Chapter 69: How to Uncover a Massive Corruption Scheme by Accident (3)
Antoril’s pre-dawn hours felt like they’d been written by a drunken playwright. The magical streetlights still flickered lazily on crooked posts, some tangled with dry vines or scrawled with protest slogans in charcoal.
The wind carried a confusing mix of burnt bread, medicinal herbs, and institutional corruption. And there I was — climbing down the side of the boarding house with more weight on my back than those old walls were probably meant to handle, my cloak catching on every damned hook along the way and my pickaxe slapping against my leg with every badly-judged jump.
"Of course," I thought. "Because doors are for people who don’t live inside a never-ending stage play of impulsive teen drama."
I landed in the alley with a dull thud. Mud splashed up to my knees. Great. Now I didn’t just look like a criminal — I smelled like one too. I tried to get my bearings, looking around, but this part of Antoril — the backside of the boarding house and the junction with abandoned trade houses — felt like a badly sewn patch in the city’s fabric. Not a soul in sight. No Thalia. No trail. Just rooftop cats and the distant echo of a night bell.
But she had gone through here. That much I was sure of. Maybe she ran across the rooftops, maybe took the narrow path that dropped toward the old market — wherever she went, she was alone. Again.
And the most annoying part of it all? That somewhere in some shady corner of my heart, I cared. Not in a poetic way. In a practical way. If she died, it would be a logistical problem. And emotional. And maybe moral. But mostly logistical.
"All right, Dante," I muttered, taking a deep breath. "Time to switch to pursuit mode."
I climbed the slippery stones along the alley and followed the first path that made sense: the one that hurt the most to walk.
That’s always where human stupidity left its footprints. I cut through the hatmaker’s lanes, passed an herb depot that looked long abandoned, and crossed the narrow walkways toward the university district, where the sky shone brighter thanks to runic floodlights.
Technically, I should’ve been grateful to be alive and still had my pickaxe. But honestly, all I wanted right then was for someone to explain how a girl with the investigative sense of a blind dog managed to cause this much chaos in less than twenty-four hours.
The city was too quiet. The kind of silence that wasn’t about a lack of sound, but a lack of witnesses.