When they had bought enough to see them through the next couple of days, they sat at one of the broad, featureless tables set up near the stalls and had a quick meal. They had been done with their food for five or ten minutes when Kit’s attention was caught by a pathetic drama enacted before one of the fish stalls.

A gulden woman perhaps a few years older than Kit was groveling on the floor before the stall, calling out in a piteous voice to the trio of men who were buying dried patties and laughing with the vendor. She was dressed in a ragged assortment of ill-fitting clothes, all of them filthy, and the hands she held up in supplication were covered with sores. She looked as though she might have crawled here all the way from Gold Mountain. Kit could think of any number of scenarios to account for her presence here, and they all turned her skin clammy-cold.

This was the kind of woman who showed up every day in the Lost City—destitute, half-starved, brutalized. This one at least had no children clinging to her skirts, though perhaps she had hidden them in a corner somewhere, admonishing them to be silent, to draw no eyes, to run if they saw their father or their brothers coming …

Kit looked away. She could give this woman the address of the charity bank, but it seemed unlikely she would ever make it that far. Most of the refugees who arrived at Del’s shelter had planned their escapes carefully for months. They had saved money, they had packed provisions. This one appeared to have left on a moment’s whim, the one minute her husband’s back was turned, and she might indeed have made this whole journey on her hands and knees.

Nolan’s voice surprised her. She hadn’t thought he had even noticed the desperate traveler. “That woman—what’s wrong? She doesn’t have a—a kurakura—whatever?”

“I’m guessing she’s run away from her husband’s or her father’s protection,” Kit said in an expressionless tone. “And she doesn’t have food or money.”

“Where can she go?”

“Not many places,” Kit said. “The city. The ghetto. She’ll find shelter there if she makes it that far.”

“But if she doesn’t have any food or money—”

“She might not make it,” Kit said quietly.

He sat there silently another moment or two, watching the woman. Now she was begging before a tall, well-groomed businessman and his gaily dressed wife, both of whom looked past her as through an inoffensive ghost. “Will anybody help her?” he asked at last.

“Maybe. You see it in the younger men more than the older ones. One of them might buy her a meal or give her a few coins. If she doesn’t get on a train before her husband arrives, though, she’s essentially dead.”