That night, Kaz is fourteen again. The wooden floor underneath him is as biting and unforgiving as he remembers; just like the harbor, just like the rooftops of Ketterdam, and just like the Barrel itself.
He pushes himself back up for what feels like the thousandth time in an hour, but he doesn’t try to limp across his cramped room again, his narrow bed too enticing to try for another bruise so soon after the last one.
He’ll rest, he promises himself, sitting down on his bed and leaning his head back against the wall. Then once he’s feeling better he’ll try again, as many times as it takes for him to figure this out.
The even tap of a cane snaps him out of his slumped, aching daydreams. He nearly thinks it’s his own before he remembers that he still hasn’t figured his own out, and by then the curiosity is overwhelming. Someone is using a cane on the other side of his door, and Kaz, hardened and cold but still fourteen, needs to know who.
Kaz limps upwards, limps to his door with hissed curses as he tries and fails to use his cane the right way, and cracks open the crooked wooden door, peering through the sliver of light into the main rooms.
“...If it’s not too much trouble, of course,” a low voice says from the main rooms of the Slat, close enough for Kaz to hear clearly but presumably not for the rest of the mingling people to do the same. “I know you’re busy, but I can pay extra for this all to go faster.”
“You would pay more?” The second voice is young and virile, sounding like a spider who just caught a slow, unwitting fly in their fine web.
There is a moment of complete silence.
“Tell me how fast it would be otherwise.”
Kaz just barely holds back laughter at the sheer stupidity he’s hearing; It’s too late for the first speaker to salvage this and all three of them — both Kaz and the two speakers — know it.
“You want two men dead by any means,” the second speaker says, laying out the terms for what, to Kaz’s ears, is the first time. “You’re willing to pay ten thousand kruge for two dead men, and more for it to come sooner.”
The first speaker falls silent.
The second speaker continues, slowly laying a trap that’s music to Kaz’s ears, and Kaz tunes them out to instead pin down the cane he had heard. Searching, searching...
There.
The second speaker, the spider catching the fly, is a young woman in dark blacks and grays, well-dressed in an even more understated way than what Kaz aims for. Her dark brown hair is pulled back into a neat bun, contrasting her pale skin even further, and her left hand rests on the handle of a simple cane.
Kaz can’t quite wrap his head around that last piece. Yet try as he might and struggle as his brain may, his eyes see clearly.
It’s not impossible, Kaz thinks. People have already done what I need to do.
This changes everything.
When the woman with the cane and her fly leave to sit elsewhere, her cane tapping against the floor, Kaz watches her. He watches how she moves and the weight she bears on it. Suddenly, somehow, it all makes sense.
Kaz looks down at his cane and feels a renewed vigor surge through him. His fingers tighten against the head of the cane, knuckles whitening under his glove.
He takes a step away from the door, then another. Then again, then again, then a fifth time, until he faces his narrow bed once again. Then he turns away from his bed and goes again.
Kaz doesn’t fall.