I met Brena Jerhit today. First time. It's the reason I'm sitting here writing any of this down, so I'll start with her.

She told me I was smart. Not the normal way people say it to be polite. She said I was smart enough to see a gap everybody was already thinking about, and instead of figuring somebody else was on it, I went and did it myself. That was the compliment. Not that I noticed the gap. Everybody noticed the gap. That I actually moved on it while the rest of them stood around waiting on a go-ahead that was never coming.

She's right, and I'd never heard it put that plain. The trade didn't need a genius. It needed one guy willing to treat the thing everyone already knew about like an actual plan instead of a rumor.

Then she said something that stuck with me more than the compliment did. She told me I should start logging my own history. My own personal one. Because in this line of work anything can happen at any moment, and it's the kind of thing you don't see coming. She was clear that I'm not on her level, she made sure I understood that, but she said even she logs her own story. She said at any time I could upset the wrong person, or run into the wrong person, and that could be it for me. I couldn't tell if that was real advice or a threat. I still can't. But it shook me enough that here I am, writing like some academic or poet that fears being lost to time. That sounds ridiculous, so for anyone who reads this later I should probably explain why I agreed to it in the first place, and why it hit me so hard that I needed to.

Not long ago I was in Therik, in one of the hubs off the docks. It's a low-profile transit spot, the kind of place people in my line pass through quiet, drink somewhere and wait until it's clear to leave the area. There was a big Assault-Class watching me. Then I spotted two Tacticians watching from across the hub. That's three I'd already made. Then before I could get out, somebody I hadn't even clocked came up on me, and I realized I was surrounded. I couldn't tell if she was another Tactician or a natural-born. She said, "Not very safe for you to be this far away on your own, is it."

That's when it hit me that my face is recognizable now. That there's some danger to me at this point that just can't be avoided anymore.

Turned out they were all Jerhit, doing legitimate business in Therik. A mix of bored security and people having a drink, waiting to leave. So it was nothing. I don't know why they picked me to mess with, and I'm just glad it was a joke. But what if it hadn't been them. What if it hadn't been friendly faces, what if it was somebody who actually wanted me. There would've been nothing I could do. Nothing. I did start keeping a security escort after that. But that's not really the point. The point is that nobody would know my story, or how I see any of this, because I'd never written a word of it down. I'd have just been another guy who was here and then gone.

So. Since I'm doing this, I'll put down who I actually am. Not the version somebody else will tell if my name ever gets out, because that one will call me a monster and leave it there, and it'll get written by people who never had to solve the problem I solved. This is the only place it's going to be honest, since nobody reads it unless I'm already gone.

I grew up in the south of the Geban continent, where the world reaches you through the relay and not through the street. Academic upbringing. I went up to the capital to study, and what I really ended up learning was how the planet moves things. Cargo, materials, people. How you make something exist on a manifest and how you make it come off one. I spent years in relay contracting, and what that taught me was exactly where the systems that track everything just stop looking.

Here's the part I'll say straight, because I'm not going to pretend otherwise in my own journal. The trade was already there. It was there under the Empire, before the Fracture, and it's here now. There have always been areas that aren't really meant to be exploited but where services exist anyway, services people act like don't exist. I didn't build the demand. I didn't do the catching. I just looked at something that was already there, already moving, already filling a need everyone wanted filled and nobody would say out loud, and I treated it like a logistics problem. That's all it was. Everyone figured the distance between the frontier and the buyers was the wall. The distance was never the wall. The paperwork was, and I already knew the paperwork. So I solved it. I ran the supply out to the demand that was sitting in the capital and in Jeyrha the whole time. It was a service everyone needed. I just realized it and did it.

Anyway. Since I'm writing, I might as well put down something that's been on my mind, because it doesn't make sense to me. Why are there people in favor of centralization at all. And on top of that, some of the ones calling for it are the Unbound. There's no group on the planet I'd rather be opposed to than them. In my business we don't trust them. So why would anybody else in society trust them. Their motives are impossible to know. They take the business side out of most things, and I honestly believe a lot of what they do is for pleasure, which is a whole different level of strange to me and to the people I stay close to.

A lot of their varens come from nothing, too. They didn't exist, and then the Unbound turn around and use them for legitimate purposes before they've been cleaned through enough layers. That's inconsiderate to anybody dealing with them, because they never tell you the origin doesn't exist, and if it ever gets investigated it'll uncover and expose several people. All of it avoidable. Just use real varens when you deal with us. Or give a heads up so it can be sent through the proper channels and fences. Or better yet, so we can even choose to turn them down and go with somebody who's legitimately wealthy instead. That's the insult in it. They put that on everyone around them and it costs them nothing to avoid.

I've been to a couple of their meetings. I don't believe He Who Allows exists, and I still find their whole idea of ultimate allowance disturbing. In what they believe, they can befriend somebody and lift him up, and then literally decide to eat him soon after. And the maddening part is it isn't even good business for them. Let me lay it out the way I actually see it, rough numbers, but close enough.

Call it 80% of our profit is bodies moved around the planet. Of that, maybe 5% are intact corpses we use to smuggle smaller, more specific items to buyers, usually pure Emberbriar. The rest of it splits, give or take, into labor and pleasure, some temporary labor, and the ones who just need to be moved, and that last group runs from people caught up in covert business, to Teytan citizens who need to deal with the rest of the world, to people trying to get out across the Berinu border. The other 20% is substances, live animals, rare gems, that kind of thing. The Unbound mostly buy the ones who'd have gone to labor. That's under 7% of what the whole operation makes, and far less of my personal cut, and yet they pull a completely disproportionate amount of attention. They're also known to raid our encampments and just take the slaves anyway. I can't prove that directly, and there's no getting them back either, because by the time we find those camps the people are already butchered and moved on.

I've cleared over 300,000 Auren this year alone. I figure me and everyone I work close with could afford to drop them completely. But they're so embedded in everything that it's hard to actually do. And that's the whole problem with them. The slaves they buy are a small percentage of the profit, and they draw way too much attention, because they start cannibal lines that people then conflate my contemporaries with being involved in, when many of us would never. Even the thought of it puts a kind of primal fear in people, and that level of fear is very bad for business. But I'm getting off track. I'll be writing every so often from here on.

Since I'm on it, here's a point I've never made to anybody. I've met Lux Notera, the Baylorbas Party, Reina, Scarlet Boom, and Yui Jersuul. I enjoy golden wing feathers, viper shoes, smilohound furs, Solarn airships, and the raised stage seats at Lux Notera as much as the next person in my profession, and I wear everything that'd get me killed in Yuvaar. But if I'm ever being hunted, or I get caught, I'll likely end up in a Karesh isolation district. Or worse, the Infinite Maw catches me and I might never get released. At least in Karesh I can still live in the district and enjoy the relay. The Maw puts people in cells, underground. There's already some vigilantes after me. I don't need the actual law on me too. All of it could be avoided if they were just a little more careful. Or it's part of their manipulation game, which their belief in total allowance accounts for, which is its own kind of frustrating.

One more thing, since it's on my mind. If I ever get caught, and one of the people I trust finds these journals, don't let the Maw take me. I'd honestly rather die. It's impossible to escape them. From what I've read they've got a zero percent escape rate, ever, and I don't like the way those odds sound. If they take me to Karesh instead, just make sure I've got some varens set aside for my eventual release, after I've been "rehabilitated," and come see me from time to time. Being able to roam a whole city district while they just monitor everything I say beats being stuck underground in a cell. At least there I've got other people to talk to.

Regardless of what anyone thinks, or what people say depending on who's standing around listening, I legitimately love what I do. I'm happy I'm the one who did what somebody else would have done anyway, and that I'm the one reaping the benefits and not some other guy. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't still think about the words of a man I met back when I was first thinking all of this through. Getrin Desmoor.

Everyone knows him. His name, his face, from the people at the very top down to the ones at the very bottom, everybody's dealt with him or knows somebody who has. And sometimes I wonder how he managed to sit right on the edge of the same business I'm in and still find a way to come out legitimately on the other end of it, and be fundamentally very different. I met him out of nowhere in the Inland one day. Big smile on his face, like he was glad to see me, even though we'd never met before. We had a great conversation. Some of his logistical advice was so sound I still use a bit of it now. But he did say one thing to me. He said, no judgment in it, that before I think about committing to moving people, I should remember there's more than enough hardware on the planet that a logistical mind like mine is needed for. And then he didn't say anything else after it. I wonder what he meant.