The jail cells of the Haven police department were located in the dungeons of the Tower. An unknown number of levels were dug deep under the foundations of the government building, each harbouring an increasingly more terrifying class of criminal, each guarded by more and more sinister methods of keeping their prisoners confined.

It was yet to be seen which level Sham and his new partners-in-crime would be confined—for now they were locked up in the holding cells, presumably afforded some time on the surface by means of paperwork and other bureaucratic obstacles.

He’d been separated quickly from his new companions with the church, lumped in with a bunch of strangers—none of them looking quite so friendly as those he’d seen in the Crater. It was classic police procedure around Haven, from what Sham knew; keep those you arrest separated, don’t give them time to get their stories straight. The Citizen’s Police, he suspected, wouldn’t yet have the policing knowledge to know to do so, but, fortunately for them, the jail was still run by the central police force. And, they knew, if nothing else, how to keep a man locked up.

Sham looked around at his fellow prisoners. To say “they take all types in here” would be to brush over a very apparent truth. Though, yes, there were a couple of the hoighty-toighty types of the Sunset District currently being incarcerated in these holding cells, they were vastly—and disproportionately—outnumbered by the types of faces Sham recognised. Like him, many sported all the telltale signs of a harbour existence; many wore scars, some shoes, and all wore the lines of age so prematurely appearing on their faces. He made eye contact with one of these prisoners, and, at once, they nodded. They didn’t need to speak a word to recognise another for what they were: another poor fucker.

They, just like Sham, had little chance of escaping this place. They couldn’t afford legal representation, and that provided to them by the great city of Haven were taking backhanders from the government itself. Prosecution was at an all-time high, justice at an all-time low. Their shared future was one of—

‘Sham Turner?’ a voice called out, thick with authority.

His head spun to the source of the question—a short, stocky woman, standing in the open doorway of the jail cell.

‘Tilner,’ Sham replied.

‘Does it look like I give a fuck?’ the guard retorted, her nostrils flaring wider than Sham would’ve thought possible. ‘You know it was you. Ain’t gonna be another Sham in here, is there?’

‘I…’

The guard looked him straight in the eyes. ‘The right answer was “no”. Or, better yet, nothing at all.’ She waved him out of the cell. ‘You leaving or what?’

Leaving?

Sham considered for a moment telling this guard that she’d never said he was supposed to leave, but bit his tongue. Didn’t want to risk her changing her mind, after all. Instead, he settled for, ‘But… why?’, and only then after he’d slipped out of the jail cell.

‘Bail’s been posted,’ the guard groaned, locking the door behind her and then returning to her post. She stared on at Sham as he stood, unsure, in the centre of the hallway. ‘Well?’ she prompted him.

‘Which way?’

The guard blinked back her frustration, then pointed to a door at the end of the corridor.

‘Thanks.’ Sham flashed her a smile. It wasn’t returned.

He felt almost like he was only now doing something wrong as he traversed the corridors of Haven’s jail unguarded. It wasn’t often that someone of his social class got to enter these rooms and then became… free to leave? The very idea didn’t compute with him. The situation posed a very reasonable question to him: just what the hell did I do to deserve this?

The question was answered—at least on a rational level, if not on a karmic level—as Sham turned a final corner and pushed through a pair of double doors out onto the jail’s main lobby. Two guards, clearly briefed that Sham was to be allowed to leave, gave him a curt nod and then stepped aside to let him pass, revealing a familiar face standing across the room.

Riot.

Sham stood still, across the art deco lobby, his feet planted firmly on the glossy tiles below, and stared the woman down. ‘Is this some kind of power play?’ he finally asked, when she said nothing. This was just the kind of game that those in the Sunset District—of all the districts—liked to play.

‘I’m sorry?’ Riot asked, accompanying the question with a raised eyebrow.

‘You get me arrested, and then you get me released?’ Sham reiterated. ‘Am I supposed to owe you a favour now?’

‘You…’ Riot started, but then her sentence faded, her eyebrows now furrowing. ‘What?’

‘Lording it over us, like people like you do.’

‘Lording… lording what over you?’

The answer seemed self-evident in the situation, but Sham said it aloud anyway. ‘Your money. Your power.’

‘What?’ Riot replied. ‘What are you talking about, Sham?’

The recently-imprisoned time traveller gestured to the building around him. ‘You,’ he said. ‘Being here. Breaking me out. Why else would you do it except to hold it over me?’

Behind him, a guard chuckled. The action betrayed the fact that he’d do the same in Riot’s situation.

‘I think that’s a projection,’ Riot replied.

‘A what?’

‘What you would do. Not what I would do.’

This only seemed to enrage Sham further. ‘What would you—’

‘Not here,’ Riot said, accompanying this curtly-spoken sentence with the shake of her head. ‘Outside.’ She eyed the guards at Sham’s rear, though he couldn’t see if they returned the stare. Without giving the time traveller a moment to respond, Riot turned and pushed herself out through the external doors, allowing for a moment the orange-hued light of the afternoon sun to pour in onto the cool tiles.

Sham saw no choice but to follow her, and ambled across the hard floor to the other side of the room, forcing the woman to wait, just a little bit. He found her sat on a cast iron bench at the roadside, leaning against the slats in the middle that were designed to stop the homeless from sleeping upon them. She didn’t look around, instead focussing on a pocket mirror as she applied subtle red lipwax to her mouth.

‘Well?’ Sham called out from behind her. ‘Want to tell me what reason you’ve conjured up for getting me freed that doesn’t essentially amount to me owing you?’

‘Because I’m after order.’

‘What?’

Finally Riot broke, and wrenched her torso around to face Sham. ‘Will you stop playing the role of “proud working man” and sit the gods damn down next to me?’

Content that he’d made this point—whatever that was—Sham relented and joined Riot on the bench. Its metal bars were warm from the touch of the evening sun.

‘You’re not a very appreciative man, are you?’ Riot asked.

‘Don’t see you’ve given me any reason to be.’

Riot shot Sham the kinda glare that says “I’m doing everything in my power not to throttle you”. She swallowed back whatever foul words she was clearly considering speaking, and then said, instead, ‘I’m after order.’

‘Order?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you like to… elaborate, on that?’ Sham asked.

Riot sighed. ‘I suppose I’m going to have to. Look, you see—I brought the Citizen’s Police to that damned church to get the right people arrested. Not you. So—order. Not chaos.’

It was Sham’s turn to furrow his brow. ‘What makes you think the Loopkeepers are the right people?’

‘Spoke with someone. Said they saw Kryl. Said he was talking about time loops. And Kryl was a logical man, like me. If he’s lost his mind in this way, then it had to have been the church’s fault. Not his.’

‘You love him, huh?’

Riot turned, suspect of the question. ‘Of course,’ she said.

Sham nodded—but didn’t really know why. ‘Say… I don’t suppose this person you talked to was an old guy? Short? A little blind?’

‘You spoke to him too.’

‘Yep.’

‘You think he’d get this wrong?’ Riot asked. ‘Might be misremembering?’

‘Nope. Said the same thing to me too.’

Riot sighed, clasped a hand around her face. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me that?’

Sham shrugged. ‘I don’t know you.’

‘I just bailed you out of jail!’

‘Well I know that now,’ Sham retorted.

‘And you didn’t even have the ounce of courtesy required to say “thank you”.’

‘Well… thank you,’ Sham finally said, speaking the words with a tad more force that they demanded.

‘You’re welcome,’ Riot replied.

They sat, for a few moments, side by side, watching the last of the evening’s foot traffic drift on by. Some of them wore the slumped spines and hazy eyes of sadness, but it was those who sported smiles that stood out. What did they have… or what did they know that Sham didn’t? What gave them this right to joy that Sham had never possessed?

‘How’s your search going?’ Riot asked. ‘Did you find your friend?’

‘What do you care?’ Sham threw back instinctively. He regretted it in an instant.

Without speaking another word, Riot stood from her place on the bench, turned away, and strode off into the distance. She didn’t look back.

Sham turned to face the passers-by on the street once more, but this time found that doing so elicited only loneliness. He, too, stood from his seat on the bench, and began ambling to the nearest tram stop—after all, Asa had given him a job to do.

As the tram pulled into the easterly side of the Harbour District on which his task was located, the rain began to pour. It wasn’t that sort of thin, drizzly rain, that someone might be able to cope with without a decent jacket, but a thick deluge that seeped into every recess of Sham’s clothing within seconds of stepping into it. He sighed, ran for the cover of a doorway at the side of the nearest building, and looked across the road at the access to the ambitiously-named Plenty Harbour. The metal signage above the entrance was faded from years of being battered by the elements, combined with no effort being made in terms of upkeep. The wooden planks of the boardwalk floor were rotten—dangerously so—with patches of green where algae had begun to thrive. In places, the beams themselves had broken in two, leaving Sham with glimpses of the murky waters below.

He checked his pocket watch—a good thirty minutes remained—and, with a sigh, stepped out into the rain once more. Even without consciously searching for the memory, he heard Asa’s voice ring out in his head once more.

‘There’ll be a small red fishing boat moored up there, one of these crates hidden under a mass of net. You take the crate to a foreign looking man at the very end.’

Foreign looking. That phrase made him uneasy. As if it wasn’t bad enough that he was involved with some criminal mastermind, he was involved with a likely racist criminal mastermind. Though perhaps “mastermind” was overstating Asa’s intellect some.

Oh well, Sham told himself. It was a means to an end. It was all in the name of staying alive, growing stronger, and—within the next five days—stopping a domestic terrorist and their ignoble schemes.

He found the red fishing vessel with some ease, it being one of the few vessels that Sham suspected was still being used. There was only one mass of nets; a pile so huge it came up to Sham’s waist, consisting of thick, heavy ropes which hurt his aged back to heave. But heave them he did—what other option did he have? Asa had made it very clear that Sham didn’t have any choice in the matter if he wanted to keep his life.

Underneath, the agreed shipment was in place. Just as he’d seen back in the warehouse—a small crate bearing the mark of an owl, its eyes wide. It would be heavier than it looked, he new, filled with glass and liquid as it was. He lifted with his legs, and still found his back seizing up despite all his best efforts.

He really needed that Vigour skill vial.

At the end of the pier, a boat pulled up, laid anchor. Its lights were off, its sailors deathly quiet. Sham would’ve missed its arrival entirely if he hadn’t known to look for it. This could only be the foreigners that he was to make contact with.

So he lugged the heavy crate down the pier in their direction, doing his very best to ignore the shooting pains running down his spine. As he grew closer, he caught sight of a lone sailor standing on the fishing vessel’s prow, scratching gently at his long, flowing beard as he watched Sham approach.

‘You are he? One of them?’ the man called out, his accent strange. Not one that Sham could place.

Sham waited until he had placed the crate down before responding; it took all his focus to keep it lifted. ‘One of who?’

The strange man studied him, his eyes bearing into Sham’s own, searching him for something. For truth, or sincerity, perhaps.

‘Good,’ he finally said, ‘Identities are hidden. We do as agreed.’

Sham licked his lips. ‘Right,’ he said, then, gesturing to the crate, ‘The package.’

‘Yes. Straight to business,’ the man said. ‘Very wise.’

He stepped off his sailing vessel in one smooth, practised movement, and heaved he crate up with an apparent ease. He’d expected it to be heavy. He knew what it contained.

‘And… payment?’

The sailor smirked, glanced back to the ship behind him. ‘What if I give you none? What happens to you then?’

Sham’s heart dropped. ‘I…’

But the contact didn’t keep him dangling for long, cutting off the tension in the air nearly immediately by bursting into a roar of laughter. ‘I would not. I joke. It is best we keep this arrangement profitable for all parties involved, you are agreed?’ The man thrust a carefully folded paper into Sham’s palms, its thickness betraying its unfolded size. Though keen to understand what document could be as valuable as a crate of skill vials, Sham suspected that this wasn’t the time nor the place to read it. As such, he thrust it into his inner jacket pocket.

‘I…’ Sham started, then swallowed, forced his voice to sound firm. ‘Yes. Profitable. Agreed.’

‘Good, then—’

The sailor was cut off by a man emerging from the shadows.

Sham had barely a moment to take it in. The intruder was old, his beard speckled with grey, what little hair remained atop his head similarly coloured. Around his eyes, his skin sported all the lines of age, and the eyes themselves… Well, they turned to fear near-instantly.

He raised his hands in the air, and had just enough time to say, ‘No!’ before a shot rang out.

In the sailor’s hand, a pistol smoked. ‘We remain hidden,’ he murmured.

Sham turned, eyes wide, legs starting to tremble with a peculiar mix of both fear and rage. ‘What did you… He wasn’t a threat!’

The sailor’s mouth no longer sported a smirk. He paced forwards, placing his face so close to Sham’s that the time traveller could smell the man’s alcohol-laden breath, and spat, ‘Hidden. Nobody observes us.’

‘We could have reasoned with him. We could have—’

‘I make a suggestion, yes? The docks are a…’ he paused, stroking his beard as he searched for the words. ‘A hot spot for smuggling. Everyone knows this. The guards, here, they don’t care. Not when they can say they see nothing.’

‘What?’ Sham shot back at him, eyes wide, his feet somehow stuck in place. ‘How’s this relevant?’

But the foreign man ignored his question, continued on. ‘When a gun is fired, however… they come. Can not say they missed that. So they come. Here. Now. And you hope it is them that find you before your new employers do, yes? Jail is better than death.’

‘What?’ Sham said again, finding it at the core of his entire vocabulary. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I am saying you should run.’

It was all the instruction that Sham’s feet needed. Suddenly they were freed from their position on the boardwalk—and, in fact, already running down the length of the pier, before the time traveller had entirely realised he was doing so.

Sham heard movement up ahead before he saw it, and jumped to his side just in time to avoid the lanterns of Plenty Harbour’s guard contingent. He landed in a small vessel, its aroma putrid from rot and algae, and relied on the shadows to keep his presence unknown.

And god damn that landing hurt his back.

Only now that he was forced to remain still did the pain seem to erupt. He fought it—a battle of willpower over the warnings of the body—and came out the victor just long enough for the pair of guards to pass. Sham stared into the distance, to the end of the pier where the stranger’s boat had been only moments earlier. And he saw nothing; the vessel already disappeared into the night.

Sham heaved himself from his hiding spot the moment he could bear the pain no longer, slinking down the boardwalk behind the back of the pair of guards, counting on the shadows to keep him hidden. He forced his body to place his feet down gently, quietly, doing everything he could to avoid drawing the attention of the harbour’s sparse contingent of guards.

The long shadows of the guards were silhouetted across the wooden planks in front of him, cast by the lanterns they held at their fore. While Sham could see the shadows, he knew that the guards were facing away from him, that he didn’t need to worry.

He was ill prepared for the guard ahead of him, however.

Moving instinctively, before the third guard could make out his unlit form, Sham took a sudden turn right down a protruding walkway. As he twisted, his left foot slipped, ever so slightly, on the wet planks, causing a strange squeaking noise to ring out across the harbour.

‘Who’s there?’ the guard called out.

Sham, of course, didn’t reply. Instead, he ploughed on ahead, charging down the boardwalk to escape notice. His getaway, however, was cut short by the wooden planks coming to an end. The time traveller stopped for a moment, his feet on the very edge of the pier, the murky waters lapping at the poles beneath him, and considered making a jump for it.

But he wasn’t a great swimmer at the best of times. Much less when his back was in this much agony. So, instead, he turned—and saw the third guard approaching from ahead of him.

Shouting erupted from the end of the pier. The pair of guards had found the body. They would call the police immediately, if they hadn’t…

From the land, a half dozen officer of the Citizen’s Police poured into the harbour.

...already.

Hmm. His chances of escape were growing slimmer by the minute. And he couldn’t see how any of his skills were going to get him out of this one. Unless…

Sham eyed the nearest functional boat, a small row boat tied up and held in place by a small brass padlock. He hopped inside, laid himself down across the seating planks, and pulled a small paperclip from his pocket.

[SEASONED] BREAK AWAY & GETAWAY: SUCCESS

The bolt gives way to only the barest of torque. It’s good news; this lock is here for show only.

Sham placed the cracked lock gently down onto the wooden hull of his vessel, keeping his ears pricked for signs that he’d been noticed. None came.

Not willing to risk the movement of the oars attracting attention, Sham uses his feet to fix himself in place and manoeuvred the boat under the wooden pier, and out of sight.

He took some small pride in this moment of inspiration as a handful of Citizen’s Police officers traversed the boards above him, failing to spot him—though this pride was outweighed by his heart pumping faster and harder than it had in years.

Sham pushed himself from pole to pole, only occasionally risking slipping his fingers between the cracks for purchase, and made his way back towards the banks of the shore. But the boardwalks above him, as ill-maintained as they were, differed in height. As he grew closer to the shore—though still tantalisingly out of reach—the wooden walkway above him dipped towards the water, making it impossible for him to progress any further.

He swung to the wide, poking his head out from under the pier to scope out the path ahead. Between him and the safety of the road—where he could be just another passer-by—were three members of the Citizen’s Police, all on high alert, lanterns unsteady in their shaky hands. He was not getting through from here. Not without flanking them.

Sham pulled the small vessel over to the other side of the walkway, from which point he could see another—just as rickety and ill-maintained, but perhaps could cover him as he moved into position to flank his pursuers.

He would just need to make it across twenty feet of water unnoticed first.

He looked left, looked right, and then waited for the guards to pass away as much as possible before he launched himself, as hard as he could, across the harbour.

The motion of the waves slowed the boat to a near stop not halfway across the gap.

Shit.

Sham remained as low in the boat as he could, moving slowly so as to not attracted attention, and placed a cupped hand over the side and into the waters. He paddled himself across the harbour, doing his best to mimic the sounds of the waves hitting the rotting wooden poles, not risking a breath for fear of being heard.

A cupped hand was a poor replacement for an oar. Every time Sham’s fingertips touched water, every time the inevitable gentle splash rang out across the piers, Sham’s heart skipped a beat. A noise just a touch too loud would be the difference between his escape and being arrested on suspicion of murder.

‘We remain hidden,’ the sailor’s voice rang out in his mind once more.

Sham resisted the urge to reply, ‘Well just what the hell do you think I’m doing?’

Finally, after what seemed like probably a lot longer than it had been, Sham’s outstretched hand met the wooden sides of the neighbouring pier, and he pulled himself underneath.

He released a breath he hadn’t quite known he’d been holding.

It was a relief, yes, that the police hadn’t detected him, but he wasn’t free yet. Though still unable to progress any further in land on the boat, trapped between pier and shore as it was, he was far enough away from his pursuers to abandon ship.

And so he did. Sham heaved himself up from boat to pier, his legs trembling as he tried to steady the boat beneath him, and then relaxing as his feet met solid ground once more.

He hurried himself behind the cover of an abandoned shipping crate, and tried to force his heart rate to steady once more.

But the eyes peering out at him from the darkness did little to help. In the distance, on the neighbouring pier, two men dressed in black watched on, their eyes piercing unabashedly into him. Sham instinctively pulled his own gaze away.

‘Look again,’ the voice spoke. ‘You’ve seen these people before. Look again.’

The voice, while… certainly odd, had never led Sham astray thus far, and so he did just this once as he was told. The two men grew closer, walking slowly, their footsteps expertly silent. And then Sham realised where he’d seen them before; they were Asa’s men.

‘Jail is better than death,’ the sailor’s words rang out again.

Sham only now understood, truly, what the foreigner had meant. Sham’s purpose was fulfilled; he’d made the transaction without revealing Asa’s identity to the sailor. And now that he’d done so, he was little more than a loose end. The sort of loose end that could be wrapped up rather neatly with a bullet to the head.

So Sham turned. And Sham fled.

He hurried back towards the land, keeping his head as low he could bear, his feet moving quickly beneath him on the wet boardwalk. Sham risked a glance back over his shoulder, and felt his heart skip a beat once more—they’d grown closer, and for a moment he thought he’d caught a glimpse of metal in one of their hands.

A weapon.

He could wait no longer. Sham stood up fully, bursting into a run, the members of the Citizen’s Police be damned. His feet pounded heavy against the wood as he sprinted, the noise alerting everyone in the area to his presence.

‘Hey!’ he heard a voice call out behind him. ‘You there! Stop!’

But he didn’t.

Sham could see the gated exit just thirty feet in front of him. Escape was within grasp. Seconds from now he’d be out into the streets, able to hide himself in the—

His feet slipped on the wet, worn planks beneath him as he turned a corner far too quickly. Instead of continuing on towards the exit, he began to slide across the landed side of the pier, coming very gradually to a stop at the feet of a familiar face.

Captain Dickhead looked down at the damp man at his feet, his mouth warped into a predatory smirk. ‘Hmm. You again. Trouble, you are,’ he muttered, and then reached for his handcuffs.

[LUCK] DID YOU THINK WE WERE FINISHED?: SYSTEM ERROR

Recalibration complete.