He came down off the headland through the old drainage path, the one that ran behind the decommissioned mill and emptied into the industrial quarter's southern edge. The route was a porter's route, the kind of thing you learned when you spent six years carrying equipment through places the guild didn't bother to secure. It was still unsecured. Still overlooked. The city had not changed in the ways that mattered.
The mill was dark. It had been dark for a decade before he'd left, and a year hadn't improved it. He moved through its shadow and emerged onto a side street two blocks from the northern district boundary. The streetlights were the same sodium orange. The pavement was the same cracked asphalt. The air smelled of salt and rust and the faint chemical tang of the rendering plant that
