"Verdammt."
The curse left Albrecht's lips in a puff of white steam, eaten by mist and chimney smoke.No work. No coins. No bread. Only the metallic taste of rain and a belly that had learned to be quiet.
Grundlage hunched under a brass‑colored sky. Chimneys coughed up black ribbons; gaslamps hissed awake one by one, painting halos over slick cobblestones. Somewhere far off, a factory groaned—slow, stubborn, like something too big to die.
Albrecht tightened his threadbare coat and joined the evening drift. Boots splashed through shallow puddles. His shadow kept pace in the lampglow—long, thin, a little crooked at the edges.
A butcher's boy waved a cleaver. "No errands today, Albrecht?"
"Not for lack of trying," he said. "Old Herr Kappel decided his crates could fly themselves."
The boy snorted. "If they could, they'd fly straight into the river. Keep dry, ja?" He tipped the cleaver like a salute and turned to hack at bone.
A fishmonger worked a silver body with a short, neat knife. Entrails slid into a bucket. "Head for a pfennig?"
"Only if it includes the rest," Albrecht said. The corner of the man's mouth twitched—almost a smile—as Albrecht moved on.
An old woman sat on a stool beneath a patched umbrella, a wicker basket of loaves cooling at her feet. "Flour's up again," she rasped. "My bread costs more, but their purses hold less."
"Then who buys?"
"People who can't stand being hungry," she said, eyes narrowing at him. "That includes boys with quick mouths."
He looked at the loaves a second too long, then offered a shrug that meant nothing and everything. She made a small, irritated sound and adjusted her shawl. "Go on, then. Trouble finds boys who linger."
He went on.
The crowd thinned. Buildings leaned together over narrow lanes like conspirators swapping secrets. Drains gurgled. A tram rang once and rattled away, its light smearing in the fog.
Albrecht's feet found their way by habit—toward the alley that wasn't his by deed, but by persistence. By nights survived.
Two bodies tangled in the dark. Clothing askew. Breathless laughter. The man's head snapped up, eyes flashing."What are you staring at, brat?"
He didn't answer. He turned and walked away, jaw tight, boots hitting harder than before. Not the first time they'd stolen his corner. Wouldn't be the last. Grundlage had a thousand hidden places; somehow, folks always picked his.
"Evening," a man in a flat cap called from a doorway as Albrecht passed.
"Barely," Albrecht said.
"Better when you've got coins." The man's grin had too many spaces. "Watch yourself. The watchmen fancy collecting strays this week."
"Good thing I'm not stray," Albrecht muttered. The man laughed low and disappeared back inside.
He cut across a lane where laundry lines sagged like exhausted ropes. Fog licked at his ankles. The lamps hummed. Water dripped from gutters in a rhythm you could mistake for a heartbeat if you were lonely enough.
A street preacher stood on a crate by the next corner, his hat crushed between his fingers. "The end's not a fire," he told the thin crowd. "It's a silence. First in the machines, then in us." He switched to Latin for a line or two—words Albrecht didn't know and didn't want to—but the sound rode under his skin like a draft in an old house.
He kept walking. Better to move than to let dark thoughts catch up.
He'd just turned down a stretch of street with no shops and no windows lit, when the air in front of him… shifted.
At first he thought it was heat haze—impossible on a night like this. The cobbles wobbled at the edge of his vision. The fog seemed to suck inward, as if the street had taken a breath.
The world folded.
A man stepped out of that fold and onto the stones.
Albrecht didn't think; he spun to run.A hand closed on his shoulder—cold and strong. His heart slammed against his ribs. This is it. This is where boys vanish and no one asks why.
The grip loosened. The man staggered, bent double by a cough that sounded like tearing cloth. He braced against the wall and slid down into the lamplight.
Albrecht stopped just out of reach. The stranger was tall beneath the soaked coat, hollow in the cheeks, eyes too sharp for someone so spent. The coat's edges were frayed and… scorched? Beneath the smell of rain and soot, a faint sting clung to the air—the crackle‑clean tang you got after lightning.
The man's gaze found Albrecht as if he'd been searching for him specifically, which made no sense. His breath was shallow. He worked a hand into his coat and drew out a small, black book that beaded water without drinking it.
He tossed it. It skidded, tapped Albrecht's boot, and came to rest in a patch of pale light.
The man's head sagged forward. The coughing stopped. The city noise pressed in to fill the gap it left.
Albrecht's eyes flashed up and down the empty street. No watchers. No footfalls. No one to say what decent people ought to do.
He crouched. Two fingers to the throat. Stillness. He waited another beat, as if hearts sometimes changed their minds. They didn't.
Hunger spoke louder than pity. He stripped the leather shoes—stiff, good quality, a little big but dry—and swapped them for his own split pair right there on the stones. He took a silver pocket watch from the waistcoat beneath the ruined coat; the chain had an understated design, a worn mother‑of‑pearl inlay on the fob. A black tophat lay a half‑step away, rain ticking softly on the brim. He shook it out and set it beside him.
"Sorry," he said to the man's still shoulder. He meant it, and he didn't. Both could be true.
He slipped the watch into his pocket. It ticked, but the rhythm was odd—too slow, then too fast, as if trying to catch its own tail. He closed his hand around it until the ticks lined up with his pulse.
Only then did he pick up the book.
It was heavier than it looked. Smooth as if many hands had worn it down, yet the leather tasted of metal on his tongue the way certain words did. No title. No author. No clasp.
He thumbed it open.
Symbols uncoupled from the neatness of ink and slid at the edges of his sight. When he tried to pin them in place, they looked like letters—then angles—then something else entirely. He thought he heard… not a voice, exactly. A pressure. The sense of a word just before it's spoken.
He snapped the book shut. A breath he hadn't realized he'd trapped came out too fast.
"Boy," someone said behind him.
Albrecht stood, the book in his left hand, the hat in his right. A watchman in a damp cloak emerged from the fog, lantern held high. The man's face had the lax patience of someone who'd walked too many quiet streets.
"Evening," the watchman said. His eyes slid over Albrecht, to the figure slumped against the wall. "Trouble?"
"Not mine," Albrecht replied. "He was like this when I found him."
The watchman's lantern dipped toward the body. "Name?"
"If he told me, I'd have sold it already." Albrecht kept his voice flat. He didn't look away. Looking away made you interesting.
The watchman grunted. The lanternlight found the scorched hem of the coat and the splashed mud, but no blood. He crouched, put two fingers to the throat like Albrecht had. His mouth tightened—not with surprise. With the resignation of a man adding another notch to a tally he didn't show his wife.
"Doctor's no good," he said, standing. "It's the kind of dead that doesn't change its mind." His gaze flicked to the book. "What's that?"
"Nothing worth pawning," Albrecht answered too quickly.
The watchman's eyes lingered a heartbeat longer than was comfortable. Then he shrugged. "Move along. Corpses invite questions. Questions invite writing." He tapped his coat where a notebook would be. "You don't look like a boy who enjoys pens."
Albrecht tipped the tophat like a joke and stepped around him. The watchman didn't stop him. He didn't even look at the body again. That was Grundlage for you: keep the machines turning, keep the streets moving, and let the river carry what it must.
Back on the market road, faces had shifted. Safer people had gone home; bolder ones came out. A duo of girls with smeared rouge shared a cigarette and a laugh. A drunk argued with a street sign and lost. The preacher had moved on, but his crate remained, glistening with damp.
"Albrecht!" the bread‑seller called, surprising him. "You walk like your shoes hurt."
"They don't," he said, which was almost true. The good leather pinched at the toes and felt like a fortune.
She eyed the hat. "New job? Or new lie?"
"Same old me."
"Mm." She dug in her basket and held out a heel of yesterday's loaf. "Only because you carry your bones like they're trying to run away."
He took it before she changed her mind. "I'll pay you back."
"You will if you can," she said. "If you can't, someone else will. The city makes its own accounts." Her gaze drifted to the pocket where the watch sat. "Time's heavy on you tonight."
He wasn't sure what to say to that, so he didn't. He moved on, chewing, the bread gone too quickly to properly thank her.
He ended up beneath the iron ribs of a bridge where the river clinked softly against the pilings. The water carried the mill's waste like secrets. He set the hat on his head and decided it didn't make him look foolish. That was something.
He rested the book on his knee. The leather refused the damp as if water simply forgot it existed. The pocket watch ticked irregularly until he took it out and set it beside the book; the ticks steadied, falling into a neat, unfamiliar cadence. The hairs on his arms lifted.
"Not superstitious," he told the river. "Just not stupid."
He opened the book again, ready to slam it shut if it tried anything clever.
The first page was blank except for a small, precise notation in the upper corner: I. Not a number, exactly. Not a letter either. Ink that didn't shine like ink. He turned the page.
A city map unfurled in the simplest of lines. No names. No legend. Just a spine of river, a handful of bridges, a grid of streets. He recognized nothing and then—suddenly—he recognized everything. The angles were Grundlage's, only older; the river's curve was the same, only the banks were wrong. The street he stood on wasn't there. The bridge above him was, though, drawn as a wooden span instead of iron.
He blinked and the lines shifted, catching up to the present. His finger hovered over the page. A dot pulsed faintly near the river, then dimmed. When it brightened again, it had moved—two streets over, toward the market.
He glanced up. Fog. Lamps. The far clang of a mill bell. He looked down. The dot faded, then brightened atop the very street where he'd met the man. He felt foolish for the way his throat tightened.
"Trick," he said. He meant to sound sure of it.
He turned another page. The text that followed gathered itself into neat blocks of cramped script. He didn't recognize the language, but his mind tried to make it into something: old church Latin? A cousin of it? Words he didn't own pressed at the back of his teeth. Divinis… Something like that. He inhaled through his nose until the pressure retreated.
A smudge near the margin resolved into a small sigil—three strokes and a circle—so simple a child could draw it. He'd seen that shape somewhere. On the pocket watch fob? He pulled the watch closer. Mother‑of‑pearl worn smooth, the inlay faded… and yes: if you caught it in the right light, the same three strokes and circle whispered back at you from under the sheen.
He looked over his shoulder without meaning to. The bridge's iron ribs cut the fog into measured slices. Footsteps went by above, the sound filtered into something softer, stranger. He heard water, and under it, a stray coil of the preacher's Latin—only memory, he told himself.
He closed the book halfway and the watch tick went wrong again, impatient and uneven. He opened the book and the ticks settled, as if the two objects were listening to one another and finally agreed on a pace.
"Fine," he said, because sometimes you had to tell the world you were fine before it decided otherwise. "I'll find out what you are, and then I'll sell you. Both of you." He addressed the book and the watch equally.
He slid the book inside his coat, tucked the watch deeper, set the hat more firmly on his head, and stepped back into motion. Motion kept you from thinking too much; motion looked like purpose.
The market had thinned further when he returned. The bread‑seller had gone; her crate was turned on its side, a little dry island in the damp. A closed sign hung crooked on the fish stall. A stray dog nosed at the butcher's buckets and bolted when Albrecht hissed.
He headed for a different alley this time—narrower, meaner, one he avoided because it funneled the wind in strange ways. Tonight, the wind was the least of his problems.
He had one boot on the alley's first stone when the pocket watch clicked. Not a tick. A click, delicate and deliberate, as if a latch had been loosened somewhere inside his coat.
Albrecht paused. The gaslamp above him dimmed, pulsed twice, and steadied.
He reached inside his coat and felt the watch's cover warm against his palm. He flipped it open.
No hands. No numbers. Just a face of mother‑of‑pearl with that faint sigil in the center, and a line he was sure hadn't been there before—hair‑thin, dark, tracing itself from the sigil outward until it pointed down the alley like a compass needle aligning with a star only it could see.
"Absolutely not," he told the night.
Another click, somewhere between his ribs and the book.
The air at the far end of the alley rippled, the smallest disturbance—like breath on a glass bottle's lip.
Albrecht closed the watch with a soft snap, swallowed the urge to run, and stepped into the alley anyway. It was either that or give the city yet another piece of his life without knowing the price.
Behind him, a lamplighter's pole scraped iron. Ahead, the darkness breathed.
And for an instant—no more—he thought he heard a word without sound slide through the fog like a blade through cloth:
…influxibis…
The watch ticked once, in perfect time with his heart.
He didn't look back.