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In a rain-slick city of markets and favors, night courier Etta Lark juggles routes, gossip, and small trades. When an elderly man asks her to hand a parcel directly to his estranged daughter, she engineers a delicate meeting through barter, timing, and streetcraft—turning logistics into possibility.
Etta Lark cinches the last strap with a practiced wrist-twist, fingers finding the notch without a glance. The pannier smells faintly of oil and lemon peel—leftover from a mechanic’s courtesy wipe—and she thumbs the clasp until it sings shut. Her courier bag sits like a small, obedient animal between her knees; she pats the canvas as if it might be comforted. Outside, the stairwell holds the seasoning of the neighborhood: the faint garlic of a landlord’s stew seeping through the plaster, a radio in the stairwell two doors down that insists every evening on the same brass band, and an old notice pinned to the bulletin board announcing the monthly night market’s new regulations about who gets which stall. None of those things are her concern tonight, but they hang around her like a familiar scent.
She hoists the bag and steps into the street. Dusk is a ribbon of indigo along the rooftops. The city’s evening breath is already setting in—a humid, citrus-laced damp that makes the cobbles shine. Food stalls are tipping their tarps, and one vendor is already threading paste into tiny pastries that steam in paper cones, a popular treat locals swear keeps the eyes awake and the legs light. Etta buys one half out of habit, eats three quarters of it while juggling keys and helmet, and hands the remainder to a pigeon that regards her as if she’s late with rent and moral instructions.
Her bicycle waits, leaning against a lamppost with an old sticker across the top tube that reads, in a font someone had thought funny, NOT A MESSENGER PIGEON. She clips her lights on—white at the front, a stubborn red at the back that blinks like a cheeky eye—and swings into the saddle. The city slides by in a practiced blur: laundry lines frayed like flags; a tram whining past with its timetable folded into a soldier’s salute; a pair of teenagers arguing fiercely over whether fermented tea tastes better with ginger or without. Etta threads between their gestures without slowing.
Riding is a conversation in motion. She leans into a corner and lets the bike talk to the street, speaks by shifting weight where feet cannot reach. Her routes are not lists but stories stitched in pavement. Tonight she intends to run her usual loop: three small corporate parcels that want to believe they’re urgent, a plant delivery to a florist who waters by night, and a bookshop that will take a raincheck for a subscription box (she is not the delivery of sentimental objects, but she can carry them). The job is muscle-memory, a choreography of left turns and discreet smiles. Still, Etta notices the unusual: a glance too long at a window, someone standing with hands in pockets and eyes on the alley she is about to take, a carton of flyers nailed to a pole advertising the annual “midnight bread toss,” a local tradition where bakers throw leftover loaves into the river for the gulls. It is a detail that has nothing to do with tonight’s business, and she files it away like a coin in a jar.
She hums—soft, tuneless—because she always hums when the city is sticky and slow. A small laugh escapes when she thinks of Harris’s face the morning he insisted that humming wards off potholes.