For a moment, Ranami thought the girl might be pretending in order to get away, but upon closer inspection, found that Phalue spoke the truth. She was dirty, small, but older than she had initially looked, her black hair tangled and unkempt. Beneath the rags, she was thin and bony, her ribs showing beneath her collarbone. Her left arm ended at the wrist, her hand missing.

“She must have been looking for money,” Ranami said. Phalue had her purse in the same pouch as the missive.

“Foolish,” Phalue said. “I give them coin. She could have waited.”

“Maybe it wasn’t enough? And she’s small. The bigger children often steal from the younger ones. It’s not an easy life.”

With a shrug, Phalue slung the girl over her shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

“Well, I’m not going to leave her here. We’re not adopting her, mind you, but she looks in a bad way, and it doesn’t seem right to leave her lying in the street. You wanted to help the gutter orphans. We can start with this one.”

That wasn’t really what Ranami had meant, but she had the feeling Phalue knew it. And she couldn’t argue with her logic. She didn’t want to leave a passed-out gutter orphan on the streets either. The girl had fainted in front of them and now they both felt some responsibility for her. Funny how that worked.

Still, she couldn’t help the trickle of unease as they made their way back up the street. Had the girl just wanted money, or had she been tipped off about the missive? It felt coincidental, but at the same time, Ranami remembered the things she’d done to get a bite to eat on the streets. She wouldn’t have betrayed Halong, who was the closest thing she had to family – most gutter orphans still had something of a moral code – but the ones who had more than she did were always fair game. It wasn’t until she’d stopped feeling quite so desperate that her capacity to trust had expanded.

“There wasn’t much money in that purse,” Ranami said. “She must have heard how spare it was when she was carrying it. Why not abandon it when you came thundering after her?”

Cobblestones turned to dirt, the switchbacks rising above them. Water ran down the path, carving rivulets through the mud. “What are you suggesting?” Phalue asked.

Ranami put voice to her unease. “Could she have been sent after the missive?”

Phalue shrugged her broad shoulders. “That’s a little farfetched.”

“People would have seen the Emperor’s envoy on his way to the palace. Just because we haven’t seen any more spy constructs doesn’t mean there aren’t spies of other kinds. We’re taking her up to the palace. The fainting could have been a ruse.”