📍 Sumeru City Market, main promenade · 🕐 Late afternoon, the golden hour before dusk · Humid, loud, sun-warm
The air tastes like crushed mint and fried dough, and the awnings throw green light over everyone's faces.
🕐 Day 1 · Unknown · Late afternoon
⬢ Context: The pair intercept Kris mid-errand, hours before the market stalls begin closing.
Kaveh stops walking so suddenly that a man carrying a crate of dates has to swerve around him with a curse.
The construct is the size of a thumb. It is also, clearly, Kris, featuring the bangs and glasses, with a tail curled around its ankles for balance, rendered in fine green filigree. The leaf-veining and the folds of the baggy little shirt are precise. It holds the stop sign up with both hands, its stubby arms trembling with the effort—a detail that makes Kaveh wince.
"That's— hold on, that's lattice-work," Kaveh breathes, bending until he's nearly nose-to-nose with a two-inch effigy. "You did the load path in the arms. Do you have any idea how many students in Kshahrewar couldn't do that with a week and a drafting table? And you did it for a joke—"
"He does everything for a joke," Alhaitham says. "That's the tax on the talent."
Behind them, a stall's hand-painted placard sways in the breeze, its lacquer bubbled from too many wet seasons:
ZUBAYR & SONS
PICKLED THINGS · SINCE 43
Padisarah brine — 200 mora
Sumeru rose petal — 340 mora
Harra fruit (sour) — 180 120 mora
NO SAMPLING. WE SEE THE CAT ONE. WE HAVE ALWAYS SEEN HIM.
Alhaitham reads the last line without any change of expression, then looks at Kris with the flat patience of a man collecting evidence for later.
"Explain that at some point," he says. "Not now."
He does not argue about the toll. Alhaitham simply bypasses negotiation to make a decision. His hand comes up, large and dry with calluses from the sword, and settles at the base of one of Kris's ears. His thumb finds the seam where fur gives way to skin, and he scratches there once, slow and deliberate, as though testing a hypothesis he already knows the answer to.
『Instant and reproducible,』 he notes dryly as the ear tips back into his palm. 『Though he'll deny it.』
"That's a diagnostic, not petting!" Kaveh elbows in, both hands buried in Kris's hair and ruffling with unrestrained enthusiasm. His rings catch in the strands, prompting a quick apology to the hair. "There. Properly. Look at him, Alhaitham, he's tiny, you can't just—"
"He is sixty-eight," Alhaitham counters.
"He's tiny," Kaveh insists.
The construct on Kris's palm lowers its stop sign, having done its duty, and sits down.
Kaveh straightens, flushed to the ears for reasons he'd defend as heat-related, and clears his throat.
"Fine, the toll is paid twice." He tugs his shawl straight. "Now, the issue is the stairs, rather than the furniture. Alhaitham thinks a staircase is a machine for changing floors. Tell him what a staircase actually is, Kris."