"We may as well go and ask where they actually are," Rhosyn said, once the Ancients' wall was behind them. "Technically they're in both rings. They work down in the second, since that's where the transport channels run, so the warehouses and the customs offices and the leased stretches are all at that level. The third is where they'd live."
"At this hour I doubt anyone's still standing behind a counter, though I wouldn't swear to it when they have slaves." Trafalgar turned toward the tunnel entrance. "The third ring, then. If they live there, somebody there knows where she sleeps."
The crossing took longer than the distance deserved. Two checkpoints, one on each end, and a guard at the second who read Trafalgar's seal, read it again, and then read the name on it a third time as if the letters might rearrange themselves into something less inconvenient.
The third ring announced itself before they were fully out of the tunnel.
Everything sat farther apart here. The buildings had room to breathe and used it, the walkways were wide and clean, and water ran between whole districts in channels lined with worked stone instead of the raw concrete of the docks. Private compounds pushed out into the open space with their own small domes over their own gardens, and the lamps had been chosen to look expensive rather than to help anybody see.
The people matched it. Myrrhvale by blood in some cases, scales and colouring giving it away, and in others the sort of person who worked for that blood and had been paid enough to start dressing like it.
'You can smell the money down here,' Trafalgar thought. 'Two rings up they were hauling crates off a submarine at nine at night, and here somebody's watering a garden under the sea.'
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