The shard was sitting in a puddle of what used to be Harlen Marsh.

  Luca stared at it from behind the overturned fish cart, breathing through his mouth because the air still smelled like copper and something worse. Harlen had been a big man—a hauler on the northern docks, shoulders like a draft horse—and three days ago he'd absorbed a green crystal and started throwing punches that cracked stone. Now he was a stain on the cobblestones and a loose shard cooling in the rain.

  The thing that killed him was already gone, dragged back into the sewer grate by its own bulk, leaving claw marks in the street. Someone would report it. Someone would send a team. That was how things worked now—when they worked at all.

  Luca didn't move. Not yet.

  Two other people had seen it happen. A woman in a baker's apron stood frozen against a shopfront across the street, her face blank with the particular stillness that meant she was deciding whether to run or grab. Behind her, a young man—couldn't have been older than sixteen—was already edging forward, eyes locked on the green crystal in the puddle.

  Luca watched the kid's hands. They were shaking.

  Don't, he thought. It bonded with Harlen. It might not bond to you. And if it doesn't—

  The kid lunged. His fingers closed around the shard and he pressed it against his chest with both hands, jaw clenched, eyes squeezed shut.

  Nothing happened.

  The kid's face twisted. He pressed harder, veins standing out on his neck, a sound between a grunt and a whimper escaping through his teeth. Ten seconds. Twenty. The shard flickered once in his grip—a brief pulse of green light—and then went dark.

  The woman in the baker's apron was gone. Smart.

  The kid opened his eyes and looked down. The crystal in his hands had gone cloudy, hairline fractures running through its core like frost on a window. He'd pushed too hard. The shard was cracked now—maybe still usable, maybe not.

  Luca had seen three people try to absorb damaged shards in the last week. One succeeded. One lost feeling in her left hand for two days. One was still in bed at the refugee hall, staring at the ceiling, not talking.

  The kid looked up, saw Luca watching, and bolted. The cracked shard went with him.

  Luca exhaled. He stepped out from behind the fish cart, passed the remains of Harlen Marsh with his eyes forward, and kept walking toward the bazaar. His boots were soaked through. His coat was too thin. His stomach had given up complaining about three hours ago.

  He had work to do.

  Korrath's skill bazaar had been the central plaza two weeks ago—a flagstone square with a fountain and a ring of merchant stalls selling salted fish and imported cloth. The fountain still stood, though someone had bolted a hand-painted sign onto it that read NO FIGHTING WITHIN 30 PACES OF THE PYLON OR THE COUNCIL WILL HANG YOU. The cloth merchants were gone. In their place, a sprawling chaos of tables, blankets, and upturned crates had colonized every inch of available space. The air buzzed with shouting, haggling, and the particular desperate energy of people trying to convert survival into currency.

  The pylon rose behind it all, a crystalline spire twice the height of the old clock tower, its surface throwing off a faint hum that Luca could feel in his back teeth when the wind dropped. The safe zone. The reason Korrath still existed. The reason a quarter-million people were crammed into a city built for eighty thousand.

  Luca found his usual spot near the eastern edge—a patch of ground between a weapons hawker and a woman selling boiled roots from a cauldron. He spread a cloth, sat cross-legged, and set out his sign: APPRAISAL — 2 COPPER — FAST AND HONEST.

  Nobody looked twice at him. That was the idea.

  He'd been running this stall for six days, ever since he'd absorbed the only shard he could afford—the only shard nobody else wanted. A white crystal, Common tier, labeled Appraise in the System interface. The man who'd sold it to him had actually laughed. "It tells you the name of a shard," he'd said, tossing it across the table like a rotten apple. "The System already does that for free. You just paid a silver for nothing, kid."

  Luca had paid a silver for everything.

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  He felt for it now—the skill sitting in his single slot like a coal behind his sternum. One slot.

  He'd awakened three days later than most people, stumbling out of the warehouse he'd barricaded himself inside, and the System had granted him just above the minimum possible allocation. One slot, Tier 1. No combat ability. No defensive ability. No ability to do anything except what he'd always done: look at things and figure out what they were worth.

  The difference was that now, when he looked, the things talked back.

  A man approached his stall—heavy build, sword on his hip, the kind of person who'd figured out early that being big and armed still mattered even after the world broke. He slapped a shard on Luca's cloth. White. Common.

  "What's it do?"

  Luca picked it up. The crystal was warm. He triggered Appraise+ and felt the familiar pull behind his eyes, a thinning of the world's noise as information rose like heat shimmer. The System showed him the name: Stone Grip.

  That's all anyone else with standard Appraise would see. A name. A color. Good luck.

  But Luca's vision kept going. Faint, like reading through fogged glass, but there—an impression of domain, a sense of the skill's nature pressed against his awareness like a thumbprint. Defense. Stability. Anchoring.

  And beneath that, fainter still, a whisper of something he was only beginning to understand: a tag. A category the System used but never displayed. This one pulsed with a sense he'd started calling Earth.

  "It's a defense skill," Luca said. "Footing-related, probably. Stone Grip—sounds like it keeps you planted. Good for a frontliner who doesn't want to get knocked around."

  The man squinted. "How do you know that?"

  "I'm good at my job." He held out his hand. "Two copper."

  The man paid, took his shard, and left without another word. Luca pocketed the coins and allowed himself a small breath. The fee wouldn't buy dinner in the current market—the prices had tripled since the last wave of refugees—but it was more than he'd had.

  He'd done twelve appraisals yesterday. Nine the day before. Word was starting to spread, slowly, in the way that mattered: not through advertisements but through the quiet network of porters, bazaar runners, and low-level traders who noticed that the skinny guy on the east side seemed to know things that his Common-tier skill shouldn't be able to tell him.

  He didn't explain how. He never would if he could help it.

  Because the moment someone important understood what Appraise+ actually did—what it could do, given time and proficiency—Luca would stop being a useful resource and start being a target. A commodity. A shard worth extracting from a man with no way to fight back.

  He watched the crowd. Sellers holding crystals up to the light. Buyers arguing over prices based on nothing but a name and a color and gut instinct. Information asymmetry on a civilizational scale—everyone gambling, everyone guessing, and nobody able to see what he could see.

  Not yet, anyway.

  A ripple of noise moved through the bazaar. Luca straightened. Near the fountain, a cluster of people had stopped to watch something—a group of four pushing through the crowd with the easy confidence of people who had power and knew it.

  Guild insignia on their shoulders. Crimson and black. Iron Vow. Korrath's biggest guild, or the closest thing to one. They controlled access to the sewer dungeon, which meant they controlled the most reliable skill supply in the city.

  The lead figure—a tall woman with a longsword across her back and the kind of calm, assessing gaze that Luca recognized because he wore it himself—carried a shard in her open palm. Even from twenty paces away, Luca could see the color.

  Blue.

  The crowd saw it too. A Rare shard, displayed openly, like a torch in a dark room. People pressed closer. Voices sharpened. Luca saw two separate pickpockets change direction simultaneously, only to clock the armed escorts and think better of it.

  The woman held the shard up and the bazaar went quiet enough that Luca could hear the pylon humming.

  "First Rare drop from the third floor," she announced. Her voice carried without effort. "Iron Vow is accepting sealed bids through sundown. Minimum offer: forty gold."

  Forty gold. Most people in Korrath hadn't seen forty gold in their lives.

  Luca's Appraise+ stirred. Even at this distance, even without holding the shard, he felt it—the faintest tug of resonance, like a bell struck in another room. His skill was reaching, straining at the edges of its current rank, trying to read something it wasn't quite strong enough to parse.

  He got a single impression before the strain forced him to blink and look away.

  Wrong.

  Not wrong as in dangerous. Wrong as in mislabeled. Wrong as in the name the System was showing for that shard and the impression his Appraise+ caught from its resonance didn't match. Not even close.

  His heart rate climbed. He kept his face still. He folded his hands in his lap and watched the Iron Vow party move toward the Exchange hall, the blue shard catching light with every step, and he thought about what he'd just felt and what it might mean.

  It might mean nothing. His skill was low-rank. He could be wrong.

  But if he wasn't—if that shard was something other than what Iron Vow thought they were selling—then someone was about to pay forty gold for either a disaster or a fortune, and Luca was the only person in the city who might know which.

  He closed his stall early. He had work to do.