CHAPTER 36

Doyle didn’t shout. I had come in ready for shouting.

He had both surveys on the desk in front of him. I hadn’t given him either one.

“Priya Nair rang me,” he said. “She rang me because she likes you. I’d like you to sit with that a minute.”

I sat with it.

“I was going to bring it to you.”

“You were going to bring it to me.” He put both hands flat on the desk. “Right. When.”

“When it was something.”

“When it was something.” He turned that over. Then he stood up, which he didn’t normally bother with. “No. That’s the bit. That’s the actual bit.”

He pointed at me with two fingers and didn’t seem to know he was doing it.

“You’ve got a version of this in your head where you find out what it’s first. Then you tell me. Because the finding out is the part that...”

He stopped.

He sat back down and squared the two surveys against each other.

“The finding out is the part that goes wrong,” he said. “That’s all I meant.”

“Frank.”

“You’re off Vaughn’s list. That wasn’t my doing.” He kept his eyes on the paper. “I had to tell her before she heard it from somebody else. She made her own decision in four seconds.”

“And the rotation?”

“You’ll get what’s going. You won’t get what’s good.” He was looking at the paperwork instead of at me. “Your charter renews in March. It goes through Allocations. Allocations read files.”

“That isn’t you doing that.”

“No. That’s the bit I can’t help you with.” He put the surveys in a drawer that already had things in it. “And I could have helped you with it on Monday.”

Whatever was going on across that desk hadn’t started on Tuesday.

“Go home. Take the stairs.” He didn’t look up. “Vaughn’s people are in the lift lobby, and I’d rather they saw you leaving than saw you in here.”

✦ ✦ ✦

The C-rank exam took forty minutes.

Lisa finished in thirty-eight. I finished in forty-one. The examiner marked us both at forty, which was either rounding down or making a point about showing up late.

We had been the first names on the list. The exam hall still had that early-morning quiet that feels borrowed from somewhere more important.

The practical was a hazard course. Standard C-rank calibration. After the tundra, it felt like a warm-up drill someone had forgotten to make harder.

Lisa cleared her section without drawing on her ghostly armor once. I took mine without reaching for Umbra. The System had cleared medium draws from the core two days earlier, which meant I still wasn’t supposed to, and didn’t.

Forty minutes. Azazel sounded personally offended. In Elysia, a promotion trial lasted three days and someone usually died. This is a handshake with extra steps.

“It’s a C-rank. The bar isn’t high.”

How high.

“For C-rank examinations, it’s usually just like this. A few timed obstacles and basic threat response. Just enough to prove you won’t trip over your own feet.” I kept my voice down as we reached the exit. “I don’t know who designed the scale.”

Someone who stopped counting early.

Yelena was waiting outside the exam hall when we came out, which meant she had planned to be. Yelena didn’t stand in corridors by accident.

“Before you brief us,” I said, “is there anything near Edinburgh on the rotation?”

Yelena paused. “Edinburgh isn’t on the rotation. Why Edinburgh?”

“Something I want to check.”

She studied me for a moment the way she studied everything, like she was pricing it. “I will see what I can find. Do not expect much. Edinburgh has been quiet since the old cases went cold.”

That was exactly why I wanted to go there.

A pair of hunters in Aegis colors stood at the far end of the corridor, too far away to pick up their own results. Nox clocked them before I did. They didn’t approach. Standing there was the whole message.

“Congratulations.” She didn’t sound congratulatory. “C-rank. Try not to peak here.”

“Not a chance,” Lisa said.

“Good philosophy.” She was already walking. “Come with me. The client I messaged you about is still waiting. Gwen wants the briefing done in person rather than over email, which for Gwen counts as a ceremony.”

We followed her back to Zarya’s floor. She didn’t sit behind her desk this time. She leaned against the front of it, which from Yelena was the equivalent of another woman standing on a table.

“The man who walked in asking for you by name,” she said. “I told him you’d be back after the exam. He didn’t blink at the wait. That either means patience or means the job isn’t as time-sensitive as he’s pretending it’s. Gwen has had me sitting on the file since he left.”

“What’s the job?” Lisa asked.

“A recovery. A thief nobody has a clear photograph of, hitting private residences with a technique the client won’t describe over the phone.” Yelena slid a card across the desk. Heavy stock, a single number, no name on it. “He wants to meet in person. Somewhere public, of his choosing.”

“Vetted?”

“As much as I can vet a man who pays a firm to keep his own name off paper.” She said it flatly, which was as close as Yelena came to a warning. “Gwen’s read is that it’s legitimate. Gwen isn’t always right. But she looked at it herself before it reached me. She wouldn’t have handed a C-rank pair their first named request if she didn’t think it was real.”

I turned the card over. An address in Mayfair, and nothing else.

“This is the part where I remind you,” Yelena said, “that a gate has a floor and a ceiling and generally agrees to stay inside both. A client doesn’t. Behave accordingly.”

She was already moving back around the desk by the time either of us had a response ready.

✦ ✦ ✦

The client was waiting for us at a café in Mayfair.

He was seated when we arrived. Late sixties. Good suit. The kind of wealthy that didn’t need to announce itself because the tailoring did all the work. A tablet sat on the table in front of him, screen dark. He stood to shake hands and gave no surname.

“Call me Mr. Quill,” he said. “Thank you for coming. I understand you sat an exam this morning. I hope it went well.”

“It went about as well as could reasonably be expected,” Lisa said, and sat down.

Quill nodded the way people nod when they have already moved past the small talk in their head. “I represent a consortium of private clients. Individuals who prefer to handle certain matters outside the Association’s usual channels. Nothing illegal. Merely discreet.”

“What was stolen,” I said.

He didn’t blink at the jump. “Several items, over the past two months. Jewelry. An antique clock. A collection of first editions. Individually unremarkable. Collectively, a pattern.”

“They were taken by the same person.”

“The same person, using the same method. The thief appears inside a secured residence, takes one item, and disappears. No forced entry. No alarm triggers. Security footage shows nothing at all.”

“And what precisely does it show?” Lisa asked.

Quill turned the tablet toward us. The footage was from a study. Dark wood, paintings, the kind of room that had been expensive fifty years ago and had only grown worse with time. The timestamp read 03:47.

At 03:47:12, a figure appeared in the center of the frame. Female. Small and hooded, already facing the bookshelf. The figure reached up, took a single volume from the shelf, and vanished.

The whole sequence ran four seconds. The alarm didn’t trigger. The motion sensors didn’t register. The guard at the front desk filed his report at four and noted nothing unusual.

“The guard,” I said. “Was he in the room at any point before the theft?”

Quill looked at me for a beat too long. “The guard’s report places him at the front desk for the duration. The cameras confirm it. The thief was never in the same room as anyone else in the building.”

Lisa replayed the footage. The figure appeared already inside, rather than entering. The vanish was the same. The space where she had been simply closed.

I watched it a third time and stopped watching the theft.

The figure arrived already facing the shelf. Her head turned twice before she reached for anything, once toward the door and once toward the window.

Only then did her hand come up for the book.

Exits first, objective second. I had watched that exact sequence for years, in one specific player’s climb replays, on every floor of a tower that killed you for reading a room too slowly.

I concluded nothing from it. I just couldn’t stop noticing it.

“Teleportation,” Lisa said. “Touch-based, if she’s bypassing wards designed to prevent exactly this. Which means she marks her locations in advance, in person, before the theft ever happens.”

“So she has been inside before,” I said. “As a guest. A delivery. Someone nobody looked at twice.”

Quill didn’t confirm it. He didn’t deny it either.

“We would like you to find her,” he said. “Recover the items. The consortium is prepared to pay well above the standard recovery rate. Fifty thousand, plus expenses.”

Lisa’s expression didn’t change. Mine didn’t either. Fifty thousand was two years of D-rank gates. For a thief who had never been caught on camera.

“Why us,” I said. “You’ve access to private security. Association-licensed recovery teams. You asked for us by name.”

“I did.” Quill folded his hands on the table. “My clients have followed your recent work with interest. The Chilterns. The tundra dispatch with Meridian. You and Miss Ambrose have shown a particular talent for finding things other people miss.”

He said it smoothly. Too smoothly. The Chilterns wasn’t public record. The tundra dispatch had happened three days ago.

“Your clients are well-informed,” Lisa said.

“They’re.” Quill stood and left a card on the table. Heavy stock. One number, no name. “The thief has stolen from seven residences so far. We believe she’s targeting an eighth within the week. There’s one more thing. At every site, the thief leaves a marker behind. A shard of mirror glass, scratched with an arrow. My clients have no idea what it means. Perhaps you’ll. The address is on the back. I suggest starting there.”

He walked out before either of us could ask the next question.

Lisa picked up the card and turned it over. A street in Hampstead. She read it twice and slid it across the table to me.

“He knew about the tundra before the file went through,” she said. “That isn’t informed. That’s inside the room.”

“Someone at the Association.”

“Or someone who gets Association reports before they’re reports.” She finished her coffee. It had gone cold twenty minutes ago. “Fifty thousand to catch a thief who has never been seen. That isn’t a recovery fee. That’s hazard pay for something he hasn’t told us yet.”

Somebody had written a survey out of an office that didn’t exist, and somebody had closed ten deaths in a fortnight. Now a man in a café knew what we had done on Tuesday.

Fifty thousand was two years of D-rank gates. It was also the first time anyone had offered me a door into that room.

Lisa had been on the train to Edinburgh. She knew which of the two things I had just said yes to, and she didn’t correct me in front of him.

I looked at the footage one more time. Four seconds. Small and hooded, already inside. The vanish was clean and professional. It was the kind of technique that took years to develop and a guild to teach it.

“A guildless thief with a developed teleport,” I said. “No guild registers a skill like that and lets the hunter run solo. Which means she has never sat an assessment. No card, no density on file. For all anyone can prove, she doesn’t exist.”

“A ghost.”

“A ghost who steals first editions and jewelry worth less than the security guarding them.” I pocketed the card. “She isn’t after money. She’s after something else. And Quill knows what it’s.”

“Then let us find out what he isn’t telling us,” Lisa said. “Preferably before we walk into a house the thief already marked and find out the hard way.”

She pulled out her phone.

“I’m going to call Doyle.”

“You think this connects?”

“Someone asked for us by name and knew about the tundra before the Association filed it. Doyle is the only person who could trace where the leak came from.” She paused with her thumb over the screen. “Unless you’d rather not involve him.”

Doyle had asked me to bring him anything that didn’t make sense. This job had stopped making sense somewhere between the footage and the fifty thousand.

“Call him.”

Doyle picked up on the second ring. Lisa put him on speaker. She didn’t mention Quill by name. She described the job in broad terms: a wealthy client, a thief with a teleport, items that didn’t add up to their stated value. She left out the tundra reference.

The silence on Doyle’s end lasted four seconds.

“Someone has been running private recovery ops off the books for about six weeks,” he said. “Same description. Teleport thief, targeting the wealthy. I’ve had three reports cross my desk and none of them went through the Association. Whoever is funding this doesn’t want a paper trail.”

“Any idea who?”

“No. But the items she has been taking aren’t random. I’ve been trying to cross-reference them against a cold case of mine. Disappearances. Gates that didn’t match their files. The Chilterns pattern, but older.”

“Does anything match?”

“Not yet. But if she’s stealing the same kind of thing from different houses, she isn’t stealing for money. She’s looking for something specific. Someone told her what to take.”

I looked at Lisa. She had reached the same conclusion.

“Keep us updated,” I said. “We’re following the trail tomorrow.”

“Be careful. Whoever is paying for the recovery isn’t the only party interested. There’s a second set of footprints on this, and they’re heavier than yours.”

He hung up before I could ask what he meant.

We took the Tube to Hampstead. On the way, I checked my phone. The Tower of Genesis client had a notification waiting.

VANTA: you are climbing again

VANTA: i saw the timer move. floor 91. you are slow

C-REAL: still healing. told you it would be a while

VANTA: you said hands. you didn’t say slow

C-REAL: the hands are wired to the brain. brain is slow too

VANTA: that is a terrible excuse

The typing indicator flickered, stopped, and flickered again.

VANTA: there is a bounty board now btw. they put one up last month. someone is offering real money for floor 100

VANTA: nobody is close. i am at 96. some guy named KITE is at 95. everyone else is 91 or lower

VANTA: you are everyone else

C-REAL: i have been busy

VANTA: busy dying apparently

VANTA: don’t do that again. i am serious. i didn’t wait three years to beat a dead guy

VANTA: just a reminder, don’t sandbag yourself. i know how you climb better than anyone alive

I closed the phone. The train rattled through a tunnel and the screen went dark.

Vanta.

What?

“He said he knows how I climb better than anyone alive.”

What does that actually mean? Azazel sounded less dry and more curious.

“It means he has probably watched every clear I ever posted. Hundreds of hours. He would know my patterns better than anyone else.”

You already suspected someone, did you not?

“Since the footage.”

And did not say.

“The footage told me the thief moved like a Tower climber,” I said. “The markers just told me which one.”

The train surfaced into daylight. Hampstead was three stops away.