Vaelora continued navigating. The compass was out and pointed at something, despite her repeated slaps to get the needle to point to where she wanted it to go to. Raum had not yet determined where she wanted to go.
The terrain had opened up from the tree cover into long stretches of cleared land. The sky was bigger out here. He could read the sun now. His sense of direction was coming back.
He was walking at the right width.
"Does rain feel different?" she asked. "From above it."
"Quieter. You watch it go down. Airships fly above rain clouds."
She thought about this. "That sounds lonely."
They walked through the morning. At a fork she went left without hesitation, the compass confirming something she had already decided. He looked at the sky and said nothing.
The second town appeared before she said it would.
She looked at the compass briefly and put it away.
Conversations stopped a half-beat before a stranger passed and resumed a half-beat after. People moved like they had learned to be visible for the shortest amount as possible. At two corners of the main square soldiers were positioned on guard. Not doing anything besides that, just positioned in a way that said this was their job.
Something looked like it happened here recently. Or was still happening. The town had organized itself around whatever it was, but no one actually said what that was.
The square was quieter than it should have been for the time of day. Which made the gathered crowd around the magician in its center noticeable.
It wasn't large, but just enough to justify a performance. Things vanished. Coins appeared from nowhere. A woman's bracelet disappeared from her wrist and reappeared from behind a man's collar. Small objects moved out of existence and back into it, the performer's hands loose and easy, no ceremony.
The audience clapped seeing this all happen in front of their eyes.
People edged closer to see better.
While they did, they lost things. A watch chain. A ring worn slightly too large. Three coins from a pocket that had been half-open. Nobody noticed because everyone was watching the show.
Raum watched this go on for two minutes. "Don't get near him" he told Vaelora before sitting down in the front row.
The performer registered him as a new face, close, not joining the crowd's center of gravity. The eyes moved on and came back. The show continued.
"Can I see something larger disappear?" Raum said. Just loud enough only the performer on stage could hear.
The performer smiled, clearly hearing the request but didn't respond. He redirected the crowd. A different trick, something produced from behind someone's ear, the show continuing to operate as smoothly as he wanted it to. Most people let themselves be fooled and redirected from what he was doing.
Raum waited for his next pause in the performance.
"The coin was good," he said. "Could you do something the size of a cup?"
Laughter in the crowd. This man in the front row, making demands. The performer continued to smile. "The spirit can only operate within its own confines," he said. The magician moved the show around the request. He did not demonstrate what he didn't want to.
"Can you do it to a person?"
Real interest moved through the crowd. The performer took a moment to give an answer the crowd would accept, "I do not touch that which the human soil inhabits." It was practiced. The crowd nodded.
Raum leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.
The performer had now diverted around a man in the front row for four tricks. That was not a comfortable position to be in. He decided to address it directly.
The cup on the ledge beside Raum vanished.
Raum's hand moved toward where it had been, but found genuinely nothing. Wherever it now was, the place or dimension it had been sent to was somewhere Reaver couldn't reach.
More things vanished. Objects near Raum, at the edge of his reach, things close to him that should have been simple to track. The performer was pressing. The space between them was becoming a problem, but not unsolvable. He could not make all things disappear. He was working within his own confines.
The crowd had stopped being sure what they were watching.
Raum stood up.
"The watch chain," he said. "The man in the blue coat has been touching the pocket it was in for about five minutes." He looked left. "The ring from the woman near the fountain. Right hand, fourth finger. She's been checking where it went since the scarves came out." He turned slightly. "The boy who stood close to the stage lost three coins when you made him look right . He thinks they fell."
He stopped there.
The crowd looked at each other. Then at the performer.
The performer had an exit plan, but he never accounted for a whole city ganging up on him.
Raum and Vaelora were already moving out of the crowd. They let the town handle it. They weren't staying for this part.
"How did you know the performer was stealing from the crowd?" Vaelora asked finally catching up to him.
"His Pulse is similar, but not quite the same to my own. I could sense the objects once they were dispossessed, but I couldn't tell where they were. He likely hides them somewhere in plain sight in a place you wouldn't think to look, then collects them once the show is done."
Raum stopped and glanced left at a wanted poster plastered on the town's board.
The paper looked fresh enough to have been renewed recently, like it was part of the town's maintenance protocol.
The town's tension had a reason now. That was what the soldiers at the corners were about. That was the careful movement and the calibrated volumes. Not just order being kept. People organized around the same fear. Whether the name on the wall was still out there, and whether the reward was still worth thinking about.
He turned away from it, continuing to leave the town.
"I'll take us to get a ship for sure this time," Vaelora said.
He glanced at her.
"If that's where your compass is going to take us."
She nodded several times, her crimson hair spilling over her vision. She brushed the strands aside, and like she always did, walked in the direction she had chosen, regardless if the compass was agreeing with her mind.
He was able to glance at the compass needle for long enough to know where they were and weren't heading.
Then they were on open ground, the afternoon light coming in low across the long flat.
Vaelora consulted the compass, adjusted it by a degree and kept walking.
The road ahead was longer and stranger than anything they had left.