Eleven Silver Coins
The following morning, white steam hissed shrilly from the kettle sitting atop the coal stove.
Sitting across the office desk, Orban chewed on a hunk of freshly baked bread as he slapped open a thick leather ledger. My Sermaize revolver, which I had placed neatly on the desk the night before, still rested right within arm's reach.
"About what you said last night," Orban began, dipping his steel nib deep into black ink. I swallowed my mouthful of bread and tilted my chin up.
"I'm not putting you on wetwork."
"Why?"
"Because you're fourteen."
"I won't make good money unless I'm killing people."
"Doesn't it occur to you that saying that is an even bigger problem, kid?" Orban let out an incredulous snort, drawing a sharp line down one side of the ledger. "I've kicked around back alleys long enough to see every kind of filth this world has to offer, but I rarely touch assassinations. And my life isn't so far down the drain that I'd pick up a starving fourteen-year-old off the street, shove a blade into her hand, and push her out to get drenched in blood."
"Putting someone under pays the highest hourly wage, though."
The right corner of Orban's mouth curled upward. "Listen to that mouth. Spouting off like some battle-hardened mercenary. There are plenty of ways to pay off a debt without killing anyone. It'll just take a little more time." He twirled his pen and gestured with his chin toward the corner of the desk. "First job. Take this envelope to the apothecary by the North Gate. Don't open it. Deliver it, get a signature, and I'll credit you four coppers."
And so began my very first assignment in Belok.
Now, I am truly, honestly not directionally challenged, but I never dreamed in my wildest nightmares that navigating a city would prove harder than murder.
Back in the facility, all you had to do was count the corners. In Belok, you could circle the exact same alley three times and still never reach your destination. You would walk straight ahead only to slam into a dead-end wall, and just when you turned around thinking it was blocked, a hairline fracture between two buildings would open up into a passage barely wide enough for one person to squeeze through. To make matters worse, there were two separate joints calling themselves the 'Red Bull Diner'—one by the East Gate and another by the South Gate.
On that first day, after lugging the envelope to the completely wrong apothecary and wandering in circles for half a day, I finally trudged back. Orban laid out four copper coins on the desk. Only one of them was shiny and new.
"The old man at the shop docked a copper because you were late."
I counted the coins with a finger, my brow furrowing deep. "There are four here. You just said he docked one."
"I sent you out without giving you directions. That was my oversight, so I made up the difference out of my own pocket. Next time, check the map twice before you walk out that door."
Well now.
Back in my past life, convenience store franchise owners would ruthlessly shave an employee's hourly wages down to the hundred-won mark for the slightest mistake. Orban, on the other hand, possessed at least a baseline shred of professional ethics. From that day forward, I made it a strict habit to etch every alleyway name and landmark into my head twice before stepping foot outside.
The housing situation was settled as well. Orban gave me the cramped storage room tucked behind the office.
The place had originally been used to dump stacks of old paperwork and empty wooden crates, leaving a layer of dust a full knuckle thick. After spending half a day dragging every box out into the hallway and vigorously scrubbing the floorboards, I carved out just enough room for a battered single cot and a washbasin. Opening the window offered a view of nothing but the brick wall of the adjacent building, but the door bolted securely from the inside. Orban dropped one of two brass keys into my palm.
"Are you adding room and board to my ledger?"
"Of course I am. What did you expect? First month is free, seeing as you turned that dust pit into something fit for human habitation. Starting next month, rent is two silvers."
"Expensive."
"Meals aren't included."
"Absurdly expensive."
Even as I grumbled, I had no intention of storming out. After inspecting every inch beneath the cot, around the window frame, and along the cracks in the walls, I slid the heavy bolt home from the inside. A space entirely my own, where no one could enter unless they smashed the door off its hinges—it was a luxury called 'privacy,' something I hadn't tasted once during my ten years confined inside that imperial facility. That night, for the first time in six months, I slept without nightmares, waking only three times until morning.
Three days later, Orban escorted me to the city registry to enter my name onto the assistant roster for the Orban Fixer Office.
My place of origin was listed as a 'burned village in the northeastern borderlands,' and my parents' names were entered as 'unknown.' In the northeastern reaches of the Herzen Empire, where border skirmishes with the Urgan were an everyday occurrence, entire settlements being reduced to ash and throwing out waves of war orphans was common knowledge. It was such a banal, everyday tragedy that nobody would ever look twice—a flawless cover identity.
"Does this make me a citizen now?"
"Keep dreaming. You just went from an illegal squatter to a temporary resident. Earning a proper Belok Citizen's Certificate comes with strict requirements."
Orban ticked them off on his fingers one by one. "First, an unbroken residency record proving you've lived at a single address for over a year without causing trouble. Second, a legitimate job where you pay your taxes like clockwork. Third, the signature of a reputable guarantor."
"And fourth is money, right?"
"Spot on. The application fee is fifteen silver coins."
"Where do I find a guarantor?"
Orban tapped the tip of his nib against the bottom of the form, right over the bold signature he had scrawled into the guarantor box. "Right here. Me."
I lightly rested my fingertips against my name where the ink had yet to fully dry, then pulled my hand back. Swallowing the urge to utter words of gratitude, I immediately began calculating my prospective wages instead.
Two silvers for rent, subtract food... If I scrape together and squirrel away one silver coin every month, that's fifteen months. If a lucrative odd job pops up along the way, I could pull it off within a year.
Once my mental tally concluded, Orban rummaged through a desk drawer and tossed a battered tin can onto my lap. It had once held black tea leaves, judging by the faded, chipped illustration of tea sprigs on the lid.
"Use that as your piggy bank. I guarantee no one will ever bother stealing it."
"Why?"
"Because anyone with eyes would mistake it for trash meant for the scrap heap."
"Fair point."
Finding no grounds to dispute him, I kept my mouth shut. Still, I took one of the four copper coins I had earned that day and slipped it through the slit. Clink. The metallic ring of the coin rolling across the dented tin bottom and settling flat carried a surprisingly weighty resonance. My entire net worth, housed in that single room, consisted of nothing more than the Sermaize revolver tucked beneath my coat and a tin piggy bank that looked like garbage.
By the time my bullet wound and lacerations had completely closed into pale scars, Orban introduced me to a gunsmith tucked away in a back alley off the main thoroughfare.
The weathered sign hanging overhead depicted a chipped revolver facing off against a hunting dog. The dog's forelegs had long since been washed away by rain, and a thick patch of bluish moss clung to the painted gun barrel. When I pushed open the door, the brass bell perched atop the frame let out a creaking, metallic rasp.
From behind the counter, a man wearing a watchmaker's loupe over one eye lifted his head. He was stout, standing barely tall enough to reach my solar plexus, but his shoulders and the sheer thickness of his ribcage were broader than Orban's. The thumb and forefinger of his right hand were stained a deep, jaundiced yellow from decades of soaking in black gun oil, and a coarse, unruly beard engulfed his jaw. This was Bram, the human-dwarf half-blood who owned the shop.
After reading the referral note Orban had penned, Bram thrust his heavy hand forward without a word. "Let's see the iron."
"You're not going to keep it, are you?"
"Leave it without fresh grease for a few more days in this state, and it'll turn into scrap iron anyway."
I verified that the hammer rested securely over an empty chamber before setting the firearm down onto his workbench, turning the grip toward him as I slid it forward.
Bram began by carefully unseating the three remaining percussion caps. Only after extracting the lead balls and powder charges did he set about disassembling the weapon, while I stood quietly beside the bench. He released the loading lever and tapped the wedge pin connecting the barrel to the frame with a small wooden mallet, splitting the revolver cleanly into three assemblies.
"A Sermaize officer-pattern six-shooter. Whoever carried this piece must have lined his pockets with plenty of dirty kickbacks."
"He's dead."
Bram's thick fingers paused for a fraction of a second. Yet he asked no further questions, silently scraping away the carbon fouling caked inside the chambers with a stiff brass brush.
"Compared to the new models chambering metallic cartridges, an old piece like this is a royal pain in the ass to maintain. You've got to pour a measured charge of powder into every chamber, tamp down a felt wad, ram the lead ball home with the lever, and cap every single nipple by hand. Come a heavy downpour, you're constantly sweating over misfires."
"Then why is it so expensive?"
"Inconvenience and price are two entirely different animals. Aristocratic officer brats will pay through the nose just to babble on about 'tradition' and 'class.'"
Just like vintage film cameras back in my past life—people paid ridiculous markups for the aesthetic. Same shit, different world.
Bram held the cylinder up to the glow of his oil lamp, squinting through the bores. "Mages go wild for this mechanism, too. Etch spell arrays inside the chambers, hollow out the central cylinder axis into a mana conduit, and you can fire spells charged with your own mana instead of burning black powder. It's easy to customize, and you can seal six completely different spells across the six chambers."
"Is this one a magic gun?"
"Nah. Yours is just an ordinary, purely powder-burning antique. Hasn't been tampered with in the slightest."
Bram worked out the dents in the worn internal parts and coated the entire assembly in a thin, immaculate sheen of clear oil. He then took a blade to the shoulder rig, trimming down the leather harness so the holster would ride snug against my slender waist. The paperwork registering the firearm as official operational equipment under the Orban Agency went through without a hitch. As long as I lacked official citizenship, I was only permitted to open-carry a weapon while actively engaged in licensed escort or courier duties.
Out behind the shop, standing before the sand berm of the test range, Bram walked me through proper loading procedure.
"Pull the hammer back halfway to half-cock. That disengages the cylinder stop so it rotates smooth under your fingers. Pour your measured powder, seat the greased felt, drop the lead ball on top, and drive it down firm with the loading lever. Caps go on dead last."
As I picked up the first percussion cap, Bram's heavy hand clamped down over my wrist.
"Don't go crushing it with raw muscle. Dent the copper casing and the fulminate will detonate right there in your fingers, blowing them clean off."
"Gently, then?"
"Not your idea of 'gently.' A normal human being's idea of 'gently.'"
Damn it, regulating strength is an absolute chore.
Back in the imperial facility, you were praised only for striking harder and lifting heavier. Out here in civil society, learning how to pull your punches and hold back proved infinitely more difficult.
As autumn gave way to the bitter chill of winter, my first genuine bodyguard contract arrived.
The job was simple: escort an accountant from the South Gate textile mill as he walked from Central Station back to the factory, carrying a steel lockbox packed with the workers' weekly wages. Before we set out, Orban pulled my coat collar snug and issued strict orders.
"Don't draw your gun."
"Understood."
"If a brawl breaks out, don't break anybody's bones."
"I'll try."
"That answer terrifies me more than anything else, honestly."
Sure enough, in a narrow alleyway, a burly brute reeking of cheap booze slammed into the accountant, snatched the strongbox, and bolted. Watching the man's broad back retreat twenty paces ahead, I kicked off the cobblestones.
Whoosh!
I erased the distance in a single second, clamping down on the man's wrist to slam the brakes. Crack! The sudden, violent deceleration of his full sprinting momentum wrenched one of his fingers backward at an unnatural angle, though the bone miraculously remained unbroken. Howling in agony, the thief dropped the lockbox, and I scooped it up from the pavement to hand it back to the trembling accountant.
That evening, Orban pressed the promised day's wage of one full silver coin into my palm.
"Well done."
"I think I messed up his hand."
"It didn't snap in half, so that's good enough."
On the walk back to the office, however, the inner tendon of my right knee locked up stiff and refused to straighten. The violent shock of coming to a dead stop from a full sprint had driven straight into the joint. When I reached for the handrail and limped up the wooden stairs, Orban placed a steady hand behind my back, silently supporting my weight without uttering a word.
The heavy-lifting porter job that arrived the following morning was farmed out to another street thug. Orban planted me in a chair and handed me the office ledgers instead.
"I can still work."
"I know. Catching miscalculated numbers and matching receipts is work too."
"Does the hourly wage stay the same?"
Orban let out a dry chuckle and turned the page. He was an employer who checked whether I was limping or whether my fingers were trembling before he ever cared about my brute physical utility.
It took four months to clear the debt entirely. Orban drew two thick red lines across the scarlet balance in the ledger. That evening, a chilled bottle of pressed apple cider was set down in front of me.
There were no grand speeches or congratulations. And instead of saying thanks, the next morning I took the hundreds of crumpled receipts scattered across Orban's messy desk and bound them neatly in chronological order and sorted by client.
When Orban saw the pristine stacks, he barked out a laugh and tossed a few extra copper coins onto my pay as a 'special clerical stipend.' A boss who expressed his appreciation with cold, hard cash rather than empty platitudes—it really was an ideal workplace.
A full cycle of seasons turned over the agency.
In spring, the soot from Central Station's towering smokestacks settled over the district like an oily fog. In summer, industrial runoff from the textile dye vats turned the South Gate canal into a shimmering, toxic rainbow. In autumn, coal ash accumulated over the rooftops like filthy grey snow, and in winter, stray alley cats and vagrants huddled shoulder to shoulder against the warmth of frozen steam conduits.
After a year, the labyrinthine alleys of Belok were mapped as clearly in my mind as the palm of my hand. I knew which bakeries ran end-of-day clearance sales and which public wells drew water sweet and free of metallic rust.
The market vendors knew my name as well. The old woman running the vegetable stall would toss me a bruised apple whenever I walked past, and the laundress downstairs would mend my torn shirts for free, accompanied by a barrage of motherly scolding.
Back when I was Kim Yujin, surviving at twenty-nine had been a living hell of overdue rent and rolling over debts across eleven banking apps. But living as fifteen-year-old Sonya, watching the balance inside my tin piggy bank swell offered a uniquely satisfying joy.
Inside that dented tin rested a hefty mound of coins worth roughly eleven silvers. Only four silver coins remained until I hit the fifteen-silver threshold for the citizenship fee. Orban had boldly guaranteed that if we landed just one decent contract, I would hold a legitimate Belok Citizen's Certificate in my hands before this winter came to a close.
It happened deep in the dead of night, just three days after that conversation.
Past midnight, right as I was about to drop the heavy wooden bar to lock up the office for the evening, heavy, frantic footsteps pounded up the creaking wooden staircase. It was an erratic, panicked cadence—the steel toes of heavy boots violently striking the stair risers on the way up.
There were no appointments scheduled for this hour.
Instinctively, I drew the Sermaize revolver from my waist. Thumbing the hammer back to half-cock, I pressed my back flat against the blind spot behind the doorframe.
Crash!
The door flew open with violent force as Orban barreled through shoulder-first. The boss's white dress shirt was drenched in crimson blood all the way up to his elbows, and thick beads of sweat dripped from his jawline.
Slumped across his back, limp and unresponsive, was a man soaked in blood.
He was a human male somewhere in his mid-forties. One lens of his metal-rimmed spectacles was shattered into spiderwebs. Even in total unconsciousness, his deathly pale face held a deep, neurotic furrow between the brows, radiating the tense demeanor of a meticulous bureaucrat.
Yet what seized my attention entirely was the gleaming silver insignia pinned to the chest of his dark overcoat.
It was a crest depicting a winged train wheel hoisted high by three clasped hands—human, elven, and dwarven.
ALDERA RAIL CORPORATION — ARC
It was the executive badge of the Aldera Rail Corporation—the titanic, quasi-governmental conglomerate holding an absolute monopoly over all continental railways and transit logistics.
"Sonya! Clear the desk!"
All traces of Orban's usual sly, leisurely composure had vanished from his voice. Asking no questions, I swept my arm across the surface, sending ledgers, inkwells, and pen stands crashing to the floor.
Orban laid the man flat on his back across the wood, exposing a ragged bullet wound the size of a fist punched clean through his right flank. With every ragged gasp the man took, dark, frothy crimson bubbles burst through the mangled flesh.
"Fetch Doctor Marta. The woman who stitched you up. Cut through the South Gate Canal—do not take the main avenues under any circumstances."
"Who is this?"
Orban pressed two fingers to the pulse point on the man's neck, his voice grinding out through clenched teeth.
"Gerhard Beltz. Head of Route Development at ARC Central Branch. Explanations later."
As I spun toward the door, Orban grabbed my forearm. Ordinarily, he would have delivered a sharp scolding, but this time his voice dropped to a grim whisper.
"Sonya."
"What?"
"Once you bring the doctor inside, bolt the ground-floor entrance from the inside. Not a single rat can find out this man is here tonight."
I slipped down the back stairwell into the freezing dark. Marta had to come first.