‘Hmm,’ Sham grumbled, his eyes on the warehouse complex ahead of him. The only clue in Kryl’s apartment—the sketched map—had led him here. Something that Kryl was interested in was contained within the buildings beyond the patrolling guards. Something that might lead him to the Target. Something that might explain all of this. Or not. But it was the only lead he had.

The solemn expression that these guards wore on their faces suggested to Sham that he wouldn’t be able to walk up to one of them and ask, simply, ‘Say, what you got going on in there?’ Not if he wanted a serious answer, at least. Not if he didn’t want to be shot and then tossed into the murky waters at the warehouses’ rears.

If he was going to find out what they were hiding in there, he’d have to do so subtly. Secretly. He would need to sneak in. This was not the kind of job that Sham was equipped for. Already the two vials of boono knocking about in his pocket were seeming all the more appealing.

No, he told himself. Not yet.

With a gulp, Sham retreated into the shadows, and began looking for a way in. Around the front, there was nothing—not a single gap in the security to exploit. But Sham was Seasoned. He knew these streets. And, more specifically, he knew of a way onto the docks that stretched out the backs of these warehouses. All he needed to do was slip in through an—admittedly locked—electrical substation.

It had been a barber’s, once, before the gas revolution. The proprietors had been evicted from their premises with little notice, given only a small handout by the government in exchange for their inconvenience. The locals would’ve protested more if they hadn’t already been enamoured by the possibilities that gas power could afford them. They dreamt of their own automobiles. They dreamt of electrical lighting in their homes. They didn’t know that only the rich and powerful would ever be gifted such things.

Sham arrived at the substation’s front door, and bashed his shoulder into it once, just to check that it was, indeed, locked.

It didn’t budge; that would’ve been a mite too easy. But the dirty, frosted glass at the side of the door was easy to break through, and few round these parts would think to investigate the sound of smashing glass. Was usually best to keep out of such trouble.

Sham put his heavy foot through the pane of glass on his first attempt, sending shards scattering in each direction, and none, thankfully, managing to cut through the thick material of Sham’s trousers. He wrapped his right hand in a filthy handkerchief, thrust it through the new gap in the window, and reached for the loose latch. It sprung open at the least provocation. Just like that, he was through, past the barbed wire fence that cordoned off this area, and onto the next stage of this afternoon’s investigation. Maybe this sneaking around business wasn’t so hard after all.

He continued through the substation and out the back door, coming to a thin concrete path that also acted as protection from erosion by the murky water below. The rear of the warehouses, while still apparently guarded, was less so than at the road. Overlooking the ramshackle docks were a handful of men and women dressed even less like they fit in in this area, with glamorous pocketwatches catching the sunlight and shoes either new or recently polished. One of them stares into the sea below, his eyes—

MEMORY UNLOCKED (RECOLLECTION)

Your toes skim the surface of the filthy water, your legs still too short to reach the sea properly from the height of the docks—at least not until high tide. Your Ma flicks a cigarette, the ashes drifting slowly down and landing on the top of the water. She says you won’t see Pa again. You focus on the feeling of water on flesh, and not on the emotions erupting inside you.

Sham felt himself staggering backwards at the vividness, at the clarity of the memory. Something he hadn’t thought about in years. No, something he hadn’t let himself think about in years. And to hit him now, of all times. What if he’d been inside already, every movement the difference between being caught and not. A moment’s hesitation then would cost him dearly.

Up until now, Sham had thought that a Legendary grade skill could only be a good thing. In this moment, he was starting to doubt if there weren’t downsides after all.

And now his confidence was shaken. He knew the costs of failing, of being caught sneaking into a place guarded by folks like these. But he’d been riding the wave of confidence—arrogance—afforded to him by his newfound skills. And the costs of failure seemed a whole lot more real now...

He retreated to the cover of the electrical substation once more, regrouping and scouring his mind for a plan. Of course, this was the moment where the small glass vials in his pocket chose to jangle together.

Was this it? Was he giving in to temptation so easily?

Sham pulled one of the two vials out of his pocket at random, and found in his hand the shimmering blue-green liquid of the Charm skill. It could work, he thought. If he was charming enough he could blag his way in, past the guards, get himself wherever he wanted.

If.

Would an Uncommon grade be enough to get him past such attentive guards? There was no way of knowing for sure. And he didn’t know what the side effects would be, either.

And then there was the Luck vial. Surely this was a black market bastardisation of the Fluke skill. If it was, then that was one Sham understood. He’d seen people with such a skill before—even at the Common grade everything seemed to go their way. Gods, he’d wanted that skill for a long, long time, had even sought after it for a while. But the only way to level up Fluke the natural way was to be lucky to begin with. And that? That was something that Sham—and indeed most of those growing up in the Harbour District—definitely wasn’t.

He stared at the pink vial a moment longer. ‘Damn it,’ he eventually muttered, then pulled the cork free and downed the liquid in one.

It had a rank metallic aftertaste, one which was hard to stomach, but he was hardly drinking this stuff for the flavour. He felt the liquid trickle down his throat, into his stomach, and felt… nothing.

Of course, you never really felt anything when you gained a new skill, or levelled up an existing one, but it would have reassured Sham somewhat in this particular circumstance if he had. Instead, he brought up his skill list once more.

SKILL LIST

Hardened Liver (Common)

Seasoned (Uncommon)

Heart of Janus (Rare)

Recollection (Legendary)

Luck (Rare)

>

Hm. There it was; Kryl’s labels hadn’t told a lie. Sham had heard about the strange error messages that tended to accompany impure skill buffs, but this was the first time he’d seen one himself. No wonder there were side effects, with an error like that. In this particular case, Sham could cope with it, assuming Kryl’s notes weren’t lying about that either. A little bad luck? That wasn’t something he hadn’t been dealing with his whole life.

But, now, there was the good luck, if it wasn’t corrupted. All Sham needed to do was test it.

He pulled a copper coin from his pocket, balanced it on his finger and thumb, and sprung it into the air as he called out, ‘Heads!’

The coin dinged against the concrete floor as it landed, coming to a stop… on a tails.

‘Hm,’ Sham muttered to himself once more. That wasn’t exactly the luck he was after. But maybe… Maybe he didn’t need to be lucky with the toss of a coin, so he hadn’t been. Maybe he needed to have something at stake before the luck would come into play.

He dug around his jacket pocket until he found what he was looking for: a small, rusty folding knife which he kept around just in case he ever got into trouble. As he gripped it in his left hand, he placed his right hand out with splayed fingers against the wooden doorframe.

Sham looked from his pocket knife to his hand.

Back to his knife.

And then to his fingers once more.

Was he really going to do this?

Fixing his mind on anything but the potentially disastrous results of what he was about to do, Sham screwed up his eyes, breathed in a deep breath, and then… threw the knife at his hand.

He heard the blade land with a soft thunk. And felt… nothing.

Slowly opening his eyes, Sham looked down to see the pocket knife still wobbling where it had landed—wedged in the wooden surface between his splayed fingers.

‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Guess I’m feeling lucky.’

Sham straightened himself up, smoothed down his shirt—only the gods knew why he did that—took a deep breath, and then stepped out of the substation and into the light.

He counted the guards up ahead. Four of them, that he could see. One of them still staring into the water—

Toes skim the surface of the filthy water.

—two of them shifting crates onto the boardwalk, leaving only one with their focus entirely on keeping watch. She would be the one to keep an eye on.

Sham walked forwards along the dockside slowly and steadily, hoping that if someone were to catch sight of him out of the corner of their eye, they would mistake his steady pace for someone who belonged there. As he grew closer, he felt his heart rate climb—with every foot that he grew closer to the open rear of the warehouse, the more chance there was that he would be caught.

But chance was exactly what he had on his side.

Sham reached the edge of the warehouse and jumped immediately to hide behind a storage crate, out of sight of any of the guards if they were to look his way.

Right. Time for the next part of the plan. Which was… what? Have a look around, see what Kryl might have been interested in?

Out here in the loading area of the warehouse there was little to find. Anything that might have been of interest was already packaged up into crates, marked with a strange symbol of a watchful owl that Sham had never seen before. Short of ripping one of these crates open—and that would create more noise than Sham was comfortable with even with luck on his side—there was no way to know what this strange organisation was shipping out. If that was even what Kryl was interested in.

So Sham turned his attention to the rooms above the main floor of the warehouse—to rooms formed of thin walls that sat at the roof, held in place by metal railings. As luck would have it, there was a rickety metal ladder leading up to this floor just where Sham was currently positioned, free of use as it was typically—according to the accompanying sign—for use in the case of a fire. Nobody would take a ladder when there were perfectly good stairs available. Nobody who wasn’t sneaking in, at least.

Sham peaked around the edge of the crate at the four patrolling guards, wondering how he was going to get away with climbing the ladder without them seeing. He needed a distraction. He needed—

His train of thought was interrupted by the sound of a large automobile approaching the warehouse from the street. All four of the guards’ heads turned, and the one stood at watch alone waved them all to the front of the building. Just like that, Sham was alone. It couldn’t have been better timing.

He was really starting to like this Luck stuff.

Not willing to wait around another second, Sham hopped to the ladder and began to climb it as quickly as his lack of fitness would allow. The bars rang out beneath his feet as he struck them, but with nobody in the vicinity it seemed he was getting away with it. Sham arrived at the top of the ladder, at the end of a metal walkway… and found himself face to face with a guard.

Uh oh. Some luck this was.

‘And who the hell are—’ the brawny guard started, his mouth twisting into a snarl, only to find himself suddenly forced to sneeze.

Sham leapt at the opportunity that chance had afforded him, clenching his left hand into a fist and bringing it plummeting down onto the top of the guard’s head. As luck would have it—yes, again—he struck the man in exactly the right spot, rendering him unconscious immediately.

The time traveller breathed a rather reluctant sigh of relief. He hadn’t been caught, but he now found himself with an unconscious body in a fairly detectable position. With a groan, he grabbed the large, burly man by the armpits, and began dragging him to the safety of a nearby room. He slammed the door open, getting a little too careless in his good luck, and was pleased to see that there was nobody inside—only stacks of documents bearing columns of numbers that Sham wasn’t going to pretend to understand.

He heaved the body over to the corner of the room and wedged him under a small wooden table. As Sham took a step back to admire his handiwork—for lack of a better word—he caught sight of the paperback on top of this very same table. His eyes fixed, by random chance, on a rather vital piece of information.

7th Harvest — Package delivery scheduled for 15.00. Ensure full guard complement.

Huh. So this was what the guards were here for. And this, surely, was what Kryl’s map was detailing—a package being delivered from the central districts to this very warehouse. But what could be in it? What could Kryl be so interested in? And how did it relate to the Target? And how—

The automobile.

Only the wealthy could own such a thing. Only those who resided, perhaps, in the Diplomatic District. Just where this package was supposed to have come from.

Sham wasted no more time. He hurried to another door at the far side of the room, pointed towards the front of the warehouse, and counted on his luck buff to come through for him.

It did. To an extent. The room beyond the door was devoid of guards, but it didn’t lead him immediately out to where he might spot what was being loaded into the warehouse. Instead, he found himself in a long, dimly-lit corridor, with the only apparent natural source of light being at the far end. He crouched slightly, scampered down to the end of the room, and stepped out into the light.

Sham found himself on a raised metal walkway around the front of the warehouse, much like that he’d climbed onto at the rear. From here, he just about afforded himself a view of the automobile below… driving away.

Damn.

He could, at least, see what had been unloaded. More crates—these unbranded, without the symbol of the strange owl—were being carried by men and women into the warehouse proper. These boxes were smaller, no wider than a pair of shoulders on their longest dimension, but still those carrying them seemed to struggle with their weight.

Sham kept still in the shadows of the rafters as the last of the guards transported their cargo up the clanging metal stairs and into a room on the opposite side of the warehouse. None of them looked back to spot the time traveller in his hiding place.

The shipment now safely stored away, all but two of the guards returned down the stairs, metal clanging with each step, and those remaining positioned themselves in front of the door. It was these two guards—two guards who were already giving one another strange looks—that Sham would have to sneak past.

Judging by the position of the room at the very side of the warehouse rafters, there wouldn’t be another way in. It was through those two guards, or bust. Sham spent a good ten minutes staring at the room, pondering a method of getting inside that didn’t rely on his luck boon. Rare grade luck was all well and good when he was at least trying to sneak about, but he didn’t much fancy his chances if he simply walked up to two guards in plain sight. He would need another way in. He would need—

But this thought was derailed by one of the guards nodding a signal to the other. ‘Let’s move,’ the head tilt said, but with two fewer words.

The other guard shook their head.

‘Come on…’ the first whispered, an alluring tone to his voice. ‘Nobody who isn’t an idiot would risk coming in here.’

Hmm. Fairly rude.

The guard touched the other by the hand, holding it gently. He turned to them, his face up close to theirs. ‘Come on,’ he suggested again, beginning to move in for the kiss.

‘Alright,’ the other said, biting their lip but pushing their apparent lover away. ‘But not here. Not where someone might…’

But the first guard was already on the move, leading his lover away by the hand. Just like that, the path was clear.

Sham was really starting to like this boono stuff.

Just think what he could’ve achieved if he’d been on this stuff his whole life. He might’ve been rich. Might be living in the Sunrise District. Or maybe he’d have left Haven, put this whole wretched place behind him. Or maybe he would be trying to save it. From government. Maybe he could’ve been the Prime Minister himself.

He edged forwards across the metal gangway, touching down gently with every step, making sure he made no sound, caused those around him no reason to come back.

Maybe he wouldn’t have been Prime Minister, but he might still have been happy. He might’ve still been married. He might have started a family. He might have had a fulfilling hobby which didn’t involve filling his body up with whisky. And he almost certainly wouldn’t be here.

Sham stopped for a moment as his hand touched door handle. This was it; behind this door was what Kryl was after. Surely this would tie everything together. Would explain what Kryl had to do with the Target. Would help Sham find them both. Would make him able to complete his quest.

He took a deep breath, opened the door, and…

...saw the crates again.

Oh. Yeah. He’d need to open them first.

Sham reached forwards and grabbed on the wooden plank atop the small crate stacked highest in the centre of the room. He clenched his mouth shut, and, with all his might—as well as his desperation to put this all behind him—he ripped the plank from the box.

QUEST COMPLETE: GUARDS! GUARDS!

Investigate the warehouse and its mysterious contents.

Inside, nestled in sawdust, were vials.

Skill vials.

And not like the one still in Sham’s pocket, no. These weren’t boono, but the real thing. Just the sort that the Target wore in under her coat as she stormed the Tower. Could these crates contain the very same ones? They had to be stolen—the government wouldn’t let these vials out of their site, especially not a mere... three days after creating them. When it came to power, Sham supposed, news travelled fast. And the shadowy arm of the underworld acted even faster.

‘Well, isn’t this unfortunate,’ a voice said.

Sham’s back tensed up in a second, his heart skipping a beat. Unfortunate? Yes. And precisely the sort of situation that the boono was supposed to prevent. Slowly, he turned on the spot, hands raised in the air, to face the man that had found him. He stood with a hunched back, wore a scowl upon his face, and held a freshly-cleaned revolver in his right hand.

‘And who might you be?’ the man asked, a strangely humorous tone to his voice that wasn’t present in his expression.’

The time traveller licked his lips, buying time to identify a means of escape. ‘Sham,’ he finally repled.

‘It’s good to meet you, Sham,’ the man replied. ‘I’m Asa.’

Ah.

‘Kryl’s tattoo,’ the voice reminded him. ‘It said…’