Eleo spun on his heel and bolted straight toward the tower.
He made it approximately four steps before something yanked him backward by the ears.
"OWWW!"
He stumbled, nearly tripping over his own feet, and spun around with watery eyes to find Tony standing there completely unbothered, two fingers pinched around Eleo's right ear like he was holding a piece of litter he'd found on the ground.
"Hold it, Bunny Boy."
"LET GO OF MY EAR!"
Tony released him with a casual flick. Eleo grabbed both ears protectively, glaring up at the skeleton with the betrayed expression of someone who had just been deeply wronged.
"What's wrong with you?! What was that for?!"
Tony straightened his cuffs. "Nothing's wrong, my dear Bunny Boy." He tilted his skull slightly, his grin as easy and unhurried as a man watching clouds drift by. "I simply wanted to grab a drink before we embark on a very, very, very~ dangerous mission."
Eleo stared at him. "A drink."
"A drink," Tony confirmed pleasantly.
"With a BUNNY KID."
"With a bunny kid," Tony agreed, already turning and strolling in the opposite direction of the tower.
Eleo threw his arms out. "BUT WE GOTTA HURRY!" He hopped in place, his ears bouncing. "The Mayor's speech won't last forever! If we don't go NOW, we'll miss our chance!"
Tony did not stop walking. He did not speed up. He did not look back.
"The speech lasts two hours," he said simply. "I checked."
Eleo opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
"...How did you check?"
Tony glanced over his shoulder, one eye socket gleaming with amusement. "I have my ways, Bunny Boy. Now come along. The city is beautiful and you haven't even seen half of it."
Eleo groaned so dramatically the pigeons nearby startled and flew off. But after a moment of standing there with his arms dangling and his ears flat, he trotted after the skeleton.
"Fine," he muttered. "But only because I'm still kinda hungry."
Tony smiled. "Of course you are."
They walked, and the city opened up around them like a book flipping to its best pages.
The main boulevard of Umapin was wide enough for six carts to roll side by side, its cobblestones worn smooth and pale gold from years of foot traffic. The stones caught the afternoon light and threw it back in warm, honeyed tones, so that walking down the street felt like moving through something amber and slow.
Merchant stalls lined both sides, draped in colored canvas. A fabric seller had bolts of cloth rolled up and standing in rows, their colors so vivid they almost hurt to look at: deep indigo, burnt orange, silk the color of shallow seawater. Beside him, a woman sold glass bottles of perfume and oils that caught the sun and fractured it into tiny rainbows across the cobblestones. The smell drifting from her stall was sweet and heady, something floral with something underneath it that Eleo could not name.
He stopped and sniffed the air like a dog.
"What's that smell?"
"Jasmine oil," Tony said. "And cedar. Don't touch anything."
Eleo had already picked up a bottle.
The woman smiled patiently. Tony set it back down without breaking stride.
Further along, a blacksmith had dragged a worktable out onto the street and was demonstrating a new blade for a cluster of onlookers. The metal rang out clearly each time his hammer fell, a clean sound that cut through the general noise of the boulevard. Sparks jumped and died in the afternoon air. The people watching leaned in, fascinated, and Eleo leaned in too, ears pricked forward.
"Whoa," he said softly. "I want one."
"You fight with your fists," Tony said.
"I want one anyway."
"No."
Eleo pouted but kept walking.
The boulevard curved slightly and opened into a wide plaza where a quartet of musicians had set up near the fountain. One played a lute, one a drum, one a horn, and the fourth simply clapped and sang in a deep, carrying voice that bounced off the surrounding buildings and filled the square with warmth. Couples danced on the open stones. Children chased each other around the fountain's base. An old man sat on a bench nearby with his eyes closed and his face turned toward the sun, perfectly still, smiling at nothing in particular.
Eleo slowed down without meaning to.
He watched the dancers for a moment, their feet quick and light on the cobblestones.
"Hey, Tony."
"Mm."
"This city's really nice, huh."
Tony glanced around. His expression did something subtle, some small shift that was not quite a smile and not quite anything else. "It has its charm," he said.
"Have you been here before?"
"Once or twice. Over the years."
Eleo looked up at him. "How many years?"
Tony's grin remained easy. "More than you'd believe, Bunny Boy."
Eleo squinted.
"You're a hundred and thirty."
"Yes."
"That's really old."
"Astute observation."
"Does it feel weird being a skeleton? Like, do you get cold?"
Tony considered this with apparent sincerity.
"No more than usual."
"Do your bones ever rattle when you run?"
"Occasionally."
"That's kinda cool actually."
"I've made peace with it," Tony said.
Eleo filed it away somewhere in the back of his mind and trotted to keep up.
The street narrowed as they moved away from the plaza, threading between older buildings whose upper floors leaned slightly toward each other overhead, close enough that the residents could probably shake hands across the gap. Laundry lines stretched between windows, shirts and trousers swaying gently. Potted plants sat on sills, vivid green against the pale stone. Somewhere above them a cat watched their passage from a balcony railing with supreme indifference.
A bakery took up the ground floor of one of the leaning buildings, its door propped open, and the smell that poured out was staggering. Bread, butter, something with cinnamon. Eleo's feet stopped completely of their own accord.
His nose twitched.
His stomach said something impolite.
Tony stopped two steps later and looked back. "No."
"I didn't even say anything!"
"Your face said it. And your ears. And your tail."
Eleo looked at the bakery. He looked at Tony. He looked at the bakery again.
"I just want to look," he said.
"Looking leads to touching. Touching leads to eating. I've known you for ten minutes and I can already see exactly how this ends."
Eleo opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"...Fair," he admitted quietly.
Tony almost smiled. "Come on. The bar's just ahead."
The place was called The Ivory Anchor, and it sat at the corner of two narrow streets like it had always been there and always would be. Its sign was painted in flaking gold letters above a door so old the wood had gone nearly black with age. Window boxes spilled over with small white flowers. Through the thick glass windows, warm amber light glowed from within.
Tony pushed the door open and held it, which Eleo found vaguely suspicious.
Inside, the bar was the kind of place that had decided not to be loud about anything. The ceiling was low, crossed with dark beams. Round tables were scattered across uneven flagstone floors, most of them occupied by people who looked like they were in the middle of conversations they'd been having for years. A long bar ran the length of the back wall, its surface worn to a satin smoothness. Behind it, shelves climbed to the ceiling, holding bottles of every color, their contents glinting in the low light like a collection of trapped sunsets.
A large woman behind the bar with close-cropped silver hair and arms like a retired wrestler looked up when they entered.
She looked at Tony.
Something crossed her face. Amusement, mostly.
"Well," she said. "It's been a while."
Tony settled onto a barstool with the ease of someone returning to a favorite chair. "Marta. You look well."
"You look dead."
"Same as always, then."
She snorted and set two glasses on the bar without being asked. Tony tapped the bar once in acknowledgment.
Eleo had already climbed onto the barstool beside him and was spinning himself back and forth, looking at everything with the focused attention of someone cataloguing a museum.
"This place is old," Eleo announced.
"It is," Marta agreed.
"I like it."
She looked at him the way people look at stray cats that have wandered through an open door: not unwelcoming exactly, just assessing. "What'll you have, kid?"
Tony raised one gloved finger. "I'll have the Blue Mushroom Wine."
Marta nodded and reached for a bottle on the upper shelf. The glass was deep blue and slightly opaque, and the wine inside, when she poured it, was the same extraordinary color, dark and shifting, with a faint iridescence to it like oil on water or the inside of a shell.
Eleo watched it pour with enormous eyes.
"That," he said immediately, "is the coolest thing I've ever seen. I want that."
Tony did not even look up. "No."
Eleo turned to him. "Why?!"
"You're twelve."
"So?!"
"So," Tony said, lifting the glass and examining the color against the light, "Blue Mushroom Wine is not for twelve-year-olds. It is made from a rare fungus that grows only in the deep caverns of World 3, it ferments for no less than forty years, and it produces effects that would be extremely inadvisable for someone whose brain is still developing."
Eleo stared at him. "What kind of effects?"
"The kind that would make you even more chaotic than you already are, which I consider a genuine threat to public safety."
"But I wanna try it!"
"No."
Eleo crossed his arms and sulked for approximately four seconds. Then he turned to Marta. "Can I have something else?"
She slid a tall glass of something bright orange and fizzing toward him. It smelled like citrus and something faintly spicy.
Eleo sniffed it. Took a cautious sip.
His ears shot straight up.
"WHOA."
"Passion fruit and ginger," Marta said. "House specialty for people who can't have the wine."
"This is AMAZING!" Eleo declared, immediately taking a long pull through the straw. He came up looking delighted and slightly wild-eyed from the fizz.
Tony sipped his wine in silence.
Eleo watched him from the corner of his eye.
Tony held the glass with complete ease, raising it to where his mouth should have been. There was, anatomically speaking, no mouth. Just the permanent grin of his skull, the jaw slightly open, the teeth white and even.
Eleo watched the wine disappear.
He squinted.
He leaned slightly closer.
Tony set the glass down.
Eleo leaned even closer, one ear tilting forward.
Tony turned his head. His empty eye sockets regarded Eleo with perfect calm. "Yes?"
"How do you drink that?"
"Carefully."
"No, I mean..." Eleo gestured vaguely at Tony's face. "You don't have a... you know... throat. Or a stomach. Or... anything."
"Correct."
"So where does it go?"
Tony picked up his glass again. "Away," he said simply, and took another sip.
Eleo stared for a very long time. Then he turned back to his own drink, looking profoundly unsatisfied with that answer.
Tony set his second glass down and was quiet for a moment, looking at the rows of bottles behind the bar with the expression of someone doing quiet arithmetic.
Outside, through the thick windows, Eleo could see the street still busy with afternoon life. A group of kids sprinting past. A merchant pushing a loaded cart with his shoulder. Two women walking arm in arm, heads together, laughing.
"Tony," Eleo said.
"Mm."
"What's on top of that tower? Like, actually. Besides the ship."
Tony was quiet for a moment. "A man," he said. "Or what's left of one. He's been sitting up there for four years, guarding that ship. He took the post because no one else was strong enough to hold it, and he's stayed because no one's been strong enough to take it."
Eleo absorbed this.
"Is he strong?"
"Very."
Eleo's grin came back. "Good."
Tony glanced at him sideways. There was something in the look that was harder to read than his usual amusement. Something that might have been respect, or something close to it, working its way toward the surface.
"You know," Tony said, swirling the last of his wine, "most people I've approached about this ship ran the other direction once they heard the details."
"That's dumb," Eleo said.
"Some might call it sensible."
"I call it dumb." He finished his drink with a final long pull and set the glass down with a decisive clink. He hopped off the barstool and stretched his arms above his head until his back popped. "Alright! I'm done! I'm refreshed! I've had my fancy orange drink! Can we go steal the ship now?"
Tony reached into his coat and set coins on the bar with a quiet click. He nodded to Marta, who raised a hand in acknowledgment without looking up from the glass she was polishing.
He rose from the barstool with the measured grace of someone who had never once rushed and did not intend to start.
"One more thing," he said.
Eleo was already bouncing on his feet. "What?!"
Tony straightened his jacket. Adjusted his cuffs. Set his collar exactly right.
Then he looked down at Eleo with that wide, permanent grin that gave nothing away and everything away at the same time.
"When we get up there," he said quietly, "follow my lead until you can't anymore. And when you can't anymore..." He tilted his skull slightly. "Do what you do."
Eleo blinked. Then the grin spread across his face like sunrise.
"What I do," he repeated.
"What you do," Tony confirmed.
Eleo turned toward the door. The tower was visible through the window, vast and dark against the afternoon sky, its peak lost somewhere above the clouds.
He cracked his knuckles.
"Alright," he said. "Let's go steal a ship."
Tony pulled the door open.
The city carried on around them, warm and golden and entirely unaware of what was about to happen to it.
They stepped out into the light.