She was already there when I arrived.
The meeting point was a small square in the older part of the city — the kind of place that had been built before anyone decided that cities needed to be efficient, so it had ended up being pleasant instead. Old stone paving, a fountain that actually worked, a row of market stalls along the north side selling things that ranged from useful to entirely unnecessary.
Kenzie was sitting on the edge of the fountain with the easy posture of someone who had been waiting long enough to get comfortable but not long enough to be annoyed about it. She wore a light jacket over a simple dress, hair loose, the ruby necklace catching the morning light. No bodyguard in sight, which meant she'd either lost him deliberately or negotiated something I didn't need to know about.
She looked up when she saw me and her face did the thing it did — that unguarded, uncomplicated brightness that I'd never quite seen on anyone else.
"You came," she said.
"You said trust you."
"And you did." She stood, tilting her head to assess my outfit. "Good. Those jeans are fine to ruin."
"That's still not reassuring."
"Stop expecting reassurance and start expecting fun." She started walking. "Come on."
The first stop was a pottery studio tucked into a side street that looked like it had been there since before the surrounding buildings were built. A low doorway, the smell of clay and something earthy underneath it, long tables with wheels and raw material and the ambient mess of a place where things were made rather than sold.
The woman running it was older, unhurried, with clay-stained hands and the expression of someone who had watched a thousand people sit down at a wheel and discover that it was harder than it looked.
It was considerably harder than it looked.
Kenzie took to it with the focused determination of someone who had decided to be good at a thing and was not yet good at it and found this interesting rather than frustrating. Her first attempt collapsed. Her second attempt collapsed faster, which she seemed to find genuinely funny. Her third attempt produced something that was technically a vessel in the sense that it had a bottom and sides.
"It's a bowl," she announced.
"It's an interpretation of a bowl," I said.
"That's what I said."
Mine wasn't much better. The clay had its own ideas about what shape it wanted to be, and those ideas did not consistently align with mine. At one point Kenzie leaned over to show me something about the wrist position and her hands ended up briefly over mine on the wheel, both of us trying to coax the same obstinate mound of clay into doing something reasonable.
It didn't work. But the attempt was good.
We left with two misshapen pieces wrapped in newspaper, which the woman promised she'd fire and have ready for collection. Kenzie carried hers like it was delicate.
"I'm going to put it on my windowsill," she said.
"It's barely symmetrical."
"I made it. That makes it worth putting on a windowsill." She glanced at me. "You should keep yours too."
"It looks like a collapsed hat."
"It looks like something you made with your hands on a Saturday morning. That's different." She shifted it to her other arm. "Objects don't have to be perfect to be worth keeping."
I looked at the newspaper-wrapped lump in my hands and thought about that for a moment.
"Fair point," I said.
We ate lunch at a place she knew — not fancy, just a counter restaurant down a back street where the menu was written on a chalkboard and the portions assumed you were hungry. We ordered more food than we needed and ate most of it anyway, sitting at a small table outside where the street was narrow enough that the buildings on either side created a kind of accidental shelter from the wind.
She told me about the week. The bodyguard situation — she'd told him she was going to a study session at a friend's. The friend existed, technically. Whether the study session did was another matter. She said it with the casual confidence of someone who had been managing complicated logistics for most of her life.
I told her about the party. The rooftop, the string lights, the sixty people having a genuinely good time while I stood at the edge watching it like a window display.
"You don't like crowds," she said.
"I don't mind crowds. I mind crowds where I'm supposed to be a version of myself that I'm not particularly."
She looked at me with the particular quality of attention she sometimes had — not analysing, just fully present. "What version were you supposed to be?"
"Someone who goes to Friday rooftop parties and has a good time."
"Can't that just be you?"
"Maybe for someone else." I picked up my cup. "I'm better in smaller rooms."
"Like this."
"Like this."
She smiled. Not the performance of one — the real version, the one that happened before she'd decided how to present it. "I know what you mean," she said. "Rooms full of people who expect something from you are exhausting. Rooms with one person who doesn't are not."
I looked at her. "You have a lot of rooms full of people who expect something."
"My entire life is rooms full of people who expect something." She said it simply, without self-pity, as a plain description of geography. "That's why this is nice."
The ferris wheel was at the edge of the old quarter — a permanent fixture rather than a seasonal one, big enough to give a real view, slow enough to make it worth taking. Kenzie had clearly been planning this specific stop because she walked toward it with the directness of someone following an internal map.
We got a cabin to ourselves. The city opened up below us as we rose — Annex City in its full Saturday afternoon arrangement, busy and layered and complicated in the way of places that had been built by many different hands across many different decades without anyone particularly coordinating the result.
Kenzie looked out the window.
Not at anything specific. Just at the city itself, the whole of it, with an expression that was different from anything I'd seen from her in the pub or the park or the evenings on my couch. Something older in it. More complicated.
"Do you love this city?" I asked.
She was quiet for a moment.
"Yes," she said. "It's difficult to love and I love it anyway. Those are usually the same thing." She traced a finger along the edge of the window, following the skyline. "Most people look at it and see the damage. The gang lines, the parts that are falling apart, the places where it's been broken and nobody fixed it properly." She paused. "I look at it and see everything it could be."
"That's a harder way to look at it."
"It's the only way I know how." She turned from the window. "My father is the reason a lot of it is the way it is."
I kept my expression neutral.
"He runs this city," she said. "Not officially. Not with a title or an office. But the way things actually work here — the money that moves, the decisions that get made, the places that get protected and the places that don't — that's him." She said it quietly, without drama. "People call him the King. Which sounds ridiculous until you understand that it isn't."
"Kenzie—"
"I'm not asking for a reaction," she said. "I'm just telling you." She looked back out the window. "I grew up in rooms full of people who treated me like an extension of him. Like I was the King's daughter before I was anything else." A pause. "You're the first person in a long time who just talks to me like I'm a person. Who gets annoyed when I show up uninvited and makes lemonade anyway and doesn't care about any of the rest of it."
I thought about the pub. The extra money under the cup. The note. The way she'd looked at me that first night like she was solving something.
"I understand that," I said.
She looked at me.
"People expecting you to be something before they've let you be anything," I said. "Like your name is already a sentence and you're just supposed to finish it the way they've decided it ends." I looked at the city below us. "I grew up with that."
She was watching me now with the particular attention of someone who has just heard something they recognise.
"Cartez," she said. Not my first name. The family name — specific, deliberate, the way you'd use someone's full name when you wanted them to understand that you were seeing them properly.
"Yeah," I said.
"You understand."
"More than most."
She turned back to the window. The wheel was near the top of its rotation now, the city spread beneath us in every direction, the late afternoon light going golden across the rooftops.
"There's a gala," she said, after a moment. "Wednesday evening. At my house." A pause. "It's the kind of event I'm required to attend and would strongly prefer not to attend alone." She glanced at me. "I'd like you to come."
I thought about Wednesday. About the faction and Crane and the mission brief that was probably already being updated for next week. About the King whose daughter was sitting next to me asking me to walk into his house.
About how she'd looked at the city just now and said everything it could be.
"Okay," I said.
She exhaled slightly — not relief exactly, something quieter. Like a question that had been asked carefully and received an answer it hadn't been entirely sure of.
"Wear something that isn't those jeans," she said.
"High bar."
"Moderate bar. You can clear it."
The wheel brought us back down to the ground. We stepped out into the Saturday afternoon, the city going about its ordinary business around us, entirely indifferent to the conversation that had just happened forty feet above it.
I got back to my apartment as the evening was starting.
Every part of me was tired in the specific way of a day that had been full without being difficult — the pleasant, heavy exhaustion of someone who had used themselves properly rather than spent themselves. I dropped my jacket on the chair. I set the newspaper-wrapped pottery on the kitchen counter. I looked at it for a moment — the collapsed hat shape, the slightly uneven rim, the undeniable evidence of my exact skill level at a wheel.
I left it on the counter.
Kenzie was right. It was worth keeping.
I changed into something comfortable, thought briefly about the balcony, thought briefly about the Wednesday gala, thought briefly about the King whose city I'd been operating in without understanding who owned it. I thought about how she called out my family name, could she know about the Cartez family?
Then I lay down on the bed and was asleep before I'd finished the thought.