissing into an open sewer.
No one noticed him. No one ever did.
That's why it shocked the hell out of him when someone did.
"You're late, Vale."
He skidded to a halt. The alley ahead was blocked. Two men. One leaning on a pipe with a strikebolt pistol loose in his grip. The other—a tall, ink-faced bruiser Dorian recognized from the Blackdrip District. A captain's man. Not Kresh's.
Not friendly.
"Didn't know I was on a time limit," Dorian muttered, glancing behind him.
No good. Another guy stepped into the path. That made three.
The bruiser stepped forward. "You got something ain't yours. Hand it over and we won't feed you to the beetles."
Dorian's pulse jumped. His hand twitched near the pouch. "You want fourteen notes that bad, just get a job."
The ink-faced man grinned. "It ain't the notes, rat."
He raised the pistol.
Dorian moved. Fast. Trained.
He threw the pouch—not at them, but straight into the sewer drain to the left. One of the men swore. Ink-face fired—crack. A bolt grazed Dorian's sleeve as he rolled to the side, boots slipping in oil and rainless mud. Another shot. Missed.
By the time the third bolt loaded, Dorian was gone—up a pipe, over a ledge, cutting across rooftop boards that were one step from collapse.
They didn't follow.
Because they weren't supposed to kill him. Just shake him. Prove something. But now the message was reversed.
Dorian Vale was just a runner. But runners don't risk their lives for dead men's deliveries.