You go back to Marr with questions.

You do not lie down.

You go back to the bar with the rag pulled over your chest as far as it will go and Marr is wiping the same slate he counted on while you were bent over his keg. The room has thinned. The older girl is upending wash water. Sawdust-sleeves is gone.

"Paper," you say, and her voice comes out smaller than you meant. "Who writes it. What it costs. How does this city work?"

Marr keeps wiping.

"You want a lecture at close."

"I want to know why everyone keeps saying mark and ledger like I should already have one."

He sets the rag down. He does not sit. He talks like a man naming prices and doors, and he talks fast because he wants his bed.

"Pell. Soft shoes. Desk at the well. He writes the book. If a husband or a father filed you, you have a household mark and the wall leaves you alone. If a house paid for a season, same. If a shop lists you as staff for the day, that's work paper — you're theirs until they scratch you out. Kalypise nuns have a vow on file. Soft Collar is an owner tag. Everything else is common."

He ticks it on his fingers without looking at you.

"Common means the ports, the statues, the windows that usually already have girls in them and they can put you in one if the spot is short. You walked in with no shoes and a village rag. Pell would file you as foreign and done. I can list you as Nail staff tomorrow if you do the slop and you don't steal. Tonight I am not walking to the well to write your name. Desk is shut."

"Coin?"

"Season-tag is not tray wages. Room here is a silver. Never-worn cloth on Needle Row is more than a room. Worn bins are cheap and they feel like it. Reading-stone at the market is copper and a hand. It spits a word for whatever is wrong with you. Useful if you think you're cursed." He eyes you with a questioning look.

You swallow. "And if I sleep in the road."

"Green Road and its Gods charges overnight if you're a woman on dirt. Don't. After that... the evening bell is how women with no paper get collected. You already saw the lamps." He picks the slate up again. "That is the city. Now get off my boards."

It is shorter than you wanted and it is all he is giving. You go through the back anyway.

The bench blanket smells like others sleep. Crates along the wall: tap-parts, rags, a coil of rope, a crate stamped with a shop mark you cannot read. You work a lid because Lenna said unused cloth was the only thing that might hold a body still, and you are still her in a dress that has been on two women today.

Nothing in the first crate has a pin in the fold. Everything has been used. You find a wrapped bundle in the second, creased neat enough that your chest lifts, and you tear the paper with your thumbs.

Sweat. Perfume that is not Lenna. A short wrap worn thin at the armpits, still shaped like someone else's chest. Not new. A girl who works somewhere in town probably used this and someone shoved it back in Marr's stores.

You have the wrap in both hands when Marr is in the doorway.

"Put that down."

You do not, not fast enough. He takes it out of your fingers hard enough that the paper rips the rest of the way.

"That is upstairs kit. That girl is on a hook at first light. You put her sweat on, I still have to explain to the girl why the wrap got up and walked. Your hunt clothes in my back room like I am Needle Row." He looks at the open crate, then at your stained hem, then at your face. "I was going to write you as trays in the morning. I am not writing you tonight and I am not writing you at dawn if this is how you work a bench."

"I wasn't stealing a dress to sell. I was—"

"I don't care what you were. You went through my stores." He shoves the wrap back in the crate and puts his boot on the lid. "Slop bucket is still dawn if you want leftover stew. Paper is Pell, in the square, when the desk opens if you find someone else to foot the bill. You want new cloth you walk eight minutes to Needle Row and you find coin I have not given you. You want a wall, the well is closer than that."

He leaves the door open on purpose. The tap is almost dark. The wrap is not yours. There is no unused thing in this room. You are still Lenna from the skin out, still Charlie behind her eyes, still in the rag with another man's spend dried on the inside of your thigh, and the city he described is all desks and holes and prices you cannot pay.