“Life debt it is then!” Matriarch Yenni declared, her reedy voice cutting through the humid Yularian air. She pointed a gnarled finger, not at the river jail, but at a surprisingly sturdy wooden barge piled high with salvaged burlap sacks. “Fetch her a working tunic, boy! And make sure it’s the scratchiest one we’ve got. Those city folk need to feel the honest toil.”
Before Vendra could articulate the concept of legal counsel, or the precise market value of a crushed watercabbage (which, she estimated, could not possibly exceed 0.0003% of her annual revenue), a gangly youth with sun-bleached hair and a gap-toothed grin materialized. He presented her with what could only be described as a potato sack, crudely stitched with twine. The fabric, bristling with coarse fibers, prickled her skin the instant it touched her fingertips. Her tailored silk blouse, a casualty of the canal, now seemed a distant, impossibly luxurious memory.
“But… I’m wearing a Ruvani original,” Vendra stated, her voice tight with disbelief, gesturing to the remains of her submerged wardrobe. “And these trousers are bespoke. This… *garment*… violates every known sartorial code.”
Matriarch Yenni, still cupping her ear, leaned in. “Eh? What’s that, dearie? Something about the river cod? Never mind that! These greens won’t harvest themselves from the murky depths!” She then handed Vendra a long, bamboo pole with a rusted metal net attached. “And don’t think of running. The current around the Elder Isles is swift. And those eels? They’ve got a taste for city shoes.”
Jorik Fane, meanwhile, was having the time of his life. He’d retrieved his salvaged camera, miraculously water-resistant, and was now circling Vendra like a predatory heron, snapping away. Each click of the shutter was a tiny, infuriating punctuation mark to her humiliation. He captured her struggling with the burlap dress, her perfectly coiffed hair damp and sticking to her temples, her eyes narrowed into emerald slits of pure fury. He even got a close-up of a particularly persistent fiber irritating her neck.
“Fantastic texture! The raw, unvarnished emotion!” Jorik exclaimed, zooming in. “This is going straight into my ‘Corporate Meltdowns in Paradise’ series.”
Vendra gritted her teeth. She imagined her ex seeing this. She imagined Lisse, her PR manager, strategically leaking it. The very thought made her blood pressure spike. She had a schedule for her grief. She had a timeline for her revenge. Neither involved a scratchy sack dress or being photobombed by a man whose artistic vision seemed to revolve solely around her misery.
“You find this amusing?” Vendra asked, her voice dangerously low, as she jabbed her bamboo pole into the canal, trying to hook a particularly resilient watercabbage. It bobbed away, taunting her.
“Endlessly,” Jorik chirped, taking another shot, this one of her mid-lunge, the rough fabric straining. “It’s like watching a meticulously crafted robot glitch. Fascinating.”
A robot. A glitch. He saw her as a machine. But she was not a machine. She was a woman, capable of profound, optimized fury. Her gaze locked onto a particularly plump, verdant head floating near the surface. An idea, wild and unoptimized, sparked in her mind.
With a sudden, violent yank, Vendra snagged the floating vegetable. It was surprisingly heavy, slick with canal water. Instead of carefully depositing it into the woven basket on her barge, she spun on her heel, her eyes fixed on Jorik’s smirking face. With a primal yell that was decidedly un-mogul-like, she hurled the leafy missile.
The trajectory was perfect, a green missile arcing directly for Jorik’s head. But at the last possible second, Jorik, ever chaotic, ducked to capture a candid shot of a startled canal heron. The produce soared past him, a blur of green, and slammed with a sickening *thwack* into the forehead of a man disembarking from a nearby cargo skiff. He was a broad-shouldered individual, adorned with an elaborate, braided beard and an official-looking sash emblazoned with the symbol of a stylized anchor. The Port Overseer of Yulari, by the looks of it.
The official swayed, his eyes rolling back dramatically. He then crumpled to the deck of his skiff, a loud *oof* escaping his lips.
A hush fell over the canal. Even the market vendors stopped their haggling. The gap-toothed youth slowly lowered his own retrieval pole, his eyes stretching round. Jorik, finally looking alarmed, stared at the unconscious man, then at Vendra, then back at the man.
“Oh, *that* wasn’t optimal,” Jorik muttered, more to himself than to Vendra.
Vendra, however, felt a surge of… something. Not satisfaction, not exactly. More like a release valve blowing. But the feeling was fleeting as Matriarch Yenni, who had witnessed the entire scene with remarkable clarity, stomped towards her. “Assault! On the esteemed Port Overseer of Elderock Crossing! That’s ten years in the river jail, young’un! Or… a life debt of two decades!”
Vendra’s carefully constructed composure shattered. Ten years? She had a 30-day timeline. She had an ex to destroy. She needed to call her lawyers. Immediately. They would handle this, just like they handled hostile takeovers and unscheduled press crises.
Her hand instinctively went to the inner pocket of her ruined silk blouse, where her customized, satellite-enabled comm-device usually resided. It was waterproof, shockproof, and capable of transmitting from any corner of the globe. A lifeline to Nova Kyris.
The pocket was empty. Utterly, disconcertingly empty.
Panic, a raw, unscheduled emotion, flared. She patted her hips, her thighs, even frantically checked the front of the burlap sack. Nothing. Her comm-device, her portal to civilization, was gone. She distinctly remembered it being in her pocket when she fell into the canal. It couldn’t have just… floated away.
Her eyes snapped to Matriarch Yenni, who was now expertly rebraiding a stray reed in her hair, humming a tuneless little ditty. The old woman’s movements were suspiciously fluid, her gaze too knowing. Vendra remembered the woman’s surprisingly strong grip when she’d pulled her from the water, the brief, almost imperceptible brush against her side.
*Pickpocketed.* The realization hit with bruising suddenness. The ancient matriarch, feigning deafness, had expertly relieved her of her most vital connection to the outside world.
“My phone!” Vendra gasped, pointing a trembling finger at Yenni. “You took it! You old… cabbage thief!”
“Eh? What’s that about a fee? Don’t worry, dearie, your debt’s just beginning!” Yenni chirped, her eyes twinkling. “Now, about that bruised official…”
Jorik, who had been peering at his camera screen, suddenly straightened up, a strange expression on his face. “Wait a second,” he murmured, scrolling through a few shots. “This is… odd.”
Vendra, still reeling from the phone revelation, glared at him. “What could possibly be ‘odd’ now, you chaotic menace?”
He turned the small screen towards her, his brow furrowed. It was an earlier shot, taken just as Vendra was being pulled from the canal, drenched and fuming. In the background, partially obscured by Matriarch Yenni’s arm, was a glimpse of Vendra’s distinctive, sapphire-blue comm-device. And on its glowing screen, clearly visible even in the low resolution, was an unread text message. It read: 'Lisse made me do it.'