Calan
Calan does not answer immediately, because there are times for talking and times for properly considering. The hel plan had been tidy in shape, which he still likes, but Carlo is right about the trouble with Torchline having too many birds and too much experience with them. A man selling ice cream in Haulani has probably heard every hel excuse there is, including the ones involving actual hels, and Calan sighs through his nose as he looks from the ice cream man to the oyster stall and back again. The oyster plan is better. It has pieces. It has movement. It has a crime that turns into business if no one looks too closely at the middle part. Unfortunately, it also has the kind of flaw that ruins otherwise excellent work.
Calan’s mouth twitches into something that's not quite a smile, before out of the corner of his eye, he spots someone standing nearby: thin and still with a beat-up lute case. Calan’s gaze sharpens at once and he snaps his fingers softly. "Okay," he says, already quieter than before, as if the plan might run away if startled. "What if we steal the oysters, but we get someone else to sell them?" His eyebrows lift, and he tips his head toward the thin girl by the music, or what he thinks is a girl anyway, because from here the important thing is not really that but whether she looks like she might want coins more than she wants rules.
"We could say we think he’s giving us an unfair price," he murmurs. "Then we ask her to see if she gets something different, telling her we'd been offered something really low so that anything he does offer seems really good in comparison and takes the deal." He glances at the cone between them, measuring how much ice cream remains against how long this plan is likely to take, then looks back toward Ren with the bright, contained interest of a boy who has just discovered that every crowd comes with spare parts you could use to fix an unfair situation.
Calan’s mouth twitches into something that's not quite a smile, before out of the corner of his eye, he spots someone standing nearby: thin and still with a beat-up lute case. Calan’s gaze sharpens at once and he snaps his fingers softly. "Okay," he says, already quieter than before, as if the plan might run away if startled. "What if we steal the oysters, but we get someone else to sell them?" His eyebrows lift, and he tips his head toward the thin girl by the music, or what he thinks is a girl anyway, because from here the important thing is not really that but whether she looks like she might want coins more than she wants rules.
"We could say we think he’s giving us an unfair price," he murmurs. "Then we ask her to see if she gets something different, telling her we'd been offered something really low so that anything he does offer seems really good in comparison and takes the deal." He glances at the cone between them, measuring how much ice cream remains against how long this plan is likely to take, then looks back toward Ren with the bright, contained interest of a boy who has just discovered that every crowd comes with spare parts you could use to fix an unfair situation.
you are a victim of the rules you live by
Code stolen from Queen Sky
