Lisa was already moving before Snart could finish frowning.
Street vendors didn't shout usually. You put up a sign, you wore something distinctive, you let the display do the work. The fact that someone was calling out across the sidewalk in the middle of a weekday morning in the city center was unusual enough to turn heads, which was precisely why half the pedestrians on the block had already turned theirs.
Snart had a different reason for looking.
He'd scouted this stretch of street more times than he could count — the bank, the armored truck routes, the timing windows, the foot traffic patterns. He knew this block. And this three-wheeled food cart had not been here yesterday, or the day before, or any day in the past two years of careful preparation. It had simply appeared, which meant it was a variable he hadn't accounted for, which meant it required evaluation.
He was still evaluating it when his sister reached the cart and started talking to the vendor.
The man behind the cart had stopped shouting by the time Lisa arrived. He knew it wasn't how things were done here — he'd known that before he started — but something about having a pot in front of him and people walking past made the instinct very difficult to suppress. Most vendors in his past life called out. It was practically a tradition. He'd managed two full sentences before his better judgment caught up with him.
"Your setup is really something," Lisa said, looking over the vehicle with the frank interest of someone who appreciated unconventional problem-solving. One person, one cast-iron pot, a stack of buns, and a laminated business license hanging from the canopy frame. Functional, legal, and slightly absurd. "I like it."
Jude lifted the grate off the pot.
The smell hit first.
The 'hamburger' or usually called Kakuni had been going since before dawn — pork belly cut into generous blocks, blanched and rinsed, then braised low and slow in a mixture of sake, mirin, soy sauce, and a single piece of kombu for depth. A knot of ginger and a handful of spring onions had gone in early and come out an hour later. The final addition — a measure of brown sugar, dissolved and darkened — had brought the whole thing to the color of lacquered wood, the skin gone translucent and trembling, the fat yielding completely to the lean.
On the cutting board, a block of pork belly broke apart at a touch — no knife pressure required, just the weight of the blade and gravity doing the rest. The fat melted into ribbons. The lean separated into clean, tender fibers, dark with braising liquid, glistening.
Lisa's gaze went immediately to the board and stayed there.
"Hold on," she said, pulling herself back. "You said hamburger. That's not a hamburger."
"Sure it is." Jude held up a milk-bread bun, soft and slightly glossy, the kind that pulls apart in layers. "Bread, meat, bread. What else would you call it?"
"I'd call it — not what I was expecting."
"I can add some braised skin on top." He lifted a piece from the pot's edge — dark, trembling, somewhere between jelly and velvet — and set it on the cutting board as a demonstration.
Lisa looked at it for a long moment. It was objectively a carbohydrate delivery vehicle for what was essentially concentrated braised pork. She was also absolutely going to order one.
"Fine. One."
Jude assembled it with the particular economy of someone who had done this thousands of times: bun opened, base layer of kakuni pressed gently so the juices absorbed into the bread, a fold of braised skin laid over the top, lid on. He handed it across wrapped in paper.
"Handcrafted Hamburger," he said, with the cadence of a man who had workshopped the name. "Honest ingredients, fair price, good for all ages. Five dollars."
The math worked out neatly. He bought ingredients at near-wholesale through the system — no storage costs, no logistics — which meant four dollars of margin on every unit. The system's asset point recognition required genuine handcraft: sourcing the ingredients himself, handling the prep and the braising, doing the work. Buying pre-made and reselling would earn nothing. Assembling it himself earned him a hundred asset points per ten dollars of sales. The 10x multiplier in the smuggling rules transformed every dollar of honest labor into something considerably more interesting.
The concept of "handcrafted" commanding a premium price, he thought, is genuinely universal.
Snart had materialized at his sister's shoulder while Jude was wrapping the order. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets, looking at the setup with the expression of a man cataloguing information he wasn't sure yet whether he needed. He accepted a second sandwich when offered without particular ceremony and ate it with small, deliberate bites, his gaze drifting across the front of the cart.
The business license. The liquor permit. The food handling certificate. All legitimate-looking. All present. The stall felt put-together and simultaneously slightly improvised, in the way that things do when someone competent assembled them quickly without worrying too much about appearances.
"Why do you have a liquor license?" Snart asked.
Jude glanced toward the front of the cart, walked around to confirm, came back.
"I do have one of those," he agreed, settling back into position behind the pot. "It's fine — I've got something to go with it."
He had not exactly memorized which permits he'd filed. There were a lot of them. When he'd been threading his cover identity into the city's paper records over the past two days, adding a few business licenses to the stack had been a natural extension of the process — he'd just been thorough. A liquor permit had seemed like a reasonable thing to have.