The lock was a Verani three-tumbler, the kind merchants bought when they wanted to feel safe without actually paying for safety. Ren had it open in four seconds.
He eased the window up with his fingertips, careful to keep the frame from catching on the swollen wood, and slipped one leg over the sill. The merchant's office smelled of tallow and old ledgers. Moonlight cut through the shutters in pale bars across a desk buried in paper.
Behind him, on the rooftop, Tik said nothing.
That was worse than criticism. Tik's silence meant he was still watching, still measuring, still deciding if the seventeen-year-old hanging half inside a second-story window deserved to call himself a thief.
Ren pulled his other leg through and landed on the balls of his feet. The floorboards didn't creak. He'd mapped this room two days ago, memorized the spots where the joists met the beams, learned where the wood was solid and where it would sing under a careless step. The merchant — Aldren Coss, dealer in dyed silks and minor bribes — kept his strongbox under the desk. Not behind a false panel, not in a hidden compartment. Under the desk, bolted to the floor, with a lock that cost more than the window's.
This one was a Kellmar six-pin, and it was the whole point of the evening.
Ren knelt beneath the desk and drew his picks from the leather roll at his belt. The roll had been Tik's gift on his fifteenth birthday — sixteen picks of graduated thickness, each one hand-filed from steel salvage, each one worth more than a week's honest wages in a city where honest wages were a cruel joke.
He selected the tension wrench and his third pick, slid them into the keyway, and closed his eyes.
The guild called it listening. Tik called it reading. The lock spoke through the pick in vibrations so small they were more imagination than sensation — the faintest scrape of pin against cylinder, the whisper of a driver settling into the shear line. You had to quiet everything else. Your breathing. Your heartbeat. The voice in your head that said you'd be faster if you just forced it.
Forcing it was what amateurs did. Forcing it was how you broke picks, tripped alarms, and ended up running through streets with guards behind you and nothing in your pockets. Ren had forced one lock in his life, two years ago, and Tik had made him pick a hundred more that week until his fingertips were raw and his hands shook.
The first pin set with a tiny click he felt more than heard. The cylinder gave a fraction of a turn. He moved to the second pin.
The merchant quarter of Harrowfeld was quiet at this hour, but not silent. Through the window, Ren could hear the night sounds of a city that never fully slept — the distant bark of a dog in the dyers' ward, the off-key singing of someone stumbling home from a tavern on Coppergate, the slow creak of a cart being driven to market before dawn. Harrowfeld sat on the River Ash at the crossroads of three trade routes, and something was always moving, always being bought or sold or stolen.
Second pin. Third.
His shoulders ached from holding still. His knees ground against the floor. The desk above him smelled of ink and the ghost of a hundred meals eaten while counting coins — grease spots on the wood, crumbs in the grain.
Fourth pin. Fifth.
He was aware, distantly, of the sweat on his upper lip. Of the cool draft from the window. Of the moon sliding behind a cloud and the room going darker. None of it mattered. The world had contracted to the width of a keyway and the space between his fingertip and a steel pin no thicker than a hair.
Sixth pin set. The cylinder turned. The lock opened with a satisfying thunk.
Ren exhaled.
He lifted the strongbox lid. Inside: a stack of promissory notes, two small bags of coin, a ring that might be gold, and a leather folio tied with ribbon. The folio was the target — Maren wanted Coss's shipping contracts, the ones that would prove he was running goods for the church at a markup the church didn't know about. Information was worth more than gold. Information could be used twice.
Ren took the folio. He left the coins, the notes, and the ring. He closed the strongbox, re-locked it with his tension wrench, and backed away on his knees until he could stand without bumping the desk.
The whole thing had taken less than three minutes.
He crossed to the window, swung his legs over the sill, and pulled himself onto the rooftop. Tik was sitting on the ridge tiles with his legs crossed, chewing something that smelled of anise. His face was all shadows and scar tissue in the moonlight — the left side smooth and taut where the burn had healed badly, the right side weathered and lined from squinting against rooftop winds.
"Show me," Tik said.
Ren held up the folio.
Tik took it, turned it in his hands, checked the ribbon seal. He grunted. "Time?"
"Three minutes. Maybe less."
"The lock?"
"Kellmar six-pin. Clean open, no rake."
Tik handed the folio back. "The window latch?"
"Verani three-tumbler. Garbage."
"And if it hadn't been garbage?"
Ren opened his mouth. Closed it.
Tik watched him with that patient, half-ruined face. He didn't prompt. He never prompted. He asked a question and then he waited, and the silence expanded until you either answered honestly or drowned in it.
"I would've taken longer on the window," Ren said. "Which means more time on the roof. More exposure."
"And?"
"And I should have scouted the window lock separately. I assumed it was the same model as last time."
Tik spat the anise seed over the edge of the roof. "Assumptions," he said, in the same tone another man might say plague. He stood — fluid, quiet, a man who'd been climbing walls for thirty years and had never once let gravity surprise him. "What's the code?"
Ren recited it without thinking. The words were as automatic as breathing: "Survive first. Steal second. Never betray your own."
"The third one's the one that matters." Tik crossed the rooftop toward the alley, not looking back. He never looked back. Either you followed or you didn't, and if you didn't, that was information too. "Come on. Ludo's got something brewing and Maren wants the folio before dawn."
***
They moved across the rooftops of the merchant quarter like water finding its level — always downhill, always toward the path of least resistance. Tik had taught Ren to read a roofline the way a sailor reads the wind: angles of pitch, distances between ridges, the strength of gutters versus the weight they'd hold. A good thief didn't jump gaps. A good thief found the route where no jumping was required.
The merchant quarter was the newest part of Harrowfeld, built in the last century when the river trade swelled and money pushed the old walls outward. The buildings here were close-packed, three and four stories of timber and plaster, with roofs that nearly touched across the narrow streets below. Ren could cross half the quarter without touching the ground. He'd mapped every route by the time he was fourteen.
Below, Harrowfeld slept the shallow sleep of a trade city. Lanterns burned in a few windows — a baker starting early, a bookkeeper working late. The smell of the river drifted up between the buildings, carrying woodsmoke and fish rot and the mineral tang that everyone who lived here learned to ignore. Beneath that, something else — a faint sweetness, almost floral, that came and went like a current in the air. It rose from the east, from the boneglass district, and Ren had smelled it his whole life without ever learning what it was.
Tik dropped from the last roofline onto a rain barrel, then to the cobblestones. Ren followed. They were in a courtyard behind a chandler's shop, three streets from the guild hall. Tik rapped on a cellar door — two knocks, pause, three — and it swung open from inside.
Warmth spilled out. Light. The smell of heated copper and sharp chemicals.
"You're late," Sera said from the doorway. She was leaning against the frame with her arms crossed, her dark hair pulled back and her expression set in that particular arrangement of boredom and amusement she reserved exclusively for Ren. "I had money on you getting caught."
"How much money?"
"Not enough to care either way." She stepped back to let them in, and as Ren passed she reached out and flicked the folio in his hand. "Ooh, the good paper. Maren will be pleased. Did you cry when you touched the six-pin?"
"I wept openly."
"That's my boy."
The cellar was the guild's working heart — not the public rooms above, where members drank and diced and pretended to be unemployed laborers, but the space beneath, dug out and reinforced over decades into a network of rooms and passages that honeycombed the block. The main chamber held a long table, benches, a dozen lanterns, and an assortment of tools, maps, and stolen goods in various stages of being converted from one thing into another.
Ludo was at the far end, bent over a copper apparatus that hissed and bubbled with something that smelled like burnt almonds. He was old — sixty, maybe older, though no one asked and he never volunteered — with white hair that stood out from his head in wisps and fingers stained permanently yellow from decades of working with compounds. He didn't look up when they entered. Ludo never looked up from his work. The compounds were always more interesting than people.
"Folio," Tik said, and tossed it onto the table.
Maren Gault emerged from the back room with a ledger under her arm and the expression of a woman who had been awake for thirty hours and intended to stay awake for thirty more. She was the guildmaster — had been for eleven years, since the previous guildmaster made the mistake of cheating a brand merchant and ended up floating in the Ash with his pockets turned out. Maren was not the best thief in Harrowfeld. She was the best planner, the best reader of people, and the most patient. In guild work, patience was worth more than speed.
She picked up the folio, untied the ribbon, and scanned the first page. Her eyes moved quickly. "Coss is skimming twelve percent off the incense shipments," she said, not to anyone in particular. "The cathedral chapter thinks they're paying market rate." She turned a page. "They're not."
"Can we use it?" Tik asked.
"Three ways." Maren set the folio down and looked at Ren. Her gaze was direct and evaluating, the same way she looked at a contract or a floor plan — searching for flaws, measuring potential. "Clean job?"
"Clean," Tik said, before Ren could answer. "No rake, no force. Window latch was soft but he didn't assume on the main lock."
Maren nodded once. Coming from her, it was the equivalent of a standing ovation. "Go eat. There's bread from this morning and Ludo made something that's either soup or a mistake."
"Soup," Ludo said without looking up. "The mistake was last Tuesday."
Sera had already settled onto one of the benches, her boots on the table, a knife in one hand and an apple in the other. She cut a slice and offered it to Ren on the blade. "So. The Lockpick Prince returns victorious. Tell me about the six-pin."
"What about it?"
"Was it as good as Tik promised? Did you feel the little click? Did the world go quiet and still and deeply meaningful?"
"You're mocking me."
"I'm always mocking you. That's not an answer."
Ren sat down across from her and took the apple slice. It was sour and cold and perfect. "It was a lock," he said. "I opened it."
Sera grinned. She had a gap between her front teeth that she'd never bothered to fix, and when she smiled it gave her face a quality of mischievous delight that made her look younger than her nineteen years. "Tik's rubbing off on you. All that stoic understatement. You know, there's no rule that says thieves can't enjoy their work."
"Survive first. Steal second."
"Enjoy third. I added that one."
"It's not official."
"Nothing about us is official. That's the point." She cut another slice, ate it herself. "Ludo says there's a job coming. A big one. He's been muttering about the boneglass district for days."
Ren glanced at Ludo. The old man was still absorbed in his apparatus, adjusting a valve with the careful precision of a surgeon. Copper tubing looped from a flask into a condenser, and the liquid dripping into the collection jar was the pale green of spring leaves. Whatever it was, it was volatile — Ren could tell from the way Ludo handled it, with the exaggerated gentleness of someone who knew exactly what would happen if he dropped it.
"What's in the boneglass district?" Ren asked.
"Money." Sera shrugged. "What's always in the boneglass district. The church keeps its overflow vaults near the old mines. Sacred ground, they call it." She said sacred the way Ludo said prayers — with an inflection that suggested the word amused her more than it impressed her. "Maren's been scouting the routes for a month."
***
Tik sat down at the head of the table and poured himself ale from a clay jug. He drank slowly, watching the room — watching Ludo work, watching Sera and Ren talk, watching the shadows in the corners the way he always did, as if even here, even home, the world might shift without warning. The scar tissue on the left side of his face caught the lamplight and shone like wax.
"Three nights," Tik said quietly, and the room went still. Not silence — the apparatus still hissed, the lanterns still guttered — but the kind of attention that settled over a group when the person speaking was the one you listened to. "Maren and I have been planning the boneglass job for three weeks. Scouting starts tomorrow. Nobody goes into the district alone. Nobody talks about it outside this room."
"What are we taking?" Ren asked.
"That depends on what we find." Tik set down his cup. "The church has been moving things in and out of those vaults for months. More traffic than usual. Maren thinks they're consolidating assets — pulling wealth out of the smaller chapels and centralizing it. If she's right, there's more in those vaults right now than there's been in years."
"And if she's wrong?"
Tik's mouth twitched — not a smile, exactly, but the ghost of one. "Then we've had a nice walk through the boneglass district and learned something anyway. Every scout is worth the time. Even the ones that come up empty."
Ludo turned from his apparatus. His eyes were sharp despite his age, bright and quick in a face mapped with the fine scars of old chemical burns. "The boneglass district is changing," he said, and his voice carried the weight of a man who had lived in this city for six decades and paid attention to all of it. "The veins are deeper than they used to be. Brighter. I could smell them from the river last week."
"You could smell boneglass?" Sera asked.
"Everything has a smell if you pay attention. Boneglass smells like cold air and copper. Like standing water in a cave." Ludo wiped his stained fingers on his apron. "The church says it's sacred. The miners used to say it was old. Neither group is worth listening to, but the miners were closer to right."
"What does old mean?" Ren asked.
"Older than the city. Older than the river, probably. The mines go down three hundred feet and the boneglass veins go deeper. Nobody knows how deep." Ludo shrugged, a gesture that seemed to encompass the entirety of human ignorance and his general dissatisfaction with it. "The church built their vaults on top of it because they think it's holy. The guild's been robbing those vaults for forty years because we think it's profitable. Both of us could be wrong about what's actually down there."
He turned back to his apparatus and adjusted the flame beneath the flask. The liquid inside shifted from pale green to something closer to amber. "I'll have the smoke compound ready by tomorrow night. Three canisters, two-minute burn. Should be enough for the entry if the ventilation shafts are where Maren mapped them."
"They are," Maren said from the back room. She'd been reading the folio this whole time, her voice carrying through the doorway with the distracted precision of someone processing multiple things at once. "I've confirmed the layout twice. The main vault is on the second sub-level, past the refinery. Two locked doors, no guards after midnight. The church trusts its locks more than its people."
"A sensible policy," Tik said. "People can be bought. Locks just need to be opened." He looked at Ren. "Which is where you come in."
Ren felt something tighten in his chest — not fear, exactly, but the electric awareness that preceded it. The boneglass district was different from the merchant quarter. The streets were narrower. The air was heavier. Things grew wrong near the old mines, and the people who lived there had a quality of thinness, as if the district were slowly wearing them away.
But the locks would be Kellmar, same as tonight. Maybe harder. Maybe better. And there was a part of Ren — the part that had felt the six-pin yield to his touch, that had heard the cylinder turn like a whispered secret — that wanted to know exactly how good he was.
"I'm ready," he said.
Tik studied him for a long moment. The scarred side of his face was unreadable; the other side carried an expression that might have been pride, or might have been worry, or might have been both.
"Eat your soup first," Tik said. "You're too thin to be ready for anything."
Sera laughed. Ludo muttered something about ungrateful children. Maren turned another page of the folio. And Ren sat in the warmth of the guild's cellar, surrounded by the people who'd taught him everything he knew, and ate his soup, and didn't think about the boneglass district yet.
That could wait until tomorrow.
The lock on the front door clicked — the particular sound of Bren letting himself in from the night watch. Footsteps on the stairs. The scrape of a chair. The murmur of low conversation between Bren and someone else from the upper rooms, drifting down through the floorboards like another layer of the building's constant, comfortable noise.
Ren rolled the apple core across the table to Sera, who batted it away.
"Tell me something," she said, leaning back on the bench.
"What?"
"When you were in there tonight. In the office, under the desk, with the six-pin. Were you scared?"
He thought about it. About the darkness under the desk, the small click of each pin, the world shrinking to the space between his fingers and the lock. About the window at his back and the rooftop beyond it and Tik waiting in the dark. About the possibility that the merchant would wake, that the floorboard would creak, that the lock would resist.
"No," he said.
"Liar."
"I wasn't scared. I was focused."
Sera looked at him sideways. "Same thing, from where I sit." She swung her boots off the table and stood, stretching. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow we start earning our reputation."
She disappeared into the passage that led to the sleeping quarters. Ren heard her footsteps fade, heard a door open and close. Ludo was banking his flame, covering the apparatus with a cloth. Tik had already gone, moving with his usual silence — there one moment, gone the next, like the best lesson he'd ever taught was how to leave a room without anyone noticing.
Maren was still reading in the back room. The lantern light spilled through the doorway and painted a warm rectangle on the cellar floor.
Ren sat alone at the table with the smell of Ludo's compounds and the taste of sour apple and the fading warmth of a room that still felt like the only safe place in the world.
He pulled his lockpick roll from his belt, unrolled it, and ran his thumb across the picks. Sixteen steel teeth, each one familiar as a finger. He could identify them by touch — the snake rake, the half-diamond, the hook, the tension wrenches in three thicknesses. Tik had filed them himself and Ren could feel the rasp marks, tiny imperfections that had become landmarks.
Tomorrow, the boneglass district. Something bigger than merchant offices and silk contracts. Something that made Maren plan for three weeks and Ludo brew compounds that could put a man on his back.
Ren rolled the picks, tied the leather cord, and went to find his bed.
The guild was quiet. The city hummed its low nighttime hum beyond the walls. Somewhere beneath both — beneath the cellars, beneath the streets, beneath the stone foundations of a city built on top of something older than anyone remembered — the boneglass pulsed in its deep veins like a second heartbeat, patient and slow and waiting.
Join the Discussion