Kael had asked me, four separate times since breakfast, whether he looked "presentable," which was a strange thing to worry about on your way to rob a government official, but I understood well enough not to point that out directly.
I'd put this off for the better part of a year. Walking toward the Tangle with my whole team beside me instead of just my own nerves, I understood, a little late, that the delay had never really been about fear of the job itself.
We stopped by a leatherworker on the way. I needed sheaths for the daggers Hask had given me. I hadn't had time to put them in my room and I didn't want to just hold them. Plus, having them on me might help me cut a more imposing figure. So two gold and ten minutes of convincing Tessa to leave later (she was immediately drawn to a pink sword scabbard in the corner), we were back to being on our way.
The trip to the poor side of the city with the whole team in tow felt different than walking there alone ever had — louder, for one thing, since Tessa apparently couldn't approach a criminal underworld hideout without narrating her own anxiety the entire way there.
"Okay but what if they don't like us? What if we walk in there and Stevie's like 'oh no, not the whole team, I only wanted Lorne', and then it's SO awkward, and then what, do we just stand there? Do we leave? Do I apologize? I feel like I should have brought a gift. Should I have brought a gift? Do criminals like gifts? Is that a thing? OH GODS what if they think we're trying to bribe them and that's an insult? Is that an insult? Why didn't anyone tell me there were RULES—"
"Tessa."
"—and also what if it's a TEST, what if showing up as a whole group is somehow the wrong move, and we fail before we even say anything, what if there's a SECRET HANDSHAKE—"
"Tessa."
Kael, from my other side, sounding remarkably calm for someone who'd asked me about his hair four times that morning. "There's no secret handshake."
"You don't know that!"
"Neither do you."
She rounded on me, eyes wide. "Lorne. Is there a secret handshake?"
"No handshake."
"Are you SURE?"
"I'm sure."
She exhaled like she'd been holding her breath for several blocks, which she may well have been. "Okay. Okay, good. I just want to make a good impression. This is important."
"You'll be great, Red."
"I KNOW I'll be great, that's not the issue, the issue is whether THEY know I'll be great, which is a completely different problem—"
Alara, walking a step behind all of us, said nothing, which by this point in the conversation felt like its own form of commentary.
I decided we would skip the unmarked tavern and head straight to the laundry. The smell of lavender and huckleberry wafted gently from the building."Remind me to ask them what kind of soap they use," Alara muttered distractedly.As I stepped through one of the archways that opened into the building, I spotted a familiar, older woman hanging bed linens on a clothesline."Marta," I said, remembering how Dandy Dan had addressed her last time I was here.She looked at me, scrutinizing me in a way that a normal washerwoman would not. "You're that Janitor boy. Callister. I remember you." She craned her neck to see the others behind me. "If you're here to see Stevie, they gotta stay here."Tessa made a small noise. I took her hand gently."Not happening. If Stevie has an issue with it, she can take it up with me downstairs."Marta stared at me long and hard. Then she cackled loudly. "Bold as brass you are! I like it." She hobbled over to the door I had gone through previously and unlocked it. She stood aside. "She told me to expect you anyway."That sounded right.
The corridor down from the laundry's back room hadn't changed since the last time I'd walked it — narrow, dim, smelling faintly of lye and steam that gave way, floor by floor, to something colder and staler the deeper we went. Kael was doing an admirable job of looking unbothered. He was failing.
"This is..." He trailed off, eyes moving over the low ceiling, the unmarked doors, the general sense of a place that existed specifically to not be found. "This is a lot more sinister than a laundry has any right to be."
"Wait 'til you see downstairs."
"There's a downstairs from the downstairs?"
"There's a downstairs from the downstairs."
He made a small, strangled sound that I chose to interpret as excitement.
The heavy door at the bottom opened into the same room I remembered — low ceilings, dark wood, oil lamps burning amber at irregular intervals, the long table running down the center still cluttered with maps and ledgers and the general accumulated business of an organization that ran on information rather than muscle. It looked exactly like what you'd imagine if someone described "criminal headquarters" to you and you'd never actually seen one.
Tessa's eyes went enormous. She grabbed my sleeve.
"This is so cool," she whispered, all her earlier anxiety apparently evaporating on contact with something genuinely interesting. "Lorne. This is so cool."
Alara surveyed the room with the same clinical, unimpressed precision she gave most things, though I caught her gaze lingering a beat too long on one of the maps before she looked away.
Kael had gone very still.
Stevie was already at the table, boots up on the wood, a cigar unlit between two fingers, exactly as unbothered by our arrival as she'd been by everything else I'd ever seen her react to.
"Callister," she said. Then, her eyes moving across the rest of us, something almost like amusement flickering behind them. "You brought company."
"Figured it was time."
Her gaze landed on Kael last, and lingered there a beat longer than it had on the others.
"Well," she said. "Hello again, kid."
Kael's ears went a shade of red I hadn't seen on him since the SCRUB incident with the flotation device.
"Hi," he said, and then, apparently deciding that wasn't enough, added, "You look well."
Tessa turned her head very slowly to look at me. I did not make eye contact.Stevie grinned that stylish, cocky grin of hers. "As do you. How's the robot? He got smashed up pretty good."Kael scratched the back of his neck, "SCRUB, his name's SCRUB, just in case you forgot – not that you would forget, because you're so smart – he's good. Got him up and running again, good as new. Did you want to see him? Oh, I didn't bring him. I could go get him real quick if you –""Kael." I held up my hand to stop him.Stevie gave Kael a knowing wink. "I'm glad he's up and about. Don't want that genius of yours going to waste."Kael went an even deeper crimson before I got Stevie's attention back."We're here to talk about LeGrange."Her expression shifted to something slightly more calculating, but she didn't drop the smile."About time. C'mon, have a seat."As we began to move, Stevie turned around again and stopped us."I almost forgot. We need to do the secret handshake."Tessa looked like she was going to pass out.Stevie laughed, "I'm kidding. The secret handshake is for operatives."We all found chairs around the long table that took up a good portion of the space. Stevie sat at the head of it, just as before. Stevie called for a bottle of whiskey and glasses. As she began to pour amber liquid out for each of us, I had a thought.I focused on the bottle, doing my utmost to focus intention. "Shadow Art: Threat Assessment. Activate." My voice was barely even a whisper. Only loud enough to just qualify as speaking.The bottle glowed. I could see there was no mana, and the liquid appeared a pale green for a moment.Stevie had not heard me, I was certain, but she spoke without looking up. "It's not poisoned, Callister. But that's a good way to use Threat Assessment."I felt the Skill dismiss as I became distracted. "How do you know about Threat Assessment?"She smirked as she began sliding glasses across the table to each of us. "Threat Assessment is a rare skill, but not wholly unique. I have it too.""That's so cool." Kael blurted. Tessa stared at him, dumbfounded.Stevie winked at him again, "Thanks, kid." She looked back at me. "Threat Assessment has all kinds of uses. Enemy weak points, poison detection, trap-seeking, and so much more. Especially since yours has gotta be at least level two.""Three, actually."She had been bringing her glass to her lips and stopped at my words. "Interesting."She sipped. I sipped. The rest of the group did too. We had apparently established a silent agreement of trust.Stevie set her glass down and folded her hands, and something in the room's temperature changed — not colder exactly, just more serious, the way a conversation shifts when the pleasantries have run their course.
"Before we get into anything," she said, "I need to hear you say it. Not implied. Not 'I've thought about it.' I need the actual words, Callister, because once I start explaining the job, you're in it. There's no version of this where you hear the details and walk away clean."
I felt the whole table's attention settle on me.
"I want to hear you say you're taking the job," she continued. "Stealing from Eversley LeGrange. In exchange for everything I know about who you were, and why you lost it."
I thought, briefly, about all the reasons I'd found over the past year to put this exact moment off. None of them felt like enough reason anymore, not with Tessa's hand finding mine under the table, not with Kael sitting up straighter than I'd seen him sit in weeks, not with Alara watching me with the particular stillness she gave things that mattered.
"I'm taking the job."
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Stevie held my gaze for a long moment, like she was checking the words for cracks.
"Good." She reached into her coat and produced a folded piece of parchment, setting it on the table. "Then let's talk about what you're actually stealing, and why it's going to be a lot harder than you think."She unfolded the parchment. It was a map — hand-drawn, precise, the kind of thing that had clearly been redrawn several times as new information came in rather than produced once and left alone.
"LeGrange keeps a private study in his main residence. Not the townhouse he uses for entertaining — a second property, much larger but quieter, registered under a name that isn't his. We've had eyes on it for the better part of two years. It's a big manor house with lots of room to hide things. He keeps records there he doesn't trust anywhere else. Personal correspondence. Financial ledgers that don't match the ones his accountants file with the Empire." She tapped a spot on the map. "And, as of about eight months ago, something new. A locked case. Nobody's gotten close enough to confirm what's in it, but the pattern of who visits and how carefully they're searched on the way out tells us it matters more than anything else in that building."
"You think it's connected to the Pale Wastes," I said.
"I think it's connected to whatever he's planning to do once he doesn't need to hide anymore. Could be maps. Could be correspondence with whoever he's got stationed out there. Could be something we don't have a name for yet. Won't know until it's in front of us."
Kael leaned forward, all his earlier nervousness apparently burned off now that there was a mechanical problem in front of him. "What's the security like?"
"Better than you'd expect for a man who officially doesn't own the building. It's a big house; wards on the exterior, standard stuff, nothing your team hasn't handled before. Interior's the problem. He rotates staff constantly — nobody works there long enough to be turned, which tells you he's thought about exactly the kind of thing we're planning. And there's at least one enchantment on the study itself we haven't been able to identify from outside, which means somebody's going to have to get close enough to read it before anyone touches that case."
"That'll be me," Alara said quietly. It was the first thing she'd said since we'd sat down.
"Figured as much." Stevie didn't look at her when she said it, which felt deliberate — acknowledging her without making a fuss. "I'm assuming Tessa, too. There's more. Staffing schedules, entry points, the two nights a month he's confirmed to be elsewhere, and don't get me started on the hedgemaze. Settle in. This isn't a conversation we finish quickly.
She was right about that. We spent the better part of the next several hours going over what she had — timelines, floor plans reconstructed from secondhand accounts, a dozen small details that individually meant nothing and together meant everything. Kael filled half a notebook with diagrams. Tessa asked more questions than anyone, most of them sharper than her earlier spiral had suggested she was capable of. Alara said very little, but I noticed she'd started sketching something of her own in the margin of Tessa's notebook— wards, maybe, or the shape of whatever spell she expected to find.Watching them be so invested in something they weren't getting anything out of made me feel loved. It was strange. Coming clean had been the right move. I just wished I had done it sooner.
Somewhere in the middle of everything, Stevie mentioned, almost in passing, that they still hadn't found the leak.
"The what?" I asked.
"Somebody's been feeding information to LeGrange's people. Small things, mostly — nothing that's cost us badly yet, but enough that I know it's happening. Haven't found who." Stevie's expression didn't change, but something in her voice went flatter. "Which means everything I'm telling you today, I'm telling you knowing there's a chance it doesn't stay in this room."
The table went quiet.
"Then why tell us at all?" Kael asked.
"Because the alternative is doing nothing, and I've never much cared for that alternative." She rolled up the map, tucking it back into her coat. "We move forward. Careful. And we keep looking."I nodded. "So what now?""We set the date. Day after tomorrow. Sundown. We meet on location. Dan will be in touch."
"You're going with us?" Tessa seemed surprised.Stevie shrugged. "To keep an eye out from a distance. I can't risk getting caught in there.""Fair enough."We stood up from our chairs, glasses empty. The others began to file out, back upstairs. As I was moving to follow behind Tessa, I heard Stevie behind me."Callister. A moment?"I told Tessa to wait for me upstairs and turned back.
I was startled to see that she was very close to me now. As close as she had been in the dungeon. She spoke softly."I'm glad you decided to take the job. Once everything settles and you have what I promised you…I think we could have a very fruitful partnership."I felt her hand move under my coat. She gently grasped the grip of one of the daggers on my belt, moving her thumb gently along the pommel."Remember what I said about making me your ally, Callister."I felt my heartbeat pick up and my face go red. "Ummm…"She gave me a smile that I hadn't seen before. Sultry. Feminine. I couldn't find words.But Tessa, who had apparently doubled back downstairs out of impatience, certainly found some. Before I knew what was happening, she had shoved herself in between Stevie and I, pushing me backwards toward the door."Yes, yes, we're all allies. Allies going to rob the bad guy and nothing else."As my heel hit the bottom stair, Tessa looked over her shoulder and gave Stevie what I could safely assume was a death glare. Then we left.She was fuming the whole way back. "I don't like her. I really don't like her."Kael walked absentmindedly beside us, clearly somewhere else. "Oh, I don't know. She seems pretty great."
I didn't know what to do with what had just happened, which was becoming something of a theme where Stevie was concerned. Tessa didn't say anything else about it until we were most of the way back to the guild hall, which I'd learned meant she was building toward something rather than letting it go.
We ended up on the guild hall's steps, the two of us, watching the evening settle over the city while everyone else filtered inside ahead of us. It took Tessa a while to speak. "You know she's manipulating you, right?"
"I know."
"Like, actually manipulating you. Not just flirting. She's using it. On purpose. Like a tool."
"I know, Red. It's not subtle."
She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them, staring out at the city instead of at me. "Then why'd you go all red and stupid?"
"Because someone put their hand on my dagger and said something sultry at close range and my brain short-circuited for a second. That's not the same thing as it working."
"Felt the same from where I was standing."
"It wasn't. I promise you it wasn't." I said it plainly, because it was true and I wanted her to hear that it was true. "There's nothing there, Tessa. Not confusion, not interest, nothing. I, apparently, just have the reflexes of a startled animal if the threat is already too close.
That got a small, reluctant huff out of her that wasn't quite a laugh yet.
"I'm not scared she's going to steal you," she said, after a moment. "I trust you. That's not the thing."
"What's the thing?"
"The thing is she gets to know things about you that I don't. She gets to be the one who tells you who you were. And I just have to sit there and watch, and be your ally, apparently, and pretend that doesn't feel like anything."
"That's fair," I said quietly. "I'm sorry."
"You don't need to be sorry. It's not your fault she has information I don't. I just—" She exhaled hard, frustrated at herself. "I hate feeling like there's a version of you I don't get access to. Even if it's not your fault. Even if you can't help it."
"You have access to all of me. The me that exists now. That's the only version I actually am."
"I know that logically." She finally looked at me. "Doesn't mean my stomach believes it."
I put my arm around her, and she let me, leaning into my side with the same total commitment she brought to everything.
"For what it's worth — I already know who I want to be. Whatever she tells me is just filling in blanks. It doesn't change the answer."
She was quiet for a long moment.
"That was almost a good line, Trouble."
"I've been saving it."
"No, you haven't.""No, I haven't."We heard him before we saw him — the particular weight of Hask's footsteps, unhurried, deliberate, the kind of walk that had never once needed to announce itself and did anyway just by existing.
He stopped a few feet away, taking in the two of us on the steps with the quick, practiced read he gave most things.
"Everything alright?"
"Getting there," Tessa said, which was honest enough.
Hask grunted and lowered himself down onto the step below us, joints creaking in a way that made me forget, sometimes, exactly how old he actually was — a fact I was still fairly sure the rest of the team didn't know the real number of.
"Job's set, then," he said. Not a question.
"Day after tomorrow. Sundown."
He nodded slowly, looking out at the same darkening skyline Tessa and I had been watching.
"Nervous?"
"Terrified," I said. "Seemed easier to admit than pretend otherwise."
"Good. Man who isn't scared going into something like this is either lying or about to get somebody killed." He said it plainly, no judgment in it. "Fear's not the problem. Freezing is."
"I won't freeze."
"I know you won't." He said it with a certainty I hadn't earned yet, not really, and it landed heavier for that. "You've got a habit of showing up exactly when it matters most. Watched it myself, in that swamp. Me and Varkas, both past the point of stopping ourselves, and there you were." He glanced sideways at me. "Don't know if that's a skill or just who you are. Might be both."
I didn't have an answer for that, so I let it sit.
"Daggers treating you alright?"
"Haven't had a real reason to use them yet."
"You will." He said it with the flat certainty of a man who'd outlived several generations of people telling him he was wrong about things like this. "Two days is enough time to get comfortable with the weight of 'em, at least. Come find me tomorrow. We'll run drills."
"Yes sir."
He stood, joints protesting again, and looked down at the two of us for a moment longer than the conversation strictly required.
"You did good today, Callister. Bringing the team in. Taking the job." A pause. "Don't take that lightly."
He didn't wait for a response. He never did, when he'd said the thing he actually came to say.
We watched him go back inside, and Tessa leaned her head against my shoulder, quiet again, but a softer kind of quiet than before.
"He's not wrong, you know," she said. "About the showing-up thing."
"I know."
"Good. Say it back to yourself sometimes. Might help."
The day before the job passed the way the days before difficult things usually did — full of motion that felt productive right up until you tried to remember what you'd actually accomplished by evening.
Kael spent most of it locked away with a length of copper wire, three different crystals, and a small leather pouch he refused to let anyone look inside until it was finished. By early afternoon he emerged with a charm on a simple cord — unremarkable to look at, the kind of thing you'd walk past in a market stall without a second glance. He called it a Muffling Charm, modeled loosely on the silencing trap that almost gotten us in the Ebon Maw a very long time ago, except this one was meant to be worn rather than something you walk into. Once active, it swallowed sound in a fifteen-foot radius around whoever wore it — footsteps, breathing, the creak of old floorboards giving way under careful weight.
He tested it exactly once, in the training yard, and the only casualty was a startled pigeon that wandered into the radius mid-coo and looked, for several seconds afterward, deeply betrayed by its own silence.
Alara spent the day buried in correspondence — her own notes alongside a stack of materials the Enclave had apparently sent over in the spirit of their newly rekindled, mutually suspicious cooperation. She was looking for anything that matched the shape of an unidentified ward, cross-referencing old diagrams against half-remembered lectures from a life she'd left behind and never quite stopped drawing on. By evening she had three candidates narrowed down and a headache she didn't mention to anyone.
Hask had me in the training yard for an hour that afternoon, running me through drills with the daggers until my arms ached in a new way that had nothing to do with the mop I'd spent a year learning to fight with. They were lighter than they should have been. Faster, too, in a way that made me wonder, more than once, whether the hands guiding them were entirely my own.
By the time the sun went down, all of us had done what we could do, and none of it felt like enough, which Hask assured me was normal the night before something that mattered.
We ended up at the Final Yak anyway — all five of us, Vlod pouring drinks he refused to charge for once he heard what tomorrow held, Trini sending over a plate of something rich and warm that none of us had ordered. Nobody talked about the job. We talked about everything else instead — Ojola's sons, SCRUB's newest upgrade, a story Tessa told about her cousin Bernie that none of us fully believed but all of us wanted to.
I sat there, surrounded by people who knew everything now, who'd chosen to stay anyway, and thought that whatever happened tomorrow, this — exactly this — was worth whatever it cost to protect.
I didn't know yet how much that was going to be.