If I had to give one piece of unsolicited advice to our city's visitors, it would be this: do not go into the canals without good protection! If I had to give a second piece of advice, it would be this: whatever protection you think is good enough, you're wrong. Do not go into the canals!

-R.M. FezRicht, Considerations on Security in Floria

"How do you even know the canals are bad?" Aldo scoffed. "You never even been there."

"You don't need to go somewhere to hear about it," Mailyn said. "And everybody's heard about the canals."

For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of Floria, the Canal Canton sits at the southwestern end of the city, consisting of a dozen or so major canals and several dozen minor canals where the slow flow of the Largotto sluices through on its way to Floria Bay. In addition to the natural runoff from the city, a great many sewage channels empty near and around the canals. This was done out of convenience in the early days of the city when the vast majority of the population lay in the Canal Canton and Midglotus Island (where the Captain's Canton now lies). Now, with a quarter of the city living on the western bank just north of the canals, this means a considerable amount of Floria's waste pours directly into the canals, making their waters… unpleasant. No, that does a disservice to the word 'unpleasant'… they are unbelievably rank, as if the rotten core at the heart of humanity had been exposed both literally and metaphorically within the canton.

I nibbled on my lip. "I still think it's a bad idea to go into the canals…"

Aldo shrugged. "I thought this whole plan was your idea…"

I crossed my arms and glared at him. "No… this is our idea. You're the one who told us about Lucan to begin with. None of us would have known about the missing kids otherwise."

"Okay, so if it's my idea, you should listen to me - and I say we're going into the canals."

I huffed out a breath. "That's not how it works!"

"I think it's okay as long as we stick together," Mailyn said.

"Hey, there's five of us. What could go wrong?" Nate said.

If you'll note my verbiage, I said missing kids, plural. There was only Lucan missing among the Scamps of the Collegium, but some of the guilds had reported missing children, too. Unlike Scamps, guild kids almost never went missing. If a child our age was taken in by a guild, it usually meant they were the child of a deceased guild member or the young relative of a member who couldn't raise the child themselves. Because of guild kids' importance to somebody in the guild, and to the guild higher-ups in general, they were usually well cared for and looked after. Nobody in their right mind left the cushy digs of a guild house boarding school. Three guild kids missing in a several-week span was a lot. And if one Scamp and three guild kids between six and nine years old were missing, that meant there were probably another dozen that nobody had noticed, maybe more.

Unlike poor Luca lost in the Old City, most of the disappearances were from around the southern part of the Foreign Canton, which suggested the canals as the main hub of missing-kid activity. Aldo also pointed out that the tin sledge the cultists had covered the ancient tunnel with was also exactly like the corrugated tin siding that made up about half of the warrens in the Canal Canton and less like the ramshackle wood and tarpaulin of the Mendicant's Canton.

"Aren't the canals really dangerous?" I asked, probably for the fifth time.

Zev sighed. "There's five of us and maybe double that when we meet up with the artificer kids. That's enough to be safe."

"I heard the artificers are real stuck-up," Aldo said. "Probably can't scrap worth a damn."

"If you're stuck-up enough, you don't have to scrap," Mailyn observed. "People just naturally stay out of your way."

"Where do we even know these kids from?" Zev asked.

"I know somebody who fences the apprentices' projects," Aldo said with a shrug. "I put in a word and the word got back."

One of the missing kids was from the artificer's guild, which was almost as exclusive as the Collegium and even more full of themselves. They even had a pretentious name for the rarefied institute that educated their apprenticed artificers: the Florian Academy of Construct Thaumaturgy, or FACT, which spells the word 'edge' in Perditalog and the word 'face' in Gionian, and spells nothing if you're reading this in any other language I speak, which is quite a few. In any case, there was a missing FACT kid, and the other dozen or so kids in their age range (the artificer's guild starts recruiting around eight years old to avoid poaching Collegium targets, and only formally accepts them at ten)… those other kids were livid. More livid, for sure, than most of the Collegium Scamps, most of whom just shrugged at the revelation that Lucan had been killed and reiterated that it was stupid to wander into the Old City. Most Scamps had been self-reliant for a long while and were well-aware that terrible things occasionally happened to kids. Artificer kids, by contrast, were used to being treated like proper little lordlings. Incidentally, I hit it off with them splendidly.

We were scheduled to meet up with the artificer kids in the south of the Foreign Canton, just outside of the Canal Canton and near where the Saltfriar Bridge connected to Whitehall Island, where the artificer's 'orphanage' was.

"I think that's them," I said, pointing forward.

"How can you tell?" Nate asked.

I shot him a flat look, unsure whether he was kidding. Nate was a smart kid - all of us were - but he could be pretty oblivious.

The neighborhood where the Foreign Canton transitioned into the canals was not an affluent one. You might expect as much; the canals of Floria are synonymous with poverty, organized crime, and shady dealings across the 'civilized' world. Many a spatback novel features heroes and villains leaping from roof to flimsy roof in the dense warrens of the canton before, ultimately, having some sort of epic showdown out among the Green Stones where the canals meet Floria Bay. Among those ancient green stones stand a press of dozens of crowded buildings crammed onto each stone, precarious above the waves.

I've heard it said that, in the canals, the primary economic product is smuggled goods with illicit alchemicals a close second. But I digress - rooftop antics are rare in the canals because so many roofs are riddled with magical traps or toxic spikes, and many more simply can't support a person's weight. But the dangerous, stinking, ramshackle press of the warrens is very real. All this is to say that, while we Scamps in our mended and well-worn second-hand clothes looked a bit overdressed for the neighborhood, the artificer kids looked like little visiting royals queuing up to be robbed.

"They look like little visiting royals queuing up to be robbed," I observed.

"Ah, yeah. I suppose they do," Nate agreed.

There were four of them, all dressed in colors of nobility, like maroon and lavender. Most of them wore fine fabrics with gold or silver trim, and each displayed numerous enchanted accessories - bangles, bracelets, necklaces, hair pins, and so on. The lead girl even had a signet ring.

While most of the kids at the artificers' boarding school were ostensibly orphans, just like the majority of Scamps, they were probably the most-pampered orphans on the planet. Their hand-me-down clothes were the carefully-restored gowns and jackets once worn by the scions of great artificer and mercantile families, and the mid-tier artifices they wore were each worth what a common family earned in a month - apprentice artificer projects deemed just a bit too mediocre to be sold in the artificers' grand auction house in the Mercantile Quarter. The girl in the lead was as tall as Po and as pale as Lia, flaxen hair like beaten gold in the sunlight.

She turned in our direction and startled, jostling with the other artificer kids to point us out. I waved at them awkwardly, my other hand clasping a handful of dingy green hemp from my out-and-about trousers, the fabric sun-faded and mended many times over.

"Are you sure that's them?" a stocky boy asked. The two boys were about our age, with the younger girl perhaps a year younger and the tall and lanky girl perhaps a year older. In her lavender and maroon finery, she reminded me of a paler version of my sister, and I felt a momentary pang of loss. Remembering my oath of revenge, I set my jaw and clenched my fists, which perhaps gave the wrong impression. "Uh… they look mad…" the boy said.

"Priovectum lucis!" the older girl shouted. As she raised her hand, her signet ring flashed like the flat tin roof of a river barge hitting the sun.

"Ah!" I yelped, covering my eyes. "What in Honored Asuna was that for?"

"Uh…" she blushed - quite visible against her pale complexion - and looked back to her fellows. "That was supposed to dispel your shadow magic…"

"We're in broad daylight," Aldo observed. "Shadow magic don't exactly work in daylight…"

"Unless you're really, really good," Zev said.

"Which, to be clear, we're not," Mailyn added.

"They don't even teach us magic until we're Sneaks," Nate said.

"Which, to be clear, we're not," Mailyn clarified.

"You flashed a spell at me for no reason at all! Now I really think we shouldn't go into the canals," I said.

"I assure you, we can take care of ourselves," the head artificer girl said with a toss of her golden locks. "I know three, almost four, spells, and I have artifices that help me cast another dozen. Plus, I borrowed a ceremonial dagger." With great reverence, she unsheathed a silver blade with an amber and wyrwood hilt. It glowed in the sun like molten lava, half a dozen intricate runes glinting like silvertails in the surf. Flashing a weapon like that in the canals was a guarantee that you would have to use it if you didn't want it stolen… and it would probably still get stolen.

"You're not better than us," the stocky boy stated.

I did not, in fact, feel like I was better than these kids. If anything, I was a bit intimidated - they had more finery than I'd ever had in my privileged upbringing, and at least one of them knew how to cast almost-four spells! I no longer felt like a privately-tutored Selenite princess… I felt as common as dirt, and these kids had a strong noble vibe to them. I was feeling all manner of social inferiority… but I wasn't about to admit that.

"Our school is just different than yours," I stated haughtily. "They teach us how to survive on the street, and your school thinks you'll never have to. So…"

"So…" the older girl said. She gestured to her gown. "So we decided to dress like this. Nobody's going to mess with a child who looks like a dozen qattrokronos. If you mess with a merchant's kid or, heavens forbid, a mage's kid, your life is forfeit."

"Hey, some of the folks in the canals are pretty desperate," Nate observed.

She turned toward him. "Meaning?"

"Meaning they don't know what 'forfeit' means, and they act like it," Zev said. "When it comes between having the cartel slipping into your window at night and having the Caravan guards banging on your door in the morning, I know which I'd prefer."

"Very well - you clearly know the streets better than we. What do you propose, then?"

As usual, everybody looked at me, as if I was some mastermind of schemes and not an eight-year-old with a penchant for coming up with overly-dramatic operation names. Like Operation: Cultkiller, which is what I was secretly calling the current 'plan' to find the missing kids.

"We need two groups," I said. "All of us together would be way too obvious, and anything less than four of us together would be way too dangerous."

"So… your group and our group?"

I shook my head. "Definitely not. Both groups need to be half and half, or close to it, because we'll need to look like we're guiding you. No offense, but you're way too flashy to be anything more than bait…" With that, I sketched out a plan.

If the artificer's guild kids weren't going to dress like canal rats (or at least rat-adjacent like us Scamps), then we might as well use their finery. If they wandered around the canals dressed as they were, then they would definitely find themselves in trouble. They just weren't street smart, and four kids with a small fortune in clothes and trinkets would put flashing gold in the eyes of even the most principled mendicant… and, in the Canal Canton, principled mendicants were few and far between. Principled folks just didn't thrive in the canals for some reason. If those four wandered in by themselves, they'd be lucky to crawl out in their underclothes.

So, instead of blending in, the artificer kids would play the scions to some important, monied faction and we would play their street-smart guides and handlers. We could play the part even though, among the five of us, only Zev had ever been into the canals, and that had been a brief and frightening experience for him. Across our experiences in the River's Run and Foreign Cantons, we were all old hands of audacious schemes and acting like we belonged.

"Okay, so we're doing girls and boys," Opellia said - that was the older girl, the de facto leader of the artificer kids. She bent down and kissed the thinner boy on the forehead - her cousin, apparently. "Stay safe and listen to those three. And if you run into serious trouble, like serious-serious trouble, trigger your alarm ward." She tapped on his bracelet.

"What does the alarm ward do?" Mailyn asked.

Opellia shot her a wary look. "Um… I'm not allowed to say. It's for emergencies only."

With that, we split up - it was agreed that nine was too big and conspicuous a group, and girls and boys was the natural delineation, though not without some reservations. Opellia wanted her cousin, Versaes, to be in her group, but he wanted to be in Rafael's group since they were best friends, and Opellia had promised to look after Nima (not the Scamp in the tetrad, obviously - it's a common name). Beyond that, Versaes had a little artificed bracelet that paired with one of Opellia's, and she knew how to track him from up to a kilometer away, giving her a way to locate their group. That pretty much forced the artificer kids' pairing. And, among us Scamps, it was a given that I'd pair with Mailyn and Zev and Nate would pair up. Aldo had decided to go with the other boys because he was a bit annoyed at me for taking charge of the plan, even though he'd basically asked me to. Also, he might have been as reticent to be on a team with four girls as I would have been to be on a team of all boys.

We headed due south as the boys circled around to the west, the nine of us moving to encircle the whole canton. Truly, nothing strikes fear into the hearts of hardened criminals like a group of precocious children, all under ten years old, surrounding them from two sides.

"You know the canals well, I assume?" Opellia asked.

"Um…" I shot Mailyn a look. "You may assume that," I said. I reached into my pocket where my little waterproofed map of the Canal Canton was. A number of streets were impassable, blocked, or waterlogged, as indicated with various dotted outlines, and a few areas had big question marks, suggesting that the information was tentative or subject to frequent change. Still, I had a pretty good idea of where I was going based on the major landmarks.

"Ew! What's that smell?" little Nima grimaced.

"That's the canals," Mailyn said flatly. "It's the Canal Canton."

"I thought we were still blocks away from the canals-proper?" Opellia observed.

"It's the canals," I reiterated. "The smell's going to get worse. Much worse." I was currently about the closest I'd ever been to the canals, but reliable sources had told me that it got a lot worse.

"And we're sure we want to go into the canals?" Opellia asked.

"Want's got nothing to do with it," Aldo called over from the boys' group. "If they disappeared near here, tollos to tortas they went into there. I don't know about you lot, but we Scamps protect our own…"

"Well, some of us do," Mailyn added.

"Fair enough."

"Yes. We definitely protect our fellows, too," Opellia said with a firm nod. "Let's do this."

With that settled, we headed south into the hazy stench of the canals, the roads growing more cramped, the shabby buildings less well-maintained, the denizens more skittish, their glowering gazes tinged with suspicion. The people who'd killed Lucan were probably somewhere in here. It had probably been a crime of opportunity - they probably had no idea that they'd abducted a Collegium Scamp, but they had abducted one, and now we were onto them. They were about to be zapped by Operation: Cultkiller!

As we walked, I brought myself alongside Opellia, who was nearly half a head taller than me. I tried to maintain the same proud poise she evinced.

"Sorry about flashing magic in your eyes."

I waved it off. "It's fine. We Scamps have a rather poor reputation. What can you tell me about your missing child?"

"Rhima is Nima's cousin," Opellia said, squeezing the younger girl's shoulder.

"Second cousin," Nima corrected her. "But my only relative in the guild. Well… the only one who's still alive." She nibbled at her lip, concern suddenly darkening her expression. "We hope. We…"

Opellia pulled the younger girl into a hug. "Rhima's alive." She glanced at me. "She's also my best friend, but she's a bit wild. I mean… probably not feral like you Collegium kids, no offense, but she's wild by our standards. Artificer Skohle tasked her with finding some embersteel scrap, and when she asked Gimilin where she was likely to find a good price on it, the idiot pointed her to the canals. Gimmi says she thought she was asking about it for a report and didn't know she was going to this godforsaken place…"

"So is your guild doing anything about it?" Mailyn asked. I'd been wondering the same thing.

Opellia shrugged. "Yes. But they're going through…" she made an unhappy face… "proper authorities. As if there were a such thing in this part of the city. I'm not about to wait for whatever passes as guards around here to get back to the guild. We might be too late by then, so we decided to take the matter into our own hands. We weren't sure what to do until Rafael heard some of your lot talking about it on the Step Wharf. I guess he got in contact with one of the boys. The shifty one met with me yesterday… he wouldn't stop talking about shamblers for some reason."

"Aldo's a bit captivated by them," I said.

"I noticed. You're not what I expected, you know…"

"Thanks, I think?" I said. Opellia just nodded. "We'd better go."

Coming from the north, the first we'd noticed was the stench, a pungent and sulfurous reek that strikes alarm deep within the hindbrain, some ancient instinct warning that you must never drink, bathe in, or look too closely at the waters of the canton. Next came the press of buildings in the north canal, the wall of continuous ramshackle warrens that separated the canton from the buffer zone of impoverished Foreign Canton neighborhoods just north of them. Finally came the haze - the miasma of industrial smoke and canal fumes that sat like a mildly toxic carpet, only occasionally wafting in the breeze. Sea birds and a few vultures circled high above, perhaps smelling the mix of fish guts, human waste, and marsh rot that infused the entire canton. Plus, I imagine there were half a dozen dead bodies exposed to the elements at any given time. If memory serves, the residents of the canals dump their bodies right into the water after wrapping a white cloth around a limb, as a courtesy to indicate that the body has already been picked over for valuables.

In short, the canals were neither a pleasant locale nor one appropriate for children. Nonetheless, hundreds of children live in the warrens and cramped, gradually-collapsing burbs of the district, and some say that a natural toxin resistance has developed in the lineages of longtime canal denizens. Obviously, none of us had any such resistance, and I was already developing a headache.

We crossed the aptly-named Canal Street running parallel to the northmost canal and, for the first time ever, I found myself in the Canal Canton. I was going to be quite upset if we didn't find the kidnappers there.