“Have you been a thief all your life?”

A brief pause; then the pen resumed its path on the parchment, breaking a path that filled with a swirling river of black ink. Gleaming wetly in the sunlight, the ink clung to the grain of the paper, liquid for a long, lingering moment before it melted into the paper, its trail a series of strokes that were individually nothing, but collectively a study in pictures and images turned to symbols. Lhurriel watched him write for a time, wondering if he planned to answer  her question, or even acknowledge that she had spoken. Several times, she opened her mouth as if to speak – but compelled to wait by some angel of patience at her shoulder, she would only tug a grape free from the bunch on her lunch tray and pop it into her mouth, chewing loudly into the silence.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunchcrunchcrunchchewswallow.

Lhurriel was reaching for her thirty-seventh grape when Amery cleared his throat and put his stack of papers aside and rested his hands on his knees. “I wasn’t born a thief, no. Circumstances late in my childhood made learning how to steal and escape after stealing a necessity.”

She stared at him, slightly perturbed.

Unable to fathom why she continued to frown at him, Amery raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

Grumbling incomprehensibly about men and their rather distorted view of what constituted a proper answer to a question, Lhurriel scowled and folded her own arms, mimicking Amery’s position. “I know it’s not my business to ask, but you really think I’ll be satisfied with such a boring answer?”

Lhurriel remembered idle daydreams that she’d had as a child, wishing she could become this or that. She especially remembered, the rare times when she sneaked beyond the Blue Gates (so named for the river that separated parts of the Lower City from more well-to-do areas), seeing pretty young women in elegant, embroidered dresses, their entire wardrobes enough to feed five families from the Lower City for an entire year. (If you counted their accessories and various ornaments, perhaps another year or two.) They stepped out of carriages that were painted in gold gilt and paneled with the rainbow of an oyster shell’s insides, driven by a servant wearing livery that could probably sell for at least a few months’ lodging. Lhurriel didn’t have a particular eye for horseflesh, but paired or matched anything tended to be pricey, and the nobility would have nothing but perfect-looking matches in their house colors.

Such daydreams were long forgotten, now, and more like the stuff of jokes and laughter. Lhurriel held no delusions about her lot in life, and her place in the societal hierarchy. Those who possessed money and riches, possessed the privilege of passing laws to keep themselves luxuriously wealthy in their wasteful, frivolous lifestyles. To them, everyone else – commoners and pickpockets like her, merchants who sold what others made, and artisans who sweated and worked with their hands – deserved their lot for failing to uphold a certain standard of virtue and honor in their past lives.

Or so ‘they’ claimed. They, of the frivolous, wasteful, and ignorant lifestyles – they, who frittered away their carefree lives in a world of idle gossip and glittering lights, while others within the walls of the same city begged and starved, worked around the clock, and suffered indignities that no man, woman, or child should need to suffer in order to see tomorrow’s sunrise.

Was it ignorance or selfishness that made their worlds so different, so far apart?

Suddenly, the rest of the alley and the surrounding walls slid up, then flipped sideways. Lhurriel didn’t have time to do anything but yelp before half her face traded greetings with a pile of large, painful somethings that made the prospect of getting beaten for stealing look more inviting by the second.

Stars exploded behind Lhurriel’s eyes, even as searing heat bloomed like fire along her legs, chest, and face; for a long, excruciating moment, she couldn’t think, breathe, or grasp anything beyond how much her forehead – and her knees, and her toes, and her ankles – were hurting. Lhurriel coughed as she clutched her stomach, and in a dim corner of her mind, she winced at the fallen meat pie, just in the corner of her eye. It had fallen into a puddle of something dark and smelly, beyond the pile of bricks that was not supposed to be here. Her stomach grumbled in protest at the loss of the meal, then abruptly fell silent when sharp, piercing pain flared in her belly and chest when she filled her lungs with air.

Lhurriel half-sobbed, half-groaned.

“There you are. I’m going to beat you good for stealing from me again-!” The voice, and the waddling footsteps, were getting closer.

If she had to die, why couldn’t she have died with a full stomach, at the very least?