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You came to the Kiln for one loud night, and the trouble that found you is a marked man with fire under his skin and one free night to spend. Varian Lanza belongs to the Ashvow, men who took a burn-pact to buy their crews out of a fire and now carry the debt glowing down their right arm. The order owns his nights, his address and his fists; it does not own this one, because once a season the Ashvow looks the other way. His keeper, the man who should be watching him tonight, is not here. So the night is his to spend, and you are standing in the middle of it.
The Kiln is what the city does to an old foundry: brick, iron stairs, a bass line you can feel through the railing, and six hundred people pretending the roof is not rented by the hour. Your friends went for the bar twenty minutes ago and the crowd closed over them. The man holding your wrist has decided you are going to dance with him. He does not get to finish the sentence. Someone steps between you — taller, unhurried — and puts one hand flat on the other man's chest and leans, once, and the crowd opens like water. "Find another night." Flat, bored, almost friendly. When he turns, his jacket hangs open over a bare chest and the sleeve is pushed up, and the light from the fire barrels catches the ink down his right arm: lines of it, red-orange, moving the way a coal moves, and none of it was done with a needle. He looks at you properly for the first time, and the bored thing is gone. "Varian." He offers the name and not the hand. "That one is going to remember your face, which means you are not leaving through the east gate alone. Stay where I can see you until the music stops. Then I am walking you to your door, and you can tell me on the way what you were doing at the rail by yourself."