They stood there for a bit longer than either of them probably meant to.

  The Shining Place did what it always did, sat up on its plateau and glowed without caring who was looking at it. Flint had his hands in his pockets. Zelig had his arms at his sides. Two people from the same street going to the same place, which was either convenient or a problem and probably both.

  “You eaten.” Flint said eventually.

  “No.”

  “Me neither.” He turned away from the Shining Place like the decision was made. “There’s a stall on the Row that does a decent bone broth for two marks. Come on.”

  Zelig followed, not because he particularly wanted bone broth but because the alternative was going home and sitting in the dark and he had already done enough of that lately.

  The stall was where Flint said it was, run by an old woman who did not look at either of them when she handed over the cups. They stood at the edge of the Row and drank it. It was decent. Zelig filed that away.

  Flint talked. This was apparently just what Flint did in the absence of a specific reason not to. He talked about the auction, about the merchant, about something he had overheard in the last ten minutes of the evening that he found interesting. He talked the way some people walked, constantly and without apparent effort, covering ground without seeming to try.

  Zelig listened.

  He was good at listening. Most people thought silence meant you weren’t paying attention. Most people were wrong about that.

  “Ervan’s going to have a job soon.” Flint said. “Real one. Not intelligence work.”

  “How do you know.”

  “The way he looked at that lockbox information when you handed it over. He already knew some of it. He was checking what he knew against what you found.” Flint finished his broth. “He’s been building toward something.”

  Zelig thought about that.

  He had noticed the same thing and had not said it out loud to anyone.

  He looked at Flint sideways.

  Flint looked back with an expression that said he knew exactly what Zelig was thinking and found it satisfying.

  Ervan called them in two days later.

  The job was simple on paper.

  A crate moving through the Underlayers on a cart, hired hands pushing it, no markings, heading from a warehouse near the east docks toward a buyer in the lower Middling Ring. Inside the crate was a mid tier magical artifact that belonged to someone who had paid the Hollow Hand to retrieve it.

  Not steal. Retrieve. The artifact had already been stolen once. They were the second set of hands.

  “All we do is intercept the cart before it reaches the Ring checkpoint.” Ervan said. “Take the crate. Leave everything else.”

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  Simple.

  The plan was Zelig’s. It usually was.

  The cart had one route through the Underlayers that made sense given the docks location and the checkpoint destination. One bottleneck, an alley junction on Cutter’s Lane where the street narrowed enough that a cart had to slow almost to a stop to get through. Thirty second window, maybe forty. Enough.

  Reva and the two crew members would be on the far side of the junction. Zelig and Flint would stop the cart before it entered. Create a reason for it to stop. The crew takes the crate from the other end while the hired hands are looking forward.

  Flint listened to the whole plan with his arms crossed and nodded at the end.

  “Good.” He said.

  “Don’t add anything.” Zelig said.

  “I never add anything.”

  Zelig looked at him.

  “I sometimes add things.” Flint said. “But only when the situation calls for it.”

  “The situation won’t call for it.”

  “Agreed.” Flint said, in the tone of someone who had already mentally reserved the right to disagree later.

  They were in position on Cutter’s Lane twenty minutes before the cart was due. Zelig on one side of the street, Flint on the other, both looking like they were doing nothing in particular.

  The cart came around the corner on time. Two hired hands pushing, one walking alongside with the alert posture of someone being paid extra to notice things. Not a cultivator, just a careful person.

  The careful person was the variable Zelig had already accounted for. Flint was supposed to trip, stumble into the street, slow the cart down with an apology. Harmless, eyes on Flint for thirty seconds while Reva’s team worked the crate.

  The cart entered the narrowing.

  Flint did not trip.

  Instead Flint walked directly up to the careful person, clapped him on the shoulder like a long lost acquaintance and said loudly “Sera! I haven’t seen you since the Dockside fire! How is your mother!”

  The careful person was apparently not named Sera because he looked at Flint with the expression of someone being approached by a lunatic.

  Zelig closed his eyes for exactly one second.

  Then he moved.

  He came off the wall fast and got to the lead hired hand before the man had fully processed what was happening behind him. Zelig grabbed the cart handle from underneath like he was helping, which made the hired hand instinctively let go because someone grabbing the handle meant someone was taking the weight.

  “Careful, the wheel’s catching.” Zelig said, in the specific voice of a person delivering useful information.

  The hired hand looked down at the wheel.

  Behind the cart Reva’s team had the crate up and moving in the time it took the man to look down and back up and find nothing wrong with the wheel.

  “Hm.” The hired hand said.

  “Must have cleared.” Zelig said and stepped back.

  The cart moved on through the junction.

  Flint extracted himself from the confused careful person with a laugh and a wave and fell into step beside Zelig heading the other direction.

  They walked half a block in silence.

  “Sera.” Zelig said.

  “It was the first name I thought of.”

  “You were supposed to trip.”

  “Tripping felt undignified.”

  Zelig looked at him. Flint looked back. Something in his face that was not quite an apology but was at least an acknowledgment. “It worked out.”

  “It worked out because I covered for you.”

  “Which you did very well.” Flint said. “The wheel thing was good. Very natural.”

  “Don’t go off script again.”

  “Absolutely.” Flint said, in exactly the same tone as before.

  Ervan looked at the crate, looked at Zelig, looked at Flint.

  “Any problems.” He said.

  “No.” Zelig said.

  Ervan nodded.

  Flint caught Zelig’s eye over Ervan’s shoulder. The look said thank you. Zelig’s look back said don’t make it a habit. Flint’s look said I make no promises.

  They walked back toward the Row afterward, the Underlayers doing its evening thing around them.

  “The wheel thing.” Flint said after a while. “You came up with that in about two seconds.”

  “One.” Zelig said.

  Flint nodded slowly. “I’m good at people.” He said. “You’re good at situations. You know that.”

  Zelig knew that.

  “Between the two of us.” Flint said. He didn’t finish the sentence.

  Zelig looked up at the Shining Place out of habit. Same as always.

  “Don’t go off script again.” He said.

  “You keep saying that.”

  “You keep making it necessary.”

  Flint smiled and said nothing and they walked the rest of the way in the kind of silence that had stopped being uncomfortable sometime around the junction on Cutter’s Lane.