The shelter slot was dry, narrow, and badly ventilated, which made it the best place they had slept since arriving.
That did not make it good.
A low platform ran along the back wall with space enough for three if none of them respected their own joints, and the fourth person was expected to make peace with the floor or lean against a support and pretend that counted as rest. The cloth divider on one side had been patched more than once, and the boards underfoot shifted just enough to remind them that privacy in Carrion Market was probably a story people told themselves when they were too tired to keep being honest.
Toma sat first and let out a slow breath he had probably been holding through the last quarter of the walk.
Mara checked the edges of the compartment, the overhead supports, the blind angle near the hanging cloth, and only then set her spear down within reach.
Pell dropped onto the platform like someone whose bones had negotiated separately with the rest of him and lost.
Leon stayed standing.
Toma noticed.
"Sit," he said.
"In a minute."
"You say that when you're thinking too hard."
Leon looked at him. "You've known me less than a day."
"That's enough for some things."
Pell raised a hand from where he was half collapsed against the wall. "I support the command to sit. You're making the room feel anxious on purpose."
"I'm doing very little on purpose right now," Leon said.
"That's worse."
Mara had already moved on. "I'm getting medicine."
Toma started to rise, then stopped when the leg protested.
Leon said, "I'll go."
Three heads turned toward him.
Pell spoke first. "That feels suspiciously generous."
"It feels practical," Mara said at the same time.
Toma looked at Leon for a moment and then nodded. "Take him."
He meant Pell.
Pell sat up at once. "Absolutely not. I've done enough walking to become philosophical."
Leon said, "You know the Market better than I do."
"I know enough to avoid volunteering for errands."
"And if I get cheated?"
Pell considered that for less than a second. "Fine. But I want it recorded that this is emotional coercion."
Mara gave him a long look. "You don't know what that means."
"I know exactly what it means. I just use it selectively."
Leon went with Pell because it made sense, because Toma needed Mara nearby if the leg worsened, and because sending Mara into a new market to barter from a place of open distrust sounded like the kind of efficient disaster people later called avoidable.
Trade Row sat one level above the lower shelter tier, reached by a narrow stair cut between rib supports and a sloping platform where water dripped steadily into a channel below. By the time they reached it, the evening flow of people had thickened. Not crowded enough to hide in. Crowded enough to get lost in if someone knew how.
Pell clearly did.
He moved through the row in short quick paths, using gaps as soon as they appeared and changing pace just enough to avoid colliding with anyone carrying weight. Leon followed and watched the place unfold around them.
Trade Row was less a street than a long raised run of attached stalls, hanging tables, and partial enclosures built along the inner curve of two giant ribs. Light came from shielded lamps and cook fires set in hanging metal trays. The goods were not displayed beautifully because beauty had no market value here. They were displayed clearly. Water skins. Dried meat. Bone hooks. Wrapped bandages. Sharpened metal strips. Fish oil. Rope. Boots in mismatched sizes. Things taken apart and given second lives by people who could not afford first ones.
The traders themselves watched with the same look Veya had worn at the perimeter.
What do you have.
How tired are you.
Can I wait one more hour and make you pay more.
Pell stopped at a stall half enclosed by hanging strips of canvas and said, "This one cheats less."
The woman behind the stall was old in the hard, efficient way some people became when age had been earned entirely through refusing to die. Her hair was tied back in a gray knot, and her left hand was missing two fingers above the knuckle.
She looked at Pell and sighed.
"No."
Pell put one hand to his chest. "I haven't even asked."
"You're here. That's usually enough."
He pointed at Leon. "I brought commerce."
Her eyes moved to Leon and narrowed slightly. "You brought someone who hasn't learned the right expressions yet."
Leon said, "I'm trying to fix that."
She grunted.
"Meds," Pell said. "Leg binding. Anti-infection if you've got anything real and not just foul paste. Maybe pain relief if it doesn't cost a kidney."
The woman reached under the stall and set out three wrapped bundles without hurrying. "That costs."
"Everything costs," Pell said. "You all say it like new information."
"Because newcomers keep acting surprised."
Leon looked at the bundles, then at the rest of the stall.
There were two other customers nearby pretending not to listen. One man with a split eyebrow and a rope coil over one shoulder. One younger woman holding a crate with dried shell meat stacked inside. Both listening. Both also watching to see how this went.
The old trader named a price.
Pell made a face so wounded it bordered on performance art.
"That," he said, "is hostile."
"That," the trader replied, "is evening rate."
Leon asked, "What's morning rate?"
The old woman looked at him.
"There isn't one," she said.
"There is if the goods don't move before dawn and the lower tier gets another intake wave."
Pell turned his head toward him slowly.
The old trader's face did not change. "You think you understand market timing."
"No," Leon said. "I think you understand it, and I'd rather not waste us both time pretending otherwise."
The split-brow man beside them smothered a laugh.
The old trader noticed.
That mattered.
Leon continued in the same even tone. "We're provisional. That marker tells everyone here we're either about to become useful or disappear. If we disappear, your bundles go to someone else tomorrow. If we don't, we remember who charged desperation price before knowing whether we'd be worth keeping alive."
Pell stared at him now with open professional interest.
The old woman looked from the marker at Leon's wrist to his face and back again.
"Threatening me is cheap," she said.
"Good," Leon replied. "Then it should suit your standards."
The woman with the crate looked down to hide a smile.
The trader noticed that too.
Very useful.
Leon softened his voice by just enough to change the shape of the exchange.
"Or," he said, "you give us a price that leaves everyone here thinking you know how to invest in people before the whole row decides you only know how to feed on panic."
That landed.
Not because it was eloquent. Because it turned the room.
The old trader was not negotiating privately anymore. She was negotiating in front of listeners, and public image in places like this was just another kind of stock.
She named a lower price.
Not generous. Real.
Pell looked offended anyway. "Still predatory."
"You can bleed somewhere else."
Pell considered. "Accepted."
Leon reached for the bundles, and the trader held them back a moment longer.
"What do they call you?" she asked.
"Leon."
She grunted once. "You read a room like a debt collector. I dislike that."
"I'm sorry to hear it."
"No, you're not."
"Not especially."
That seemed to satisfy her.
They paid with what little trade weight Pell had held back from earlier scavenging and one small information token Leon did not like giving away. Not the basin route. Something less important but still useful, a note about shell movement near a lower shelf line that would matter to scavengers and not much beyond that.
As they turned to go, the split-brow man with the rope coil said, "You're new."
Leon looked at him. "That was the general impression, yes."
"You should be careful about sounding sharp on your first night."
Pell answered before Leon could. "He is being careful. This is apparently the reduced version."
The man laughed at that, but his eyes stayed on Leon.
"Name's Orren," he said. "Bone Runner side. Try not to let Quiet Ledger hear you talk before you know what they collect."
Leon stored the name and the warning both.
"Good advice," he said.
Orren shrugged. "No. Just affordable."
That line stayed with Leon all the way back down the row.
Pell, who had been quiet for almost thirty seconds, finally said, "You really are dangerous."
Leon glanced at him. "From you, that means very little."
"No," Pell said. "It means I know the shape when I see it."
He tapped the medicine bundle under Leon's arm.
"You didn't buy those. You bought a reputation. Very small. Very local. But still."
Leon said nothing.
Because Pell was right.
And because he had the growing sense that someone else in Carrion Market had probably heard about it already.