Sure he does. Or if he doesn’t, he knows where to get some. There aren’t any black-market vendors operating in Baalboden without Thom’s knowledge.

“Where can I find it, then?”

He shrugs his massive shoulders and picks up a grimy rag to smear across the greasy countertop as if cleaning is suddenly a priority.

I’m sick of running into roadblocks. If I can’t convince him to give me what I need, I won’t be able to finish my current invention. If I don’t finish my current invention, I can’t head into the Wasteland to find Jared. And if I don’t find Jared, Rachel and I are stuck together until next year’s Claiming ceremony, when another hapless man can do his best to tame her strong will into something that won’t get her tossed into the Commander’s dungeon.

I wish him luck.

“How much for the supplies?” I ask Thom. Maybe if he sees that I refuse to go away, he’ll deal with me. Someone has to deal with me. They can’t all be afraid of the potential repercussions.

“Boy, you must be stupid.”

I laugh, a short sound devoid of mirth. I’m a lot of things—Protector, orphan, inventor, outcast—but I’m not stupid.

I am, however, a little desperate.

By the look of the place, so is Thom. The grooved wooden floor is splintered and sagging. The walls are stained with soot from the torches he uses instead of lanterns. And his stock of ale behind the counter looks more than half depleted. I don’t have the kind of money that will take care of the slow decline I see here.

But beneath the decline, I sense something else. In the darkened corners, in the tense, watchful eyes of the serving girl who glances repeatedly out the heavily shrouded windows, and in the huddled, quiet conversation of the six men sitting behind me—the only other patrons in the tavern—an undertone of secrecy wraps the room in deliberate seclusion.

What would Thom pay to protect those secrets from the prying eyes of the Commander and his guards? I pull a pair of small circular wooden objects from my cloak and set them on the counter. “You see these?”

He grunts and darts a look at the group in the corner. Interesting. I’m guessing he isn’t their leader, or he wouldn’t be looking to them for permission to continue our discussion. And they wouldn’t be hiding in the corner if they were in good standing with the Commander. Which means all of us are on the same side.

I just need to make them see it.

Raising my voice only enough to reach the group’s ears without sounding obvious, I say, “These are surveillance discs modified to alert you to the approach of a guard anywhere in a twenty-five-yard radius. You insert a battery in each”—I pull out a small battery from the batch I made last week and slap it on the counter—“and mount one to the outside of your building. It sends out a sonic pulse every thirty seconds and takes a reading of every citizen’s wristmark in the immediate area. If any of those wristmarks carry the military code, the outside disc triggers an alarm built into the disc you keep behind the counter. A twenty-five-yard radius means you have at least a forty-second warning. More than enough time to modify any suspicious behavior before getting caught.”

I sense more than hear the sudden quiet in the group behind me.

“I’m happy to give you a demonstration of their capabilities, but once I do, I expect my tubing, my wire, and my barrel of acid.”

A deep voice speaks from behind me. “You’re Logan McEntire, aren’t you?”

Turning, I face the group and their speaker, a man with bushy black hair, a silver-shot beard, and dark eyes, assesses me with fierce concentration.

I nod slowly, trying without success to put a name with his face. “I am.”

“Guess the fine merchants of North Hub didn’t have what you need. Or if they did, you aren’t exactly the person they want to be seen selling it to, are you?”

“No.”

The silence thickens between us, broken only by the slow steady drip of ale leaking from the barrel behind Thom and the quiet movements of the serving girl, who takes another look out the window as if searching the street for something.

“You take a risk bringing tech like that out into the open.” The man gestures toward the discs lying on the counter beside me. “If you’re caught, it’s the dungeon or worse for you.”

“The guards leave me alone as much as the rest of you do.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

“Am I supposed to feel something about it?”

His stare is unwavering. “If my mother was flogged to death for breaking the law, and I was declared a social outcast when I was but six years old, I think I’d feel something about it. Especially toward the man doing the flogging.”

His words rake across a long-healed scar, drawing fresh blood. He’s right. My mother broke the law and paid the price. And in a perpetual example of the consequences of disobedience, the Commander declared me an outcast, fit for nothing but life on the street until I came of age at seventeen. It’s impossible to separate the law and its punishments from the Commander, since in Baalboden the two are one and the same, but I’ve tried. It’s the only way I can live here without wanting to kill him.

“She shouldn’t have broken the law,” I say, though it’s hard to sound like I mean it.

“Or maybe the law shouldn’t demand a flogging for a woman caught walking the city streets without her Protector.” The man watches me closely.