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It's an ordinary, quiet night. The . . . patrons, or whatever they are, of the lab equipment shop downstairs, took off about forty-five minutes ago.
There's silence, mostly. You can only be out at night in Sothis if you have business. But there's some business. Every so often a party passes under Katie's window. Their conversation is mostly what Katie has become accustomed to thinking of as "focused", though occasionally some is just downright tense or revelrous.
Wind. Distant insects. Dogs.
Something shuffles downstairs.
And continues to shuffle.
"Are we good?" The voice is insistent, alto, and right underneath Katie. And it's female.
"Yes, fine". Higher. If Katie knows what female halflings sound like, it sounds like that.
The shuffling moves deeper into the shop. A glass clinks. Laughter starts, whispering at first, then merely hushed.
"Oh my god." A third voice.
"All this stuff is fake, you know. This and this and this used to be one bespoke fixture."
"Fuck."
Whoever it is is going through the merchandise.
Expensive, heavily regulated merchandise. Katie's parent have only been in Ulunat for two weeks, but she's picked up that the proprietors of this place have gone to a moderate effort to secure it against thieves.
"Fuck the sun . . ." she mutters under her breath. She'd be fleeing and finding something else to eat right now if it weren't for that. And she would just go to sleep and realign her schedule with night after yesterday, but . . . she can't sleep when she's hungry. She feels the usual white-hot flash of pure rage at this, and as usual stamps it down.
She looks at Katie pleadingly, feeling like a tragic heroine, in a very low-status way.
The rationalization her brain constructs to give to Mabel later is a cross-hurricane of Katie's not that important and probably wouldn't have survived and stood a significant chance of damaging the mission and it's fine we'll reverse everything anyway [ ?? ] and I instrumentally needed to, right just then, if nothing else to show them what happens when they don't feed me
. . . even though that last is objectively insane.
She sidles up to Teg. "If I die, there's no better way to do it than in the arms of a beautiful woman. I'd prefer not to, though. Would be a shame to never get to see your face again."