My stall at the midnight bazaar wasn’t hard to find. All you had to do was walk past countless other derelicts pawning family heirlooms or renting themselves out as a companion to talk to. To fuck. To play therapist. The smell of deep-fried illegal meat and contraband cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air. You’d round a few corners, snaking through data thieves and buskers and dealers who’d been dealt bad hands by life. Folks who made it to my end of the bazaar were looking for only one thing—salvation—because somewhere down the line, they’d already found trouble. Sorting it out was simply my business.

    “Local or regional passage?” I didn’t bother looking up from my stall when my soon-to-be-customer’s imposing shadow obscured the mismatched pile of keys and crystals and stones in front of me. The tools of my trade. The ingredients to finding salvation.

    It was a simple question, but it was met with silence, so I asked again in the regional tongue.

    But when I looked up and saw the tear-streaked face of the human child, I knew there was not going to be a simple answer. The boy poked out from within the folds of a heavy coat worn by the looming man behind him.

    I asked a third time in a galactic common language, but the adult shrugged, then slapped a piece of paper onto my table, jostling my arrangement of crystals. I let out a breath. Exchanged it for another lungful of humid, stale air while I rummaged through the knowledge I had on humans. Earth-born, given the dialect he started yelling.

    “I need the boy out of here,” he was saying. “Quickly and quietly. Safely.”

    He had moxie for an Earthling who apparently only spoke a single language out here on the outskirts. I’d seen people killed over that kind of minute inconvenience.

    Yet he had the gall to blab blab blab, pointing at the kid and then to me like I was the ignorant one.

    The gall of Earthling men.

    I could see he was distressed, so I kept my cool. Professionalism and what have you. But more so, the boy was beyond upset. His cheeks were rubbed raw. Painful to look at. It was his eyes that nearly killed me, though. So beautiful. Mottled shades of green and brown, shimmering like an electrical storm. Despite their biological deficiencies, I always thought humans had the most stunning eyes in the galaxy, even when suffering.

    “Local or regional?” The words felt so clumsy in my throat.

    “Intergalactic. Tonight.”

    “Two intergalactic jumps won’t be cheap.”

    “Only need one.” He held a digital wallet, thin as paper, between two fingers. “Money won’t be an issue.”

    He slipped the wallet back into his pocket, keeping his other hand firmly gripped onto the boy’s shoulder. The boy winced.

    Humans had an interesting relationship with the truth. Always obscuring it. Muddling it. Renaming it. Hiding from it. Rarely did they ever actually want it.

    And they always tried to talk their way out of it, which was never a good idea for a species whose bodies betrayed them every single time.

    I understood what was happening from the moment the boy peeked out from the bastard’s coat. “Coordinates?” Sometimes, I hated this job.

    The bastard jabbed a finger at the paper on my table while stealing glances over his shoulder. There was no point. My stall was the end of the line as far as the bazaar was concerned. Hell, my stall was the end of the galaxy.

    “Sure, sure. And for you? I assume you won’t be leaving through the bazaar tonight.”

    He dawdled.

    I couldn’t believe he didn’t have an escape plan of his own. Pfft. Earthlings.

    “Yeah, okay.” He wrote another set of coordinates on the piece of paper.

    I scooped the pile of keys and crystals and stones into my upper set of hands and walked to the dead-end space next to my stall. I knelt and with my lower pair of hands, began drawing a glyph into the dirt.

    I arranged the crystals and stones as I’d been taught by my grandmother. The keys were mostly symbolic but served as an adequate metallic conductor, which was necessary for the glyph to work. Beyond that, all it required was my keyphrase.

    “C’mon, let’s go.” The bastard pushed the boy forward.

    It was my turn to shake my head and blab blab blab about payment.

    “You’re going first. Intergalactic travel requires a more in-depth set of glyphs, higher cost, and I don’t believe you will be eager to wait around, no? So, leave the wallet. I’ll make sure he gets where he needs to be.” I could smell the frustration, the angst, through his primitive sweat glands.

    He cracked his knuckles and relented his possessions.

    “Very well, step into the center of the glyph.”

    And with a single word, I delivered the bastard traveling to the salvation he deserved—to float through an empty stretch of the blackest space, somewhere in the lunar wilderness.

    As soon as the glyph disappeared in a puff of ozone, my crystals shattered, stones vibrating, and the keys reduced to mangled clumps. I kicked the dirt to erase all signs of my spell.

    The boy stood near my stall, wide-eyed.

    “It’s okay. He’s gone.” I held up my hands to show I meant no harm. “You wouldn’t happen to know your address, would you?”

    He shook his head.

    Oh well.

    He wasn’t looking for trouble. It found him. Now it was my job to sort it out.

    “Let’s go find your parents.”

    I piled my gear and the bastard’s wallet into a satchel and left a Closed sign at my empty stall. A trip sounded nice. I’d grown tired of the smell of fry oil and the sounds of buskers.