One Job Too Many

The city of Verrado had two halves, and everyone who lived in the lower one had a joke about it that wasn't really a joke: the rich lived in the sky because they'd rather forget the ground existed, and the poor lived on the ground because the ground was the only thing that hadn't yet found a way to charge rent for the air.

Kesi flew scavenger runs between the two halves for a living, which was a polite way of saying she stole things the sky-district hadn't finished deciding whether they'd noticed missing yet. Her ship, the Rattletrap — a name she'd chosen with the specific intent of managing expectations — had a hull held together by three different colors of patch-welding and an engine that ran, by her own count, on roughly forty percent spite.

The job that changed everything came from a man she didn't know, in a bar she didn't trust, offering four times her usual rate for a single flight into the sky-district's restricted freight corridors — no questions, no cargo manifest, just a location, a time window, and an amount of money that made every instinct she'd spent a decade sharpening scream at her to refuse.

She took it anyway. Everyone in the lower district eventually took the job that made no sense, because eventually the ordinary jobs stopped covering the ordinary bills, and Kesi had exactly eleven days left on a debt that the wrong kind of people collected in ways that didn't involve currency.

The cargo, when she finally got eyes on it in the restricted corridor, was not cargo at all.

It was a girl. No older than twelve, strapped into a transport pod built for freight, wearing a medical bracelet with a corporate logo Kesi recognized instantly, because it was stitched into the collar of every enforcement drone that had ever chased her out of sky-district airspace.

Kesi sat in the cockpit for exactly four seconds, doing the math on eleven days and an impossible debt and the very simple, very inconvenient fact that she was, apparently, not quite as good at ignoring a child's face as her reputation suggested.

Then she overrode the delivery coordinates, and pointed the Rattletrap somewhere the man in the bar had never intended it to go.