The Weight in Locker Thirteen

The Moonrise Market had one rule that every stallholder knew. Nothing was sold until it was weighed, and every scale in the market answered to the Measure House.

Adaeze ran the scale stall at the north gate. She was sixteen, and she had kept the stall alone since the spring. It had a brass scale and a row of iron weights. It also had one tiny silver weight, the Honest Gram. The Honest Gram was special. Whenever a trader lied about his goods, the scale tipped toward the truth. The whole market saw it happen.

On the morning of the yearly inspection, the Honest Gram was gone.

Adaeze counted the weights three times. Iron, iron, iron, and then an empty hole in the velvet where the silver one belonged. Her hands began to shake.

"Don't panic," said Thandi, who sold dried figs at the next stall. "Think. Who has been near your scale?"

"Nobody," Adaeze said. "Only the Measure House clerk. He came yesterday and said my scale was drifting."

"Drifting?" Thandi laughed. "Scales don't drift. He wanted a reason to touch it."

"Without the Gram, the inspectors will take my licence at noon," Adaeze said. "Then I lose the stall."

Thandi looked at the sun, which had just cleared the rooftops. They had about five hours. She tied up her fig sacks and shut her shutters with a bang.

"Right," she said. "We find out where he put it."

It was not hard. The clerk kept a list of every item he borrowed, and he was proud of his handwriting. The list hung on a nail outside the Measure House door. Beside yesterday's date it said, in neat black ink, "One silver gram, for testing, locker thirteen."

"Locker thirteen is in the cellar," Adaeze said. "Every stallholder knows that. The cellar door has a guard."

"Then we need a plan," Thandi said.

They made one on an upturned crate behind the fish stalls. It was a good plan, and that was the problem. Thandi would carry a heavy basket of figs to the front desk. There she would complain loudly about a broken scale. While the clerk argued with her, Adaeze would slip past the guard and go down to the cellar. She would open the locker with a thin steel pick that Thandi had borrowed from a locksmith's son. Then she would take the Gram and run.

"What if the guard sees me?" Adaeze asked.

"He won't," Thandi said. "He never looks up from his lunch."

At eleven o'clock, they went in. The front hall smelled of wax and old paper. Thandi marched to the desk with her basket and began to shout about her ruined scale. The clerk, a thin man with a pointed nose, stood up at once. Adaeze waited until his back was turned, then ran along the wall to the cellar stairs.

The guard was not eating lunch. He was sitting straight up on his stool with a long stick across his knees.

"Where do you think you are going?" he asked.

"The clerk sent me," Adaeze said. Her voice came out higher than she wanted. "For the, um, borrowed silver gram."

The guard looked at her for a long moment. Then he pointed his stick at a chair. "Sit. Nobody goes down without the clerk's own signature."

So the plan had failed in the first two minutes. Adaeze sat and stared at the cellar door. Upstairs, she could hear Thandi's voice getting louder and more desperate. She would not be able to keep that up for long.

Then the guard's stomach growled. He glanced at his stool, where a small cloth bundle sat half hidden. Adaeze had an idea. It was not a clever one, but it was the only one she had.

"Sir, may I ask you something?" she said. "Do you know what a fig weighs?"

"What?"

"Thandi's figs are the best in the market," Adaeze said. "She is upstairs with a whole basket. I think she would give you a handful if you asked. I could fetch it for you."

The guard hesitated. Then he nodded slowly and waved his stick toward the stairs. "Ten minutes. And if you are not back, I ring the bell."

Adaeze ran up, grabbed Thandi by the sleeve, and whispered in her ear. Thandi stopped shouting in the middle of a word. She gave the astonished clerk a sweet smile, scooped up a fistful of figs, and followed Adaeze down.

The guard ate eleven figs, one after another, with his eyes closed. By the time he opened them, the two girls were standing in the cellar. He had no idea how they had got there. In his defence, he had said they could fetch the figs. He had not said where.

Locker thirteen was in the far corner, behind a stack of cracked barrels. It was small and black, and it did not have a keyhole. Instead, it had a little brass pan fixed to its door, like half of a scale.

"The pick is useless," Adaeze said. "There is nothing to pick."

"Try it anyway," Thandi said.

Adaeze pushed the steel pick into the seam of the door. It snapped with a sharp little crack and flew across the floor. The pan began to hum.

"Now what?" Thandi whispered.

Adaeze put her hand on the pan. The humming grew louder, and it felt as if the whole cellar was listening. "It wants something," she said slowly. "I think it opens when the pan is balanced. When it holds exactly what is inside."

"And what is inside?"

"The Honest Gram." Adaeze stared at the pan. "I have no weights with me. I always keep them in the stall."

Thandi dug into her pocket and pulled out a handful of fig seeds. She had been spitting them out all morning. "In the old trade," she said, "a fig seed is one gram. My mother sold figs that way. She told me it is the same weight every time, as exact as a king's coin."

They looked at each other. Then Adaeze took a single seed and laid it carefully in the pan.

The pan trembled, dipped, and rose again. Something inside the locker clicked, and the little door swung open.

The Honest Gram lay on a bed of grey cloth, shining faintly. Adaeze picked it up and felt it grow warm in her palm. She smiled, and for the first time that day her hands were steady.

"Let's go," Thandi said. "Before the guard finishes the figs."

They were halfway to the stairs when Adaeze stopped. Something else had been lying in the locker, tucked behind the cloth. She went back and looked.

It was a second silver weight, exactly like the first. It was stamped with a tiny number, and the number was not thirteen. It was fourteen.

"Why would the Measure House keep a spare Honest Gram?" Thandi asked.

"I don't think they would." Adaeze held the two weights side by side. One was warm, and the other was cold as ice. "I think somebody else has been using my scale. And I think the clerk knows who."

From the stairs above them came the sound of a bell.