“I’m looking for a job,” Wylan said to him. “Do you know anyone who might be hiring?”
The man peered at him through a cloud of smoke. “Young dollop of cream like you should be able to make fine coin on West Stave.”
“Honest work.”
The man had laughed until he started hacking, but eventually he’d directed Wylan south to the tanneries.
Wylan was paid a scraping wage for mixing dyes and cleaning the vats. The other workers were mostly women and children, a few scrawny boys like him. They spoke little, too tired and too ill from the chemicals to do more than complete their work and collect their pay. They were given no gloves or masks, and Wylan was fairly sure he’d be dead of poisoning before he ever had to worry about where he should go with the tiny bit of money he was earning.
One afternoon, Wylan heard the dye chief complaining that they were losing gallons of dye to evaporation because the boilers ran too hot. He was cursing over the cost he’d paid to have two of them fixed and how little good it had done.
Wylan hesitated, then suggested adding seawater to the tanks.
“Why the hell would I want to do that?” said the dye chief.
“It will raise the boiling point,” said Wylan, wondering why he’d thought it was a good idea to speak at all. “The dyes will have to get hotter to boil so you’ll lose less to evaporation. You’ll have to tweak the formula because the saline will build up fast, and you’ll have to clean the tanks more regularly because the salt can be corrosive.”
The dye chief had merely spat a stream of jurda onto the floor and ignored him. But the next week, they tried using saltwater in one of the tanks. A few days later, they were using a mixture of seawater in all of them, and the dye chief started coming to Wylan with more questions. How could they keep the red dye from stiffening the hides? How could they shorten processing and drying times? Could Wylan make a resin to keep the dyes from bleeding?
A week after that, Wylan had been standing at the vats with his wooden paddle, woozy from the dyes, eyes watering, wondering if helping the dye chief meant he could request a raise, when a boy approached him. He was tall, lanky, his skin a deep Zemeni brown, and looked ridiculously out of place on the dying floor. Not just because of his lime plaid waistcoat and yellow trousers, but because he seemed to exude plea sure, as if there was no place he’d rather be than a miserable, foul-smelling tannery, as if he’d just walked into a party he couldn’t wait to attend. Though he was skinny, his body fit together with a kind of loose-limbed ease. The dye chief didn’t usually like strangers on the dying floor, but he didn’t say a word to this boy with the revolvers slung across his hips, just tipped his hat respectfully and went scurrying off.
Wylan’s first thought was that this boy had the most perfectly shaped lips he’d ever seen. His second was that his father had sent someone new to kill him. He gripped his paddle. Would the boy shoot him in broad daylight? Did people just do that?
But the boy said, “Hear you know your way around a chemistry set.”
“What? I … yes. A bit,” Wylan had managed.
“Just a bit?”
Wylan had the sense that his next answer was very important. “I have a background.” He’d taken to science and math and pursued them diligently, hoping they might somehow compensate for his other failings.
The boy handed Wylan a folded piece of paper. “Then come to this address when you get off work tonight. We might have a job for you.” He looked around, as if just noticing the vats and the pallid laborers bent over them. “A real job.”
Wylan had stared at the paper, the letters a tangle in front of his eyes. “I—I don’t know where this is.”
The boy gave an exasperated sigh. “You’re not from here, are you?” Wylan shook his head. “Fine. I’ll come fetch you, because clearly I don’t have anything to do with my time but squire new lilies around town. Wylan, right?” Wylan nodded. “Wylan what?”
“Wylan … Hendriks.”
“You know much about demo, Wylan Hendriks?”
“Demo?”
“The boom, the bang, the flint and fuss.”
Wylan didn’t know what he meant at all, but he felt admitting that would be a bad mistake. “Sure,” he said with as much confidence as he could muster.
The boy cut him a skeptical glance. “We’ll see. Be out front at six bells. And no guns unless you want trouble.”
“Of course not.”
The boy had rolled his gray eyes and muttered, “Kaz has got to be out of his mind.”
At six bells, Jesper arrived to escort Wylan to a bait shop in the Barrel. Wylan had been embarrassed by his rumpled clothes, but they were the only ones he owned, and the paralyzing fear that this was just some elaborate trap concocted by his father had provided ample distraction from his worry. In a back room of the bait shop, Wylan met Kaz and Inej. They told him they needed flash bombs and maybe something with a little more kick. Wylan had refused.
That night, he arrived back at the boarding house to find the first letter. The only words he recognized were the name of the sender: Jan Van Eck.
He’d lain awake all night, certain that at any moment Prior would smash through the door and clamp his meaty hands around his neck. He’d thought about running, but he barely had enough money to pay his rent, let alone buy a ticket out of the city. And what hope did he have in the country? No one was going to hire him on as farm labor. The next day, he went to see Kaz, and that night, he built his first explosive for the Dregs. He knew what he was doing was illegal, but he’d made more money for a few hours’ work than he made in a week at the tannery.
The letters from his father continued to arrive, once, sometimes twice a week. Wylan didn’t know what to make of them. Were they threats? Taunts? He stashed them in a stack beneath his mattress, and sometimes at night he thought he could feel the ink bleeding through the pages, up through the mattress and into his heart like dark poison.
But the more time that passed and the more he worked for Kaz, the less scared he felt. He’d make his money, get out of town, and never speak the name Van Eck again. And if his father decided to have him done away with before then, there was nothing Wylan could do about it. His clothes were ragged and threadbare. He was getting so skinny, he had to cut new holes in his belt. But he would sell himself in the pleasure houses of West Stave before he’d ask for his father’s mercy.
Wylan hadn’t realized it then, but Kaz had known his true identity all along. Dirtyhands kept tabs on anyone who took up residence in the Barrel, and he’d placed Wylan under Dregs protection, certain that one day a rich mercher’s son would come in handy.
He had no illusions about why Kaz had looked out for him, but he also knew he never would have survived this long without his help. And Kaz didn’t care if he could read. Kaz and the others teased him, but they’d given him a chance to prove himself. They valued the things he could do instead of punishing him for the things he couldn’t.
Wylan had believed that Kaz could get revenge for what had been done to his mother. He’d believed that despite his father’s wealth and influence, this crew—his crew—was a match for Jan Van Eck. But now his father was reaching out to taunt him yet again.