The outer slums smelled different from the rest of the city, and Beorn had long since stopped expecting them to smell any other way. Cook fires, crowds packed into small streets, alleys and buildings. The breath of too many people who had arrived with nothing and organized their lives around that fact with inevitable efficiency.

He walked through the early-morning streets in a plain coat and a hat pulled low enough to alter the view of his face, with Tam at his left and Lewin one step behind, carrying one bag.

"There’s five of them."

Beorn said to Tam as they moved. "Three are probably past the beginning of it. Two are still in the early stages."

Tam kept pace without looking over.

"How long have the younger ones been in the early stages, my lord?"

"Lewin’s estimate was weeks."

He glanced ahead as they walked.

"Maybe longer."

She pursed her lips in empathetic distress.

"Chances are the oldest is keeping them from using their powers."

A pause passed between them, then he continued, "She thinks that’s the best way to keep them save and without attracting attention."

Tam nearly stopped walking, "She’s hurting them..."

The girl was as sad over the oldest as the younger ones.

"Yes," Beorn said.

She understood without needing more explanation. He did not add to it, and she did not ask.

The street widened as they reached the bottom of the old slums district, and the atmosphere of the place changed. More people stood in the streets without a place to sleep, more faces had the sheer exhaustion of forced migration.

Two women sat on a step with bundled goods at their feet, speaking in a language Beorn did not know. They watched the street with the sideways attention of people still deciding what this city was. A child in an upper window followed him from one end of the street to the other as he passed below.

The food lines on the district had grown since the last time he came this way. The organization around them worked, which meant his own administrative work, carried out by staff he had hired and infrastructure he had built. But the volume had outstripped the system’s original scale. People stood in clusters instead of neat rows.

He noted that away with everything else that needed attention, and kept moving.

Lewin took a turn he had not announced. The route slipped between two converted storage buildings and along a narrow passage that ran beside the main street without quite meeting it. He moved without checking anything, which meant he had been this way before. Beorn followed without asking why.

The building sat at the end of the passage. Ground floor, shuttered windows, an upper floor with one shutter sitting slightly off true, as if it had been adjusted recently from the inside. Nothing about it felt remarkable.

Beorn knocked. Three gentle raps.

No one replied.

He waited.

He knocked again, exactly as before.

Still nothing, though the inside was not entirely quiet. The way a room changes when the people inside stop moving and start listening.

He spoke to the door, keeping his voice low enough to carry through the wood without reaching the street.

"I have medicine," he said. "For whoever needs it most."

He did not name the illness. He did not mention symptoms or powers or anything that would give the door a reason to stay shut instead of a reason to open. He put the fact against the wood and waited to see whether that was enough.

Finally, movement came from inside.

The sound of someone moving.

Then the door opened.

The girl who opened it was somewhere around eighteen. She stood with the door at her back, occupying the way inside completely. She was not tall, but she held herself as if height had stopped mattering some time ago.

Her hair was dark and unwashed, pulled back without care. Her face wasn’t quite hostile, to Beorn’s fortune. She discerned the three of them in a single sweep, starting with Lewin, moving to Beorn, then pausing briefly on Tam.

"Who are you," she said.

"Beorn."

He gave only the one name.

"The one behind me is Lewin. He has what I mentioned."

Her eyes moved to the bag in Lewin’s hands.

Then back to Beorn.

"And her?" she said, her gaze returning to Tam.

"She’s with us, Tam." he said.

A small sound came from somewhere behind the girl. She gave no outward sign of hearing it. She kept her attention on Beorn.

"What do you want," she said.

"To give you food and the medicine," Beorn said. "After that, to talk, if you’ll allow it."

"About what."

"About what’s happening to your group."

Her expression didn’t change, but something in her gaze shifted by a degree he would have missed if he had not been watching for it. He had said your group rather than the children, rather than you. That placed her inside the problem instead of outside it, and she had noticed the distinction and was deciding what to do with it.

Her eyes went to Tam again and stayed there.

Tam stood beside Beorn with her hands at her sides.

She did not look away from the stare. She did not offer reassurance, explanation, or any visible effort to seem harmless.

She was simply there, fourteen years old, fine and healthy, and whatever that showed, it did so without Tam trying to make it say anything.

The oldest girl looked at her for three full seconds.

Then she stepped back from the doorway.

Inside, the room was what storage became when it had been used for other things long enough. High ceiling, a floor that had taken years of different use, walls marked by the ghost outlines of shelving that no longer existed.

Five people had been living there, and the way they had organized themselves within the space said everything about the order between them.

A girl with dark eyes and straight posture stood against the far wall, her back flat to the wood, watching the door. She had probably been watching it since before it opened, Beorn thought.

She did not acknowledge their entry in any way that would confirm she had noticed them.

A third girl sat near the left wall, in a way she could see both the door and the girl at the far wall. Her posture was loose where the girl at the wall was stiff. She looked at them as they came in, and her expression had the doubt whether this would be worth her time.

"So," the third girl said, to no one in particular, "there are three of them."

The oldest girl did not look at her.

"Beadu."

"What. I’m just watching."

In the far corner, the two children sat close together. The older of the two, thirteen or close to it, had her knees drawn up with her arms around them and watched with a gaze older than her age should have allowed.

The younger leaned against the wall beside her, and her condition was obvious from the start. The paleness had gone past what Beorn would consider the first stage. She was hugging herself in way that implied every motion brought her pain, her breaths shallow, her eyes watching them without turning her head.

The oldest closed the door.

She looked at the third, Beadu without expression.

"Take the bag."

Beadu uncurled from her seat without urgency and crossed to Lewin, who held the bag out. She opened it and looked inside without committing to any reaction.

"Food and herbs," she said, more to herself than anyone else.

She carried it to the corner and set it down near the children.

The younger one looked at the bag, then at Beadu, then at Beorn across the room. She said nothing, but her face had the look of a child when they were trying very hard to be as brave as the older girls.

The oldest moved to the center of the room and stopped.

She went through the names in order, her eyes moving from the girl at the wall, Mod, to Beadu, pausing on the older child, Leof, and then to the youngest, Mab. Hers was Hild.

Beorn kept his expression attentive, disengaged, without any indication that could arise a hostile reaction from the girls.

She folded her arms.

"Now, stop playing games and tell me what you actually want," she said.