The first warning reached the market before anyone rang its bell.
A hunter stood between a fish cart and a stack of empty baskets, reading something only he could see. At first the woman behind the baskets thought he meant to buy them. She moved the cracked ones aside, exposed the good handles, and waited with a patience that had already lasted most of the morning.
Then he told her to close her stall.
She put the cracked baskets back.
By the time Eli reached the street, the argument had drawn a crowd large enough to obstruct the very passage the warning wanted cleared. Kellan had met them on the ordinary surface approach with the market association’s request for assistance. The hunter had asked local responders for help; one of those responders had sent for people who could carry stock and reach the clinics. It was a request to prepare, not permission to take command of the market.
Rook’s announcement still seemed to hang above the city. Direct command. An end to competing instructions. Protection made dependable by putting its decisions in one place. Eli had left the shelter with the broadcast’s unanswered questions still moving through his head, and now a man wearing a hunter’s contract stood in sunlight offering a reason those questions might sound intolerably slow.
