SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 884: Still Flooded

Zafira was waiting at the end of the corridor with her arms folded, and she had clearly been standing there a while. Zafira looked him over once. "Well?"

"I'm free."

"That sounded convincing."

"It comes with conditions."

They found out what that meant before they made it out of the administrative wing. A clerk from Ithanne's office stopped Trafalgar at the first staircase and asked where he was going. He wanted an address, an expected return time and the names of anyone leaving with him.

Trafalgar gave him all three. Then the clerk led them back into a small office and wrote everything into a ledger that already had Trafalgar's name at the top of the page.

By the time they were allowed to leave, getting two streets away had taken twenty-five minutes, and twenty of those had been paperwork. Zafira glanced back toward the office as they started down the stairs.

"They're doing that every time you leave a room?"

"Probably for weeks."

"That'll drive you insane."

"It's started already."

The castle district hadn't calmed down and wasn't going to. Corridors full of people at all hours, couriers and port officers and household staff carrying lists, and every second face they passed had been awake since the attack. Somewhere below them a bell had been ringing on and off since dawn and nobody had turned it off.

The place Zafira took them was three floors up in a residential wing, small and warm and almost empty. Rhosyn was already there.

She had a chair against the wall and didn't get up, and she looked at him for slightly longer than she normally looked at anything.

"You walked out on your own."

"Barely. I've been in a chair since eight this morning and I think that did more damage to me than the whole fight."

Zafira dropped into the seat opposite and let out a long breath. "Okay, I'm saying this once and then never again, because it's humiliating. I stood outside that chamber for eleven hours, nobody would tell me anything, and I was sure they were going to hold you."

"I'm sorry. There wasn't a way to get word out."

"I know there wasn't, I'm not blaming you." She sat back. "Next time try not to be the only witness to anything."

Trafalgar sat down, and it was the best thing that had happened to him all day. "She filled me in," Zafira said, nodding at Rhosyn. "Last night. All of it."

'So that's three people now instead of two.'

He turned that over and found he didn't mind, which surprised him.

"You'd have pieced half of it together anyway and got the wrong half."

"That's pretty much what she said."

Zafira poured for all three of them and pushed a cup across to him. "How bad was Corvyn?" she asked. "I could hear him from the corridor twice."

"He wasn't bad at all, that's the problem. He asked the one question I couldn't answer properly and then he sat back down like a reasonable man." Trafalgar took the cup. "If he'd shouted at me it would have been easier. Half that chamber would have stopped listening to him."

"He's not stupid."

"Nobody in that room is stupid. That's the whole difficulty with this city."

Rhosyn stirred in her chair. "Ondrek?"

"Said nothing all day. His people nodded whenever Corvyn spoke and that was the extent of it." He drank. "Which is worse than an argument. Ondrek only moves when he's sure, and he's clearly not sure of me."

"So what happens now?" Zafira asked. "Because from out here it looks like nothing happens now."

"That's about right."

"You were cleared."

"Of the detention and the fight. On the dome she said the cause was undetermined, which isn't the same thing." He rubbed his eyes. "Half this city has decided that means the foreigner did it and they can't prove it yet."

"They'll change their minds when the sector's dry."

"Some of them. Meanwhile I can't go near the second ring, I can't ask anyone about cargo, and I can't look at a manifest without Corvyn's people hearing about it by dinner." He let his head rest against the wall. "Everything I was doing three days ago is the thing that makes me look guilty now."

Down in the castle the bell rang twice and stopped. "What about the building?" he asked, looking over at Rhosyn. "Did you get anything at all?"

"Nothing. I went back the night before last."

"And?"

"It's still full. The whole sector, up to the vaulting, and it stays that way until somebody pumps it." She turned her cup a quarter turn and left it. "No air pocket anywhere, no way through on foot."

"What about the perimeter?"

"Worse. Guards on every port and every access hatch on the dry side now, proper shifts, names on a board. Thirty at least."

"You could get past thirty."

"Not without somebody knowing that someone had." She looked at him. "You told me the whole point of me is that nobody knows I'm here. So I'd need a different way in. There'll be one. I just haven't found it yet."

Everything he wanted was under that water. The books, whatever had been stored in that building, the manifests, Rhavel's body and whatever else he'd been carrying.

All of it in a sealed sector, getting worse by the hour, while he sat three rings away signing a ledger to walk two streets.

"Then we wait," he said.

"For how long?"

"Until somebody hands me a reason to move, and it'll come. Nobody arranges a thing that size without leaving edges on it."

He turned the cup without drinking. "Rhavel had orders from someone. Plenty of men came off the watch on his word, and every one of them had a sergeant who noticed they were gone. That's a lot of people holding a small piece."

For a while the three of them sat there with the pot going cold and nobody working on anything. It was the first hour like that he'd had in a while. It was Zafira who ended the moment.

"They announced the recovery this afternoon," she said. "While you were still in the chamber. Pumping crews, gate work, however many weeks it takes."

"Who's running it?"

"The fleet. Who else? They own every pump and every lock in Meraval."