Confidence Game

1 Tod was going to be late. The woman's message said that she would come to see the flat precisely at noon. Keller didn't have a clock in his shop, but Tod was sure it was getting close to noon, and he still had to walk through Origh and two miles out of town to get to his cottage. "It's all right Keller," he whispered to the older man, trying to hurry him along. "I'm sure they're fine, I'll take them now." The printer looked up from the pages he was proofing, raising his face only a little bit, not relieving the weight that the low hang of his head put on his tired shoulders. He didn't say anything, but Tod heard his answer very clearly. Keller never cut corners on a job, even when he'd been swamped by three law revisions in one day, even when the Justices threatened him with shutting down his press if they didn't get their orders in rush time. Every page had to come out perfect, even if it meant that Keller didn't sleep. The printer was doing Tod's job and he was going to finish it. Tod would just have to wait. Finally, Keller's dry voice uttered, "Good," and he gathered up the last of the barely dry sheets and filed them in a battered leather portfolio. "It's done, now get on your way. Although," Keller added, looking through his cracked window, "you'll have trouble hurrying anywhere." Tod had been thinking the same thing as he paced anxiously past the window of the shop. Walking into Origh this morning, he'd seen troops of Public Force guards marching toward the center of town. Not that that was unusual--the pounding of their boots and the creak of the short heavy sticks and pistols swinging at their belts was something he heard every day he was in the city. When he'd first moved to the cottage on the outskirts he'd been shocked at how quiet it was without that sound. But there seemed to be more guards today than there usually were, and as Tod stood at Keller's window and waited for the printer to finish with his job, their numbers grew. Tod lost count of them; he didn't know there were so many in the whole District. Then they stopped moving and backed up in the street. Something was happening in the center of town and Tod's way was blocked. "You there, back inside," a guard barked as Tod inched through the doorway. He startled and froze, but the guard was shouting at a clerk who'd stepped out of the chandler's shop next door. The clerk, his arms full of boxes of candles bound, no doubt, for some Justice's office, stepped up to the man in the gray uniform and began arguing. A moment later the chandler was out in the street, adding his booming voice to the argument, complaining about how this mess in the street was harming his business. "Better run for it while you can, lad," Keller said at Tod's ear. He only had a glance at what was going on as he darted out of Keller's door. The Public Force had filled up the street as far as Tod could see, preventing anyone from moving forward, pushing anyone who stepped out of their shops or houses back inside. Tod clutched his portfolio and hurried away in the opposite direction of the roadblock, and found himself in the middle of a thin crowd that was doing the same, escaping out of a bakery and away from the guards. From behind him, in the thick of the blockade, Tod thought he heard shouts and the distant sound of breaking glass. For a second he stopped short. Breaking glass. Then it was himself he saw in the crowd, in the center of town. Shouts all around him, the press of bodies nearly sweeping him off his feet. Bricks were thrown, rocks hurled through windows, matches touched to whatever would burn. Where they had gotten the debris, Tod couldn't remember and couldn't imagine. He couldn't imagine because the streets of Origh were kept so clean, not to offend the Justices with the sight of waste. He couldn't remember because he had been drunk. He couldWelch, Michelle M. is the author of 'Confidence Game' with ISBN 9780553586275 and ISBN 0553586270.