The dumpster was not, in Nix's professional opinion, an ideal surveillance post. It smelled like three-week-old curry and whatever biological catastrophe a restaurant kitchen produced after a busy Saturday night. But the fire escape above it was occupied by a couple having an argument loud enough to rattle the ironwork, the telephone wire he preferred was currently hosting four pigeons with no concept of personal space, and the rooftop across the alley had inexplicably acquired a security camera since Tuesday.

So. The dumpster.

He crouched on its lid with his stave balanced across his knees and watched the intersection below with the focused detachment of someone who had been doing this for longer than the city's oldest building had been standing. Three in the morning. The sodium lights turned everything the color of old bruises. A taxi moved through the intersection without stopping. A man in a reflective vest walked past pushing a cart of recycling, headphones in, entirely elsewhere mentally. A cat sat on a window ledge across the street and stared at Nix with the specific knowing look cats always had around Fae, which he found deeply irritating.

He was monitoring a handoff. Two humans, a package, a corner. Boring work, honestly, but the Birch Court had asked for eyes on the situation and Nix provided eyes on situations. That was the arrangement. Information flowed up, compensation flowed down, everyone stayed out of each other's way. Clean. Transactional. The way things ought to be.

He had been crouching on the dumpster lid for forty minutes when the lid moved.

Not shifted — moved. The whole thing swung upward from below with the force of something being thrown open from the inside, and Nix went sideways off it with considerably less dignity than he would have preferred, catching the edge with one hand and swinging himself onto the brick wall beside it with a speed that was more instinct than thought. He flattened against the wall at about nine feet up, wings pinned, stave horizontal, and stared downward.

A woman climbed out of the dumpster.

She was perhaps thirty, wearing a blazer that had seen better days and had now seen significantly worse ones, and she emerged from the interior of the bin with the grim purposeful energy of someone who had made a decision they weren't happy about and were committed to anyway. She got one leg over the edge, then the other, dropped to the ground, and immediately began brushing curry-scented debris off her sleeves with sharp efficient movements, her expression suggesting she was mentally composing a complaint she intended to file with someone.

Then she looked up.

Nix looked down.

There was a pause.

"Hm," the woman said.

Nix said nothing. He was running a rapid assessment. She could see him — that was already annoying, most humans in this city were too distracted to register Fae even in direct eyeline, but occasionally you got one whose perception hadn't been fully sanded down by screens and routine. Her eyes were tracking him correctly, not doing the sliding unfocused thing where a human brain edited out what it didn't have a category for. She was looking directly at him and her expression was not one of confusion or terror. It was one of mild, exhausted interest, like someone who had already had a very long night and had simply decided to absorb additional strange information without complaint.

He revised his threat assessment downward. Revised his irritation assessment upward.

"You're on my wall," he said.

"Your wall," she repeated.

"I was using this location."

She looked at the dumpster, then back up at him. "I was using this dumpster."

"Poorly."

"I was hiding in it."

"From what?"

She glanced back toward the alley entrance briefly. "Two men who very much wanted to discuss a work matter I've decided I'm no longer available for."

Nix looked toward the alley entrance. Nobody there. He looked back at her. "They're gone. There's a grey sedan parked on the next block that pulled away approximately four minutes ago."

She stared at him. "How do you know what their car looked like?"

"I've been up here for forty minutes. I notice things. It's my job." He paused. "Don't ask what my job is."

"I wasn't going to," she said, which was either very cool or complete honesty, and with this particular human he was finding it difficult to determine which. She was still looking at him with that same expression of tired, cataloguing interest. Her eyes moved to his wings, briefly, then to the stave, then back to his face. "Are you going to do something to me?"

"No."

"Okay." She looked at her blazer again and picked off something he preferred not to identify. "This is the worst night I've had in recent memory, just so you know. I'm not saying that as a complaint to you specifically. Just contextually."

"I don't require context."

"I'm providing it anyway." She dropped the debris on the ground and straightened up. She was shorter than average and had the bearing of someone who compensated for that by being annoying on purpose. "You were watching that intersection."

"I was."

"The handoff at the corner of Vane and Merchant."

Nix went very still. "What do you know about that?"

"I know it happens every third Wednesday. I know the package is about the size of a hardback book and changes hands in under four seconds. I know the man in the green jacket is left-handed and the woman he meets always comes from the direction of the Aldgate underpass." She looked up at him with an expression of complete innocence. "I've been watching it too. From the dumpster. For three Wednesdays."

The silence that followed was the specific silence of someone recalculating.

"You've been in that dumpster for three Wednesdays," Nix said.

"Third Wednesday of each month, yes."

"Watching the same handoff I've been watching."

"Apparently."

"Why?"

She considered him for a moment, the way people considered whether an answer was worth giving. "I'm a journalist," she said finally. "I think the woman from the underpass is connected to a planning commissioner who approved three developments he shouldn't have. The package is part of it." She paused. "Why are you watching it?"

"I don't answer questions."

"You just asked me several."

"I'm in a position of elevation. It changes the dynamic."

She looked at the wall he was clinging to, nine feet up, completely motionless, with an expression that suggested she found this argument unpersuasive. "Could you come down? My neck is starting to hurt."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because then we'd be at eye level and this conversation would feel collaborative, which it isn't." He shifted his grip on the stave slightly. "You need to forget you saw me."

"That seems unlikely."

"I can make it more likely."

"Is that a threat?"

He looked at her. She looked back at him. She did not look particularly threatened. She looked like someone who had just spent an unknown quantity of time in a dumpster and had decided that whatever came next was simply going to have to get in line. He found this genuinely annoying in a way that was almost refreshing.

"No," he admitted. "It wasn't a threat. I don't do that."

"What do you do?"

"Watch. Record. Report."

"To who?"

"To parties you don't have clearance to know about."

She nodded slowly, absorbing this. "So you're basically also an information broker."

"I'm nothing like also an information broker."

"You watch things and tell people about them in exchange for something."

Nix opened his mouth and closed it again. "The comparison is reductive."

"But not inaccurate."

"Go away," he said.

"I will," she said, pleasantly. "In a second. The woman from the underpass — does she go to the development sites afterward? Because I've lost her twice on the underground and I can't figure out which line she's taking."

The question hung in the cold alley air between them.

Nix stared down at her. She stared up at him. The cat across the street was still watching. Somewhere above them the argument on the fire escape had escalated to the point where a plant pot was involved. The city moved around the alley in its usual state of aggressive indifference to anything that happened within it.

"She doesn't take the underground," Nix said, before he'd fully decided to. "She takes the number 47 bus from the stop on Crale Street. Rides it four stops. Gets off outside the Meridian building and goes in through the service entrance on the south side."

The woman looked at him for a long moment.

"Why did you tell me that?" she asked.

It was a fair question. He turned it over briefly. "Because you've been sitting in a dumpster for three Wednesdays," he said finally. "That's a level of commitment that deserves something."

"That's almost kind."

"It's transactional. You'll publish something eventually and the information will be in the open, which is useful to me for reasons you don't need to understand." He adjusted his grip on the stave. "Now go away."

"What's your name?"

"Absolutely not."

"Okay." She straightened her blazer with the dignity of someone who had not recently been inside a bin. "I'm Carrie."

"I didn't ask."

"No. But now you know." She moved toward the alley entrance, stepping around the dumpster with care. At the entrance she stopped and looked back up at him, still flattened against the wall in the dark. "Will you be here next month?"

"No," Nix said immediately.

"Okay," she said again, in the tone of someone who had noted this response and assigned it approximately the weight it deserved.

Then she walked out of the alley and turned left toward Crale Street, her footsteps steady and unhurried on the wet pavement, her blazer still carrying the architectural evidence of a dumpster encounter she appeared to have fully absorbed and moved on from.

Nix remained on the wall for another moment.

The cat across the street blinked at him once, slowly, with the smug satisfaction of a creature that had witnessed something it found entertaining.

"Don't," Nix told it.

The cat looked away.

He pushed off the wall, caught the air with his wings, and rose above the alley and the dumpster and the argument on the fire escape and the pigeons on the telephone wire, until the intersection of Vane and Merchant was visible below him in its full sodium-lit geography, the corner empty now, the handoff long concluded, his actual job for the evening technically complete.

He told himself the Meridian building information had been purely strategic.

He mostly believed it.

Below him, a figure in a ruined blazer turned the corner onto Crale Street and disappeared from view, already on her way to the next thing, because that was apparently what she did.

Nix filed the observation and moved on.

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