The wagon hit a rut and the sack Coin was leaning against shifted. Coin shifted with it, settled back into the groove between two bags of something dry that rustled when the wheels found rough ground.

  The merchant up front was talking to his horse. Full conversation. The horse had not responded once in the hours Coin had been listening, which hadn't slowed the man down at all.

  "—and I told her, I said, you can't sell barley at that price in a river town, there's no margin, there's no—you're not listening. You never listen."

  The horse kept walking.

  The road had been like this since Coin climbed aboard. Flat, rutted, tree-lined based on the shadows that passed over the tarp at regular intervals. The merchant talked. The horse endured. The wheels turned.

  The merchant moved on to the topic of his wife's sister, who apparently had opinions about how he ran his business that she shared at every family gathering. The horse maintained its position on the matter.

  Coin had heard worse. The innkeeper with the jingle habit had been worse. The beggar's cup had been worse. A man talking to a horse about his sister-in-law was practically peaceful by comparison.

  The shadows passing over the tarp got shorter as the sun climbed. The ruts in the road smoothed out, which meant better road, which meant closer to somewhere worth maintaining a road for. The merchant's monologue shifted from family grievances to inventory. How many sacks he had, what he'd get per unit, who owed him from last time. The numbers were boring. The confidence behind them was earned. This man knew his margins.

  The road noise changed. The wheels went from packed dirt to stone. Other carts now, passing close, wheels and hooves and voices overlapping. The merchant stopped talking to the horse and started talking to people, calling out to someone he recognized, haggling a greeting into a price check without breaking stride.

  Town.

  Coin waited until the wagon slowed for traffic, rolled out from under the tarp, dropped off the back edge, and hit the street. Nobody saw. The wagon kept moving. The merchant kept talking, this time to someone who could actually answer, and Coin was already gone.

  The street had everything in it. Carts, dogs, a goat tied to a post that had chewed its rope halfway through, and people moving in every direction without looking down. Coin rolled through the traffic, cutting between wheels and hooves and boots that landed where they landed. Nobody checked.

  A shadow fell over Coin and stayed. A boot came down where Coin had been, heel ringing off the stone, and the owner of the boot laughed. Not the good kind. Coin cut left. The boot followed, heel slamming down again, and the man was making a game of it now, tracking the coin on the ground the way a child tracked a beetle it intended to step on.

  Coin reached for a thread. Pull it, tilt the man's balance, watch him hit the street. Coin had done this a thousand times.

  The reach lit up hot across every surface Coin had. Coin pulled back. The pain stayed for a few seconds after, sitting in Coin the way heat sat in metal.

  The boot came down again. Coin dodged it, rolled off the main street and down a side road where the traffic thinned out and the buildings weren't stacked on top of each other.

  The side street opened up after a bend. Shorter buildings, fewer people, the noise from the main road falling off behind Coin. A cat watched from a windowsill. A woman was beating a rug in a doorway.

  An inn sat where the street met a small square. Two stories, plaster walls gone yellow with age, a door propped open with a brick. The windows were dark but the door was wide and from inside came the low murmur of people settled in for the afternoon.

  Coin rolled over the threshold.

  ***

  The room was small and the bed took up most of it.

  A nightstand sat next to the headboard. Coin rolled to the back edge where the wall met the wood and stopped there. The window had shutters instead of glass. The door was locked. Coin had made sure of that before anything else.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The light through the shutters striped the bed in intervals. Coin counted them. Six bars of afternoon sun, each one the width of a finger, crossing the mattress and climbing the far wall at an angle that would shift as the hours moved. All of them hit the bed. The nightstand stayed in shadow.

  That was fine. Coin was here for the quiet.

  LOCATION: SECURED.

  OBJECTIVE: PENDING.

  Coin had always been the thing that moved. Across continents, through wars, in and out of treasuries that thought they could hold something older than their walls. Coin chose where to be and when to stop being there, because Coin could always leave.

  Coin needed to think about what came next.

  What if Coin did nothing. Stayed on the nightstand. Let the afternoon pass and the evening come and the morning after that. Let the maid find a coin on the nightstand and pocket it or spend it or drop it in a jar. Let the next person find Coin and the next and the next.

  Coin held that future up and looked at it.

  Pockets. Endless pockets. Lint pressed against every surface, gray and matted, forever. Counting tables where some merchant's wet thumb ground spit into the stamped face over and over. Boxes with no light. Tarnish creeping in from the edges with nobody to polish it back. The slow green rot of copper left to fend for itself in the dark.

  Light.

  The whole idea weighed nothing. Coin had looked at it from every angle and found nothing there.

  Coin, giving up. Coin, accepting the nightstand. Coin, riding pockets for eternity.

  PROBABILITY OF SURRENDER: ZERO.

  Coin opened the layout.

  The rings spread out around Coin. Concentric, familiar. The outer ring's working nodes held their glow, steady and small against the dark of everything else.

  Coin went to the lock first.

  The main bridge stretched ahead, the lock sitting halfway across. The patterns had rearranged. Coin pressed. They shifted, folded, settled.

  Closed.

  Coin moved on.

  The tilt core sat where Coin had left it. The sphere, seamless and dark, surrounded by output channels running dry in every direction. Depleted. Coin had figured that out last time.

  What Coin hadn't figured out was where the power came from.

  Output channels ran to the outer ring. Coin had traced those. But output meant there had to be input. Something filled this sphere. Something fed it. And whatever that something was, it wasn't coming from the same direction the power went out.

  Coin started looking.

  The output channels were thick, visible, easy to follow. The rest of the sphere's surface was smooth and seamless and unhelpful. Coin circled it. Nothing. Circled again, slower, pressing attention into every contour the way Coin pressed into ward-seams on a safe.

  There. A channel so thin Coin had to focus to keep track of it. Running at an angle that didn't match anything else, threading away from the sphere and deeper into the layout.

  Coin followed.

  The channel dove past the familiar parts of the system and into architecture Coin had never walked through. Dead nodes on either side, dark bridges branching off toward locked sections and blocked pathways. Obstructions everywhere, places where the channel structure hit walls and stopped cold. Whatever those connected to was still offline and staying that way.

  But the channel Coin was following stayed open. Narrow, dim, but unobstructed. It threaded through the dead zones the way water found cracks in stone, taking the path that existed between the paths that didn't.

  More blocked branches. More dead ends splitting off to either side. Coin passed them and kept moving. The channel knew where it was going even if Coin didn't.

  It surfaced at a junction. Several smaller channels converged here, all feeding into the one Coin had been following, which fed back to the tilt core. A collection point. And every one of those smaller channels pointed the same direction.

  Toward the yellow light.

  Dim today. Low amber. Sitting at the end of a short bridge, doing what it had apparently been doing for longer than Coin wanted to think about.

  Coin crossed the bridge and touched the node.

  BONDED: NONE

  STRENGTH: ---

  Coin read it again.

  The node tracked bonds. That's what this was. A readout built to display a name and a strength level, and both fields were empty because there was nothing to display.

  The collection channels ran from here to the junction. The junction fed the input channel. The input channel fed the tilt core.

  Coin looked at the two empty fields and the whole layout clicked into place like a lock Coin had been picking from the wrong side.

  The tilt core was dry because this node had nothing to send it. This node had nothing to send because Coin wasn't bonded to anyone. Coin wasn't bonded to anyone because Coin had never in all the ages of Coin's existence cared about bonding with anyone.

  REALIZATION: THIS IS COIN'S FAULT.

  WITNESSES: ZERO, THANKFULLY.

  Coin let the layout close.

  The room came back. The nightstand. The bed. The light through the shutters had shifted while Coin was inside, the stripes thinner now, evening pushing in.

  Coin sat with it for exactly as long as it took to accept the diagnosis and move to the prescription. The tilt core needed power. The power came from bonds. Bonds required people.

  Bonds were just another lock to pick. Another ward to crack. Coin had been getting past things designed to keep Coin out since before the people who designed them existed.

  Giving up was a dumb idea. Coin was going to fix this instead.