Ervan did not give them details that night.

  He laid out the broad shape of it, a vault, Middling Ring, significant contents, and then told them to go home and come back in two days. He said it the way he said things that were not up for discussion, flat and even, and nobody discussed it.

  Zelig walked home with Flint.

  They did not talk about the job. That was an unspoken thing between them by now, operational details stayed inside the room where they were discussed, not on the street where anyone could be walking behind you. They talked about other things instead. Flint had seen something near the east docks that morning that he found funny, a cart horse that had apparently decided it was done for the day and had sat down in the middle of the road and refused to move for two hours while its owner tried everything short of actual pleading to get it up.

  “Eventually the owner just sat down next to it.” Flint said. “Just gave up and sat down in the road beside his own horse.”

  “Did it work.”

  “Eventually the horse got up on its own. Just stood up and walked like nothing happened.” Flint shook his head. “The owner looked like he had aged five years.”

  Zelig said nothing but the corner of his mouth moved.

  Flint noticed. He always noticed.

  They split at the corner of Arbor Street. Zelig went up. Marie was already asleep. He sat at the table in the dark for a while thinking about vaults and Middling Ring and the way Ervan had stood, and then went to bed.

  The next day was ordinary in the way days before something are ordinary, which is to say it was ordinary and also it was not.

  He ran his con on the Row in the morning. Forty two marks. He bought bread and something from the hot stall near the junction and ate it walking back. The Row was doing its usual thing. The glow lantern at the corner was buzzing again, same frequency as always, nobody had fixed it.

  He looked up at the Shining Place on the way home without meaning to.

  Same as always. Pale and steady above the rooftops.

  He looked away and kept walking.

  Two days later they went back to Ervan.

  The full picture was this. A merchant in the lower Middling Ring, successful, careful, the kind of man who had spent twenty years being careful and had let that make him confident, kept a private vault beneath his business premises. The vault held a collection of magical artifacts, some legitimate, some less so. Among them was an item that belonged to a client of Ervan’s, acquired through means the merchant had probably not examined too closely when the opportunity arose.

  The client wanted it back.

  The job was retrieval. Same as the delivery, same as the lockbox, just larger and further up than they had worked before.

  “Security.” Zelig said.

  “Two men on the door. One inside, rotates every two hours.” Ervan said. “The vault itself has a seal. Challenger rank minimum to open.”

  Zelig kept his face the way it was.

  Flint glanced at him for half a second.

  Zelig’s face said nothing back.

  “We have a contact who can handle the seal.” Ervan said. “She goes in with the team. In and out in under twenty minutes.”

  Zelig looked at the rough layout Ervan had put on the table. A hand drawn floor plan, basic but accurate enough to work from. He studied it for a while.

  “The front.” He said. “What’s the cover.”

  “Merchant hosts a private showing every month.” Ervan said. “Next one is in four days. Invitation only, Middling Ring clientele. We get in through the front, we look like we belong, the team goes down while Flint and Zelig hold the room.”

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  Flint spread his hands like this was the most natural thing in the world. “A showing. Perfect.”

  Zelig looked at the floor plan again.

  “I need a day with this.” He said.

  Ervan nodded and rolled it up and handed it over.

  Zelig spent the next day at the table with the floor plan open in front of him and a cup of tea going cold beside it.

  He went through it the way he went through everything. Entry points first. The front door was the obvious one and obvious was what Flint was for. Side entrance from the adjoining alley, locked, not guarded but visible from the street. Rear access through a loading area that would be inactive during an evening showing.

  The vault was on the sublevel. One staircase down from the main floor, the kind of staircase that would be locked during a social event and therefore the kind of staircase that someone going to find a bathroom on a busy evening might accidentally try.

  The guard rotation was the variable. Two hours was a long window but the timing mattered. If they went down at the wrong point in the rotation they had twenty minutes. If they went down at the right point they had close to forty.

  He needed to know the rotation start time.

  He made a list of what he needed and how to get each thing and how long each thing would take and whether any of them had dependencies on each other.

  By the time Marie came home he had a plan.

  The night of the showing Flint arrived at Arbor Street dressed better than Zelig had seen him dressed before, which was saying something because Flint always looked like he had put effort in. Tonight was a different tier of effort. He looked like someone who had always had money and had recently acquired slightly more of it.

  “Where did you get that.” Zelig said.

  “I know a person.” Flint said.

  Marie looked up from the table. Looked at Flint. Looked at Zelig.

  “Don’t.” Zelig said to her.

  “I didn’t say anything.” Marie said.

  “You were going to.”

  Marie went back to her mending.

  Flint looked between them with the expression he got when he found their dynamic entertaining, which was most of the time.

  They left.

  The merchant’s premises were on a clean street in the lower Middling Ring, the kind of street that had managed to stay clean by making it quietly inconvenient for people who would make it otherwise. Lanterns that actually worked. Stone that had been repaired recently. The building itself was three floors, old money architecture, the kind that did not announce itself because it did not feel it needed to.

  There were maybe thirty people inside when they arrived. Middling Ring money, the specific social register of people who were comfortable but aware of everyone around them who was slightly more comfortable. Flint walked in and immediately became one of them, that quality he had of filling whatever room he entered without pushing anything out of the way.

  Zelig moved differently. He found the edges first. The corners, the transitions between spaces, the places where you could see everything without being the thing people looked at.

  He clocked the inside guard within four minutes. Position, posture, pattern.

  He found Reva near the back of the room and made eye contact for half a second.

  She had the rotation time.

  They were at the right point. Forty minutes.

  Zelig moved to Flint’s side and said quietly “twenty minutes from now” and Flint without breaking his current conversation with a man about textile imports gave a small nod that nobody else in the room would have read as anything.

  Reva’s contact opened the vault seal in six minutes.

  The vault was smaller than the floor plan had suggested, the drawing had not been to scale, but the contents were more than the floor plan had suggested too. Shelves along three walls, items on each one, the specific careful arrangement of someone who catalogued things and cared about the catalogue.

  Reva went to the item they were there for directly. She knew what she was looking for. She found it in under a minute, small, wrapped in cloth, placed it in the bag she had brought.

  Zelig looked at the other shelves.

  He had two minutes before they needed to move.

  He read everything he could see. Labels, markings, the items themselves. His eyes moved fast and his memory did what his memory did, taking it all in and storing it somewhere it would stay.

  One item on the third shelf stopped him.

  Not because it was large or obviously significant. Because it was labeled in a script he had seen before, in the stolen Eastern texts he read at night, and because the label did not say what the item was but said where it was from and that location was not a place a Middling Ring merchant should have access to.

  He did not touch it. He did not take it. He looked at it for the remaining two minutes and left.

  They were back in the main room before the guard completed his rotation.

  Flint was mid story when Zelig appeared at his shoulder. The people around him were laughing. The merchant himself was two people away with his back to them.

  They left eleven minutes later through the front door.

  Clean. Under twenty minutes. Nobody had looked at them twice.

  On the street after, walking back toward the Underlayers, Reva handed the bag to Ervan’s intermediary at the corner of the third street and that was that. Job done. Split distributed two days later as always.

  Flint fell into step beside Zelig heading home.

  “Smooth.” Flint said.

  “Yes.” Zelig said.

  “You saw something in there.” Flint said. Not a question.

  Zelig looked at him.

  “You went still for a moment.” Flint said. “Just a moment. I was watching the room but I caught it.”

  Zelig said nothing for long enough that Flint got the message.

  “Okay.” Flint said. “Okay.”

  They walked the rest of the way without talking about it.