I step inside Nick’s drughouse, looking at the hallway as it’s now free of any evidence or hint of the battle that had transpired here not so long ago. I peek into the crash room, as it similarly has been completely repaired, though a small concrete patch stands out as fresher than the rest of the floor, roughly where I remember the grenade rolling to. Still had a weird smell, though. I silently hoped they were sleeping in instead of just doing drugs at all hours of the day.

I walk up the stairs and open the door without knocking, stepping in to find Nick at his desk, still on the phone with someone and facing the nearby, albeit shuttered window. The rest of the room, though, is fancier than I’d imagined, with wood paneling and floors, and a stylish counter riding along the back wall of the office-and a printer atop it that looked 10 years past its prime. Nick’s desk, itself, was a large one of lacquered wood-mahogany, if I had to guess-giving off the appearance of an executive’s workstation. I turn my focus back to Nick’s predicament.

“Listen, man, you gotta believe me when I say those little shits were NOT associated with me in any way. I don’t dick around with Teneb, not really into fucking up my clients on that scale.” He tilts his head. “Yeah, tell your friends to stay away from anyone dealing a black substance of any sort-and while you’re at it, report it to me. I’m trying to play whack-a-mole with these punk-ass rats.” Nick sighs, exasperated as he hangs up. He then finally turns to look at me, smiling slightly as he brings his hands together on his desk. “Glad to see you here, chief. Finally, I can have someone useful on board for this particular pest problem.”

“So, what do we know about these vermin?”

“Well...” Nick clears some space and pulls out a printed sheet of paper which had a map on it. Three points were circled in red pen, plus one more circled in blue pen. “Circled in blue is the drug house, and these three points in red are the last places where we caught these punks kicking up shop. I’m fucking sick of chasing them off and I’d like a more… permanent solution.” The way he says ‘permanent solution’, I don’t like what he’s asking me to do, but I understand that it might be necessary.

I pull the nearby chair on his side-also an elegantly crafted chair with padding-out and sit down in it after pulling my swords out of my belt, propping them up against the desk. “So they’re smart enough to change position after getting caught, but they’re changing position with a very noticeable trend...”

“Noticeable? What?” Nick leans forward on the table, his eyes searching desperately for the pattern he apparently didn’t see. In his defense, though, it’s not a specific enough pattern to really bank on.

“They’re all behind the drughouse. That’s not a guarantee that the next meet spot will be behind the drughouse, but it was something I noticed.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s kind of a helpful assumption to make…” Nick tilts his head. “But it’s definitely not a silver bullet.”

“Agreed.” I stop to think about what other commonalities they may have, and decide it might be better if I had a direct look at the spots myself. “Hey, you got a clipboard?”

“Yeah, I think I got a few as part of that business blowout sale lot I jumped on a while ago.” He opens one of his desk’s drawers, looking inside.

“So, you don’t have a taste for immaculate mahogany desks, then?” I tilted my head, curious but somehow not surprised that he got all this nice furniture from a liquidation sale. After all, I knew drug dealers had cash, but this was a little bit of a ridiculous expenditure for my intuition to digest.

“Oh no, I knew this desk was downright bitchin’, but it would’ve been a bitch to buy at retail price.” I let out a good-natured chuckle. “Wait, what do you need a clipboard for?” Nick looked puzzled as he pulled a wooden clipboard out of the drawer.

“Well, I wanted to be able to take notes. I also need another copy of that map, if you could print one for me.”

“Yeah, sure.” He sets the clipboard on the table as he pulls up his laptop-a somewhat blocky business model that gave impressions of a durable, dependable workhorse that disdained beauty and coveted utility. He clicks a couple of times, and the printer behind him buzzes to life, its display lighting up with a soft glow, pulling a sheet from its feed tray at an agonizingly slow pace.

“That wasn’t exactly a very up-to-date business you cleaned out, huh?”

“I guess not.” Nick sighed, turning in his chair to face the printer, which now had fully pulled the paper from its feed tray, and got to work printing the map one slow and painful line at a time, whirring with each fraction of an inch the paper juts out of the output slot.

I raise an eyebrow. “So you can go thrift shopping for a giant executive’s desk but not a printer that was made within the last 5 years?”

Nick chuckled. “Nah, I’m gonna ride this damn thing into the ground first.” He crossed his arms. “I actually kinda like its aesthetic, though. A big, robust old beast of a machine, well past its prime but not quite useless. Just think of the history it probably has!”

“Oh, yeah, being an obnoxiously slow printer for a failing business, must be worthy of the next YA novel, huh?” I sigh. “Hearing you hype up this piece of shit, I’m thinking you wouldn’t do so bad in an auction house.” Speaking of said piece of shit, it was about halfway through printing the map.

Nick laughs, putting both arms behind his back and leaning back in his chair. “Ah, man, wouldn’t it be nice to be an orator, roping rich old people into shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for old-ass chairs and tables nobody else would ever want. I’d be living nice and safe and comfy-but I kinda like it here, with the danger and the street cred of being a drug dealer, and all the low-life friends I end up making along the way!”

I let out a short laugh at Nick’s clearly boyish attitude towards his career prospects. “When you put it that way, being an auctioneer starts to sound like one hell of a racket.”

Nick rotates his chair back around to face me, his face now full of energy. “Oh, you have no fucking clue, dude. These guys make up imaginary bids just to drive up the prices. The most bombastic of those con artists will point right up at the chandelier while doing it!”

I smile, letting out a hearty chuckle. “I’m not so sure that’s why they call it chandelier bidding, Nick.” Come to think of it, I had heard the term ‘Chandelier Bidding’ before, but never really knew what it meant until the other piece of the puzzle was presented to me just now.

Nick smiles. “Maybe that’s just what they want you to think.”

As I try to come up with a witty response, I notice that the printer had finished its task while we were bantering. “Oh, look, the map’s done.”

“Oh, shit, right, yeah,” Nick pushes his chair back, standing up and quickly walking over, taking the map and walking back over as he sets it on the desk towards my end. “Almost forgot we were supposed to actually be doing work for a minute.” Nick lets out a chuckle afterwards.

“I’m gonna need pens, too. As many colors as you have.” Nick hands over the pens as I copy the circles for the drughouse’s location as well as the hiding spots, drawing lines forming a cone starting from the drughouse and covering an area with the meet spots within it. “Time for me to do some surveying.” I stand up and slide my swords back into my belt, carefully rearranging them before grabbing the clipboard and the green pen. I walk out of the office, down to the array of paths and alleys that linger behind the drug den.

Making a meticulous effort to keep track of where I was as I went, I surveyed the three areas they’d already been, trying to decipher a commonality between the three spots. While it was something of a stretch, I did find one commonality between them; they were all alleys that branched off from busier roads. That is a pretty broad net, but it was the only one I had.

I walk around, passively taking in the sights of brick buildings housing seedy joints, struggling businesses, and a few closed storefronts. All things considered, though, the streets looked surprisingly lively and beautiful for being in such close proximity to a drug den. That is one thing I’ve noticed about Halych; it hides its wounds well, continuing to sing like a bird even under great pain.

Of course, this was no time to be sightseeing. I kept the center of my focus on finding spots similar to the last three, yet again jumping on anything even remotely resembling a lead like I did when I first searched for the poetry that led me to the Haracrein’s church. I paused as I found each semi-secluded alleyway, trying to think if each spot was such a likely area for them to set up camp next. I circled each area I thought was likely with green, making sure to stay mostly within the cone I had drawn earlier, treading out on either side of the cone shortly to hedge my bets. All in all, I find 6 possible spots, not too far from each other.

I re-enter Nick’s office, as I see him toying around with a gilded pocketwatch. “Alright, so I’ve noticed that they’re always picking alleys that are secluded, but branching off from relatively popular roads. I know it’s not a very strong trend to go off of, but it’s all I’ve got. I also took the liberty of figuring out a bunch of other places they’d be likely to strike next, if this incredibly flimsy pattern holds.” I set my clipboard-map included- onto the desk in front of him. “The spots are circled in green.”

“Alright, well...” Nick drops the pocketwatch into a desk drawer as he looks closer at the circles, moving his own pen’s head between them as if trying to form a shape out of them. “At least this area isn’t too big, but 6 spots is a lot of ground to cover. What the hell are we supposed to do with this information?”

I cross my arms, trying to think of something. He did have a point, we couldn’t just lay a trap and bet on a one in six chance of being correct. We’d need something smarter than that. This was a game of cat and mouse, after all, and mice can be quite slippery, scurrying away to their holes even when they do get spotted. It was then I had an idea; the streets were full of funnels and chokepoints we could use to our advantage, with enough manpower.

“We don’t have to be everywhere. If we just got enough rough men we could completely surround the area at all the right chokepoints, and funnel-no, herd them towards where an area where we can completely surround them more tightly.”

Nick tilted his head, clearly interested in the idea. “Not a bad plan, but I think they’d just scram if they saw guards everywhere and go somewhere else to deal their bullshit to the public.”

“Well, if you could have an undercover agent, perhaps a buyer to run a sting operation with, patrolling the area that wouldn’t gather so much suspicion. Though, you’d still need to have guards on standby for this, so this could be logistically strenuous.”

“It won’t be too easy, but I think I could scramble together the right guys. This is gonna be an expensive problem to fix at this rate, though...” He sighs, running a hand through his hair. “So, how many do you think we’d need in total?”

I take a blue pen off the desk and start figuring out how to surround the entire area with the smallest amount of chokepoints necessary. I go to work, putting line after line across the various branching paths, taking care to avoid bothering to blockade dead ends. “I’d recommend a dozen men at the minimum, we’re talking about a fairly wide net here.”

“Damn. Well, I suppose I could scrape together that many willing men, after all, I’ve got plenty of friends from all the dealing I do. Though, how are we gonna signal them all to move in? Where will they hide beforehand?”

“Simple. We keep them in the drug den, and tell them to take roundabout paths. As for coordination… how about, as old fashioned as it sounds, hand-radios?”

“Oh, you mean like mall cops?” Nick suddenly sounded slightly excited. “I’ve been thinking about getting one of those for a while, actually. Just never got to think of a good reason to get them until now.”

“Well, now you do. Have fun, and try not to buy outdated trash again.”

Nick sighed. “Fair enough.” I get up from my chair. “Wait.” He pulls out a picture. “This is a picture of the little shits that a guy I knew managed to snap. I know it’s not much, but it’s something, right? Just in case you run across those little shits yourself.”

“Wouldn’t you need to keep this so your guards know what they’re looking for?” I tilt my head, looking at the picture. It’s blurry and low-resolution, and shows three people running together. They’re not very big, though one is prominently wearing a red coat with a hood, and another is carrying what seems to be a blanket or a large rag of some sort with them. Come to think of it, the picture didn’t exactly give a good frame of reference, but I get the impression that Nick was being more literal than I thought when he was referring to them as ‘kids’. If that’s true, how the hell did they get roped into slinging Teneb in the streets, especially on hostile turf?

“Oh, no, I’ll just… print them, on that big, slow bastard over there.” Nick briefly tilts his head towards the printer, almost for comedic effect.

I let out a short chuckle. “Come to think of it, are they picking their dealing times on a schedule as well?”

“They’ve been doing it every day, or so we think, at around 10-2, typically. I take it you’d like to lead the charge yourself?”

“If I can, I will. I just don’t want to be cooped up in this building for two weeks waiting for nothing.”

“Then come at 9:30 AM tomorrow.”

“Got it.” I nod lightly to him before standing upright and leaving. As an afterthought I text Nick and tell him to number the spots in green for easier identification.