I slammed them down on the desk. “Call the keeper, and let him out!”

“Watch it, tinker,” one of the lawmen said. “You’re a hair’s breadth away from landing down there yourself, with a mouth like that.”

His was not an empty threat. I swallowed down the defiance as best I could. I held up my hands and stared at the floor. “My apologies to the Exalted.”

“Apologize again.”

I dropped to my knees and bowed, forehead to the filthy floor. A boot landed on my neck, pressing down just hard enough to suggest what kind of damage could be done to me. “My apologies to the Exalted,” I said again.

The lawmen laughed. One of them grabbed me by the collar and jerked me upright. He was a big man, a slab of muscle and fat. His hands were huge and calloused. A cigarette was planted between his teeth, and when he spoke, the words fought their way through clouds of smoke. “You counted it?”

“All there,” said the clerk.

“Give me the notice.” The keeper read it and handed it back. He shoved me forward.

“Wait!” I said. “Wait, my papers!”

The keeper held out a hand for my papers. The clerk stamped them and handed them to the keeper, who dropped them on the floor and knocked me to the floor a second after to fetch them. I fell hard and split my lip. He grabbed me again by the collar and sent me flying through a doorway and down a flight of stairs to the lock room.

I had been arrested before, but never in the 23rd. I’d been arrested for being an elf in the wrong part of town, for having eyes the wrong color, but not for something I’d actually done. I’d been taken to lockup at the 12th and the 7th, held for two or three hours with a dozen other quietly-seething elves, and released with orders to pay my own fine. The 23rd was different. I stumbled down the stairs into a pitch-dark cellar. The keeper laughed; it was a mocking, vicious laugh that ricocheted off the stone walls. A man began to cry at the sound of it. The keeper lit a torch—an actual torch, a thing of bright, violent flames—and brushed past me. “He’s with the other ghalios,” the keeper said. “Follow me.”