The Black Market does not employ locks.
It employs witnesses.
I’ve said this to visitors for thirty years and watched exactly none of them believe me, right up until the moment they did. Humans especially. They walk into the Market expecting shadows, blades in alleys, the usual cheap theater of the criminal underworld, and they miss the actual machinery entirely.
The machinery is attention. Old, patient, and total.
This is the account of what that attention did to a family named Vail. I’ve pieced it together from Sänä testimony, the Triad’s own record, and one very reluctant interview with a locksmith’s niece.
Some names I’ve kept.
A few, out of what remains of my professional decency, I have not.
