a frustrated broker

Nasha Town looked like someone had built a harbor out of a scrapyard and then decided that was a style.

Metal everywhere — plates, rivets, pipes that had started life as something else and been argued into walls. The buildings did not agree with each other. One roof sat too sharp, the next too low, a third patched in a different alloy as if the street had changed its mind halfway through the winter. It was not ugly so much as honest. No Tianquan had paid for a skyline here. No Shogun had demanded a matching eave. Live and let live, written in mismatched iron.

They walked it the way they walked most new places: clustered, obvious, already being watched.

Ineffa kept a half-step ahead and a polite tick in her joints.

“The Curatorium of Secrets,”
she said.
“If you want information that is not a rumor with a knife in it, you trade with Nefer. She sells what she knows. She does not give it away because you freed an Archon two nations ago.”
A pause.
“I would also suggest we look for Nicole. I have no location. An angel who does not wish to be found will not be found by a map I do not have.”

“Curatorium first,” Rosaria said. “Witches later.”

Ineffa led them off the main scrape of street into a front that looked like an office only because someone had put a desk behind the metal. The Curatorium did not bother with temple theatrics. It bothered with being the place you went when you needed a fact more than you needed dignity.

Nefer was already waiting.

Not because a letter had arrived. Because the harbor talked, and she had heard a particular kind of group had stepped off Beidou’s plank — too many beautiful women, one blond problem, a machine with grey limbs — and she had hoped the rumor would walk through her door instead of past it. She sat as if the hoping were irrelevant. Dark, composed, the look of a woman who priced knowledge the way Ningguang priced ships.

(https://im.ge/i/QQFMEB1)
(artist: miyu)

“Traveler,”
she said, and did not waste time pretending she had been interrupted.
“Nod-Krai is small when it wants to be. I heard you docked. I hoped you would be intelligent about where you spent your first hour.”

Aether glanced at Ineffa. Ineffa did not look smug. She looked correct.

“We need information,” he said. “The moon. The rifts. A witch named Nicole, if you have a direction. Ineffa says you trade.”

“I do.”
Nefer’s gaze moved over the pride without lingering long enough to be rude, then came back to him and stayed.
“I will help you. I do not work in front of an audience. You and I will discuss terms in private. Your companions may wait next door. The walls are thick enough for courtesy and thin enough that they will know when we are finished.”

The other girls did not even bother to look surprised.

Rosaria’s mouth did that small, knowing thing. Dehya snorted once, very quietly. Xilonen’s eyes warmed with professional amusement. Lisa hid a smile in the act of adjusting a glove. They all knew what a private discussion meant when the woman asking for it looked at Aether like that. It was not even a clever pretense. It was a polite one.

“Go discuss,”
Rosaria said, already turning toward the adjoining door.
“Try to remember we came here for a goddess, not a second vacation.”

Lynette waited until the others moved, then followed with the bags because property did not get a chair in the main room unless someone pointed at one.

Nefer stood, smooth, and tipped her head toward the inner office.

“After you,”
she said to Aether.
“I promise the information is real. I also promise I am not going to insult either of us by spelling out the other half of the price.”

Nefer did not offer him a chair first. She offered him the truth the way she offered prices: already counted.

“Do you have any idea,” she said, “how much of you has come across this desk in the last two months.”

Not an accusation. A working condition. She flicked a stack of notes with one finger, then ignored the paper because the paper was not the point.

“Breeding Mondstadt. Breaking Liyue’s Tianquan on a table. Rewriting Inazuma’s idea of eternity with your cock. Fucking Sumeru’s network until a nation came on the floor. Natlan lighting a pillar they could see from the Chamber. Every sailor, every spy, every bored priestess with a mouth has been in here selling me another chapter. I buy information. That is my life. For two months my life has been you putting children in women I have never met.”

Aether opened his mouth. Nefer kept going, vulgar on purpose, as if courtesy would have been the insult.

“And it got into me,”
she said.
“Not the politics. The descriptions. How you last. How you pack a womb and keep going. How they walk out dripping and still ask for another. I live in a harbor that will take a woman in an alley and not call it a crime if she stays on these islands. I know what I like. I went looking for it.”
Her mouth twisted.
“Night. Docks. Hands I did not pick. Hours. They held me over a crate and used me until the shift changed. Cunt, mouth, the other hole when the first two were sloppy. I came until I was angry about coming. I went back the next week and let it happen again because that is what this water is for.”

(https://im.ge/i/QQFM3sf)
(artist: miyu)

She leaned on the desk, eyes flat and hungry.

“It did not help. Do you understand that. A night of being ruined against wet rope and I still went home clenching on nothing, thinking about a blond problem I had only read. You sexually frustrated an information broker from three nations away. That is an achievement. It is also a debt.”

Aether could only smile.

He had seen this scene in enough doorways now that the surprise had worn off and left the fondness. A woman he had never touched, already past pretending she wanted a conversation first. Nefer saw the smile and did not bother being offended by it.

“Repayment before we discuss payment,” she said. “You want the moon. You want Nicole. You want the rifts. You can have the list. After I get what two months of your legend did to me. I am not negotiating the order.”

She was already uncovering her breasts.

(https://im.ge/i/QQFMpHy)
(artist: miyu)

No pause for his yes. The dark fabric came aside and the rest of her followed the decision her mouth had already made — full, heavy, nipples tight in the office air, presented like a clause in a contract he had not signed and was going to honor anyway. She watched his face while she did it, waiting for the familiar agreement she had priced the moment he walked in.

“Well,”
Aether said, still smiling, stepping around the desk because the pretense next door had been correct and there was no point insulting a broker by making her ask twice.
“That is a very honest invoice.”

Nefer’s answer was to take his wrist and put his hand on the breast she had just freed, as if filing him under paid on receipt.

“Then start settling it,” she said. “The harbor already tried. I want the version from the files.”