To get a ring like that, you needed a mark so far gone they wouldn’t notice a part of their hand being cut off. Which meant opium, or dreamdust, or something else as sharp. Even the hardest of hard-up sailors didn’t do those drugs in public. Private establishments catered to the rich, the kind of places with white silk covers on the cushions to show they were changed after every client, and girls and boys on call for play even if most of the customers were too far gone to get it up. Addicts with less to spend settled for cheaper, less reputable dens.

She knew a few places in East Claw, close enough to the Godsdistrikt for their customers to smell the incense and feel the heat. Knew them well enough to keep clear: dens didn’t stay open long; the Watch always came to wrap them up sooner or later. Those that lasted long enough to build up clientele posted lookouts on the street and on the roofs, and they weren’t kind to kids who drifted close.

The den on Palmheart occupied an old Contact-era three-story house. The roof was heavily sloped, and the widow’s walk at its peak just big enough for two guys, one fat, one thin, one looking west, one east.

Guards in hophead joints didn’t tend to stay too clean themselves. So Izza waited until after dark, a few roofs over, for the telltale flick of a lighter and the bright spark of a flame on the widow’s walk, which gave birth to a fat smoldering ember on the end of a thick joint. The fat guard took a drag, and passed to the thin guard, who took his own. She didn’t need to smell the dope to know, but she could, and did.

They started talking soon after, telling bad dirty jokes she’d heard through the doors of a hundred bars, the one about the djinn and the traveling salesman and the twelve-inch piano player, and the one about the cat that wasn’t coming in but going out, and when one of them broke into a braying hoarse laugh she ran and jumped. Landed on red tile, skidded down a few feet toward the roof’s edge, but didn’t fall, and didn’t make enough noise to be heard over the laughter.

Dangling by one hand from the gutter, she slipped down between window boards into the top floor’s haze of bad dreams and sick sweet smoke. The room was big, and hot, and dark. Prone bodies lay on a labyrinth of narrow cots. Unlit pipes dangled from fingers. Rolling eyes flashed white through slitted lids. Off to her left, in the dark, a man moaned. She broke into a sweat as she began her search.