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And just when I knew I couldn’t take anymore, the world went bright. I breathed in greedily, grateful to be out in the open air, a complex perfume layered with the smells of baking bread, of strange beasts, of unnameable flowers. I blinked my eyes against the sunlight, holding back a gasp as I took in the Black Market.

A cobblestone lane led out from the portal behind us, thrusting us straight into the buzz of the grand bazaar. This was the heart of the Black Market, a dizzying array of stalls, carts, and carpets piled high with arcane goods fit to fulfill every fantasy.

A man with four arms gestured invitingly toward a rack of magical staves, one of them issuing a steady stream of smoke, another wreathed in leaves and tendrils. A woman in veils pushed a cart filled with rolls of cloth in impossible colors, gleaming and shimmering. A messenger pixie wove in and out of the crowd, a tiny crossbody bag strapped across his chest, a wax-sealed scroll clenched in his arms in a protective embrace.

“Whoa,” I breathed, and that was all I could really say. This was well worth getting slapped full in the face with a greasy butcher’s curtain.

Entire segments of the bazaar — buildings and street lamps alike — appeared to be crafted out of midnight velvet, a strange, shadowy substance that gave the shopping dimension its name. Morrow brushed his hand against my shoulder. I watched as a strip of midnight black fell to the ground, vanishing before it reached the cobblestones.

“Just dimensional detritus,” he said, picking some of the fluff out of my hair. “Come on. Let me show you around.”

Suddenly I longed for him to reach for my hand again, to guide me through the living, breathing maze of the Black Market bazaar. But that would feel too jarring, too public. I wondered if he only ever felt comfortable doing it out of sight, like I was his dirty little secret.

There I went again, building all these expectations. I was an Occultech contractor, and he was an Occultech field agent, and we were on a mission to gather information. Nothing more, nothing less.

But good luck with that, what with all the overstimulation. Even Morrow was looking around with his lips parted, as if seeing the bazaar with fresh eyes, maybe because he was. He’d activated the holographic lenses from his ocular pendant, head turning this way and that.

He locked eyes with me, a boyish grin on his lips. “Are you seeing this shit?” his expression seemed to say. “Can you believe this?”

He was adorable. I was in so fucking deep. I was in so much goddamn trouble.

Theodore Morrow pulled me in close, his lenses tinting his gray eyes a pale Occultech blue. Like a thousand times before, I wondered if this was when we would finally kiss.

“The stalls only go so far,” he shouted above the din of the bazaar. “It stops there, then it’s brick and mortar shops all around for blocks and blocks.”

He pointed toward the edge of the bazaar, the crowd thinning as shop windows glinted in the near distance.

“I wish we could stay and browse,” he continued, “but we need to get a move on.”

“I thought you said you were going to show me around,” I shouted back.

He pulled me to the edge of the bazaar. We paused by the gray brick of a curiosities shop, taking a breather away from the chaos of the central market.

“Sure, but we didn’t come to shop, remember? This isn’t a date, Frost.”

“Hah,” I said, catching my breath, disguising my disappointment. “Not a date. Of course not. That’s ridiculous.”

“And besides, Sakamoto already set a limit on my card. We’re here to visit the guilds.”

He clapped me on the shoulder, pointing even farther out of the concentric ring of shops that bordered the grand bazaar. The architecture of the Black Market’s shops was anachronistic enough, at least by mundane standards, almost in the style of a medieval fantasy theme park. Certainly a deliberate decision, all to make the shopping experience even more memorable.

But the buildings on the outermost ring of the dimension were stranger still. The Nomicon Valley corpos had nothing on the magical marvels of the Black Market.

“That’s guild headquarters for the Flickering Flame,” Morrow said, pointing at a tower that resembled a candle, down to the fire at its apex that did indeed flicker like the flame on a wick. “The guild of chandlers. What I do with scrolls, they do with candles.”

Candle magic! I’d heard of this stuff before. Light one up and off go the fireworks. A candle could be a sneaky lavender-scented sleeping spell, a noxious poison gas trap, or even a bomb in the shape of a tea candle.

“And that’s Mother Dough,” he said, pointing at the grandmother of all witch’s huts. “Can you guess what they do?”

It looked like someone’s grandma had been allowed to go buck wild designing the coziest oversized cabin, all thatch huts and chimneys, like a building complex cobbled together from an enormous quantity of fairytale cottages. The name, the smoking chimneys, the scent of baked goods and sugar in the air?

“I might be stupid, but I’m not that stupid, Morrow.” I checked the cottage monstrosity one last time, then gave him a sidelong glance. “It’s the guild of bakers, isn’t it?”

“Look at that,” he said. “So you’re not just a pretty face, after all.”

I chucked him on the shoulder, doing my best to pretend I was pissed off. He laughed, then pointed at the next guild building, his mouth going a mile a minute. I bit my bottom lip and tried not to smile. His eyes twinkled with excitement as he pointed out one guild after another.

“And that’s my guild. Look!”