So one night, she stepped beyond the last lit post.

  Dani’s legs ached from crouching in the shadows behind the Baron’s estate. Stillness had settled deep in her muscles, a dull ache she didn’t dare stretch. The lamplights had flickered on, weak, barely nudging back the darkness. She stilled her breath and became part of it. A shadow among shadows in the city’s washed-out twilight.

  Bruno’s intel held. Baron Holt was knee-deep in the usual Inner Ring indulgence—smug laughter shared over overpriced pastries, merchants nodding too eagerly, nobles mistaking decadence for taste.

  She figured by now, he’d be deep into the wine, too busy savoring his own importance to notice anything going missing.

  They had planned this job meticulously. Guard rotations, blind spots, fallback routes; it was all mapped out. Holt had tightened security since that mess in the Bazaar, but Dani had been watching for days.

  Her gaze lifted toward the Temple’s bell tower, its silhouette stark against the sky. Her pulse quickened. It was almost time.

  With fingers flexing around the worn pouch at her belt that held her tools, she ran through the plan one last time in her mind.

  The bells chimed three cold notes. She moved.

  Her tools pressed against her side. Her breath stayed shallow. The night had shifted, and so had she. From stillness to motion, from shadow to thief.

  It was time.

  In seconds, she reached the servants’ entrance, yanking a stolen white coat from her bag and slipping it on. It smelled like starch and sweat. The weight of it settled on her shoulders. Her fingers found the lock—familiar metal, cold against skin—and her picks whispered into place, coaxing the tumblers.

  Click.

  Then—

  A low, rolling boom cracked across the district.

  The stones beneath her feet trembled. Dani's heart pounded and she froze.

  That wasn’t part of the plan.

  She’d paid the last of her coin for a distraction, a flash mob of orphans raising hell in Temple Square, enough chaos to keep the Guardians busy. A little mischief, not destruction.

  This was something else.

  She needed the Guardians looking in the district, not bringing help from outside of it.

  Panic clawed at the edges of her focus, but she shoved it down. The plan was shifting, which meant she had to move faster.

  She slipped inside. The kitchen was warm, reeking of spice and scorched butter. She peeled off the coat, hooked it on a peg, and moved quickly.

  A flash of gray fur darted past her feet. She nearly yelped.

  “Ollie—” she muttered a curse. Damn cat. Bruno had even learned its name to continue his joke. He really did take pride in his details.

  Somewhere outside, chaos brewed. But inside, Dani moved with practiced ease. Past the kitchen, toward the study.

  Whatever had just happened, she didn’t have time to flinch.

  Dani moved swiftly, sticking to the mapped-out route. The grand foyer stretched ahead, its gleaming floor dim under gaslight. Two guards flanked the study doors, eyes peering out of the window.

  “I’m telling you, something blew up,” one whispered.

  “Probably just a merchant cart,” the other muttered, but his voice wavered.

  “Didn’t sound like a cart.”

  Dani didn’t linger. Bare feet soundless on polished wood, she slipped past and took the stairs two at a time. At the end of the hall, the heavy oak doors of Holt’s private study loomed.

  Bruno hadn’t known much here. Just slurred gossip from a drunk guard, talk of something locked away, something “worth more than the Baron’s wine cellar.”

  Rumors sometimes lead to real coin. He’d said. Sometimes to corpses. She was about to find out which.

  The pick slid in. A breath. A twitch of fingers.Click.

  She slipped inside.

  The study smelled of varnish and old bindings. Shadows gathered in the corners, broken only by the silver glow of a single desk lamp. Leather chairs. A decanter. Ornate shelves filled with titles that hadn’t been read in years.

  Her fingers skimmed the spines. There—a seam too clean to be decorative. She pressed it. The shelf clicked and swung inward, revealing the vault.

  Dani exhaled slowly.

  It wasn’t just any safe. It was an old-world mechanism.

  She paused, examining the vault’s strange design, a mix of polished brass and riveted steel, fitted with a keypad and a viewing window through which intricate gears were visible.

  Bruno had warned her it would be “fancy”, but he didn’t say it was a holy relic masquerading as a lockbox.

  Dani dusted the keys with a fine powder, squinting at the smudges left behind. Three digits stood out—1, 3, 0—but the order was unclear. Her heart thudded against her ribs as she ran through permutations in her head.

  This wasn’t a lock. It was a language. One she had to speak fluently, or risk jamming the whole thing.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  She tried 103. The gears turned—then stalled with a warning groan. Not locked, but close.

  She gritted her teeth while her mind kicked through combinations. Not the birthday. Not the title year. Not even the date of the damn vineyard acquisition that Holt had bragged about for weeks. Another wrong guess, and the vault might seal for good.

  Wiping the panel again carefully, she noticed the faintest residue on the zero, and a sharper edge on the one—it had been used more than the others. It still wasn’t enough.

  Her gaze flicked to the viewport. Inside, the gears were exquisite. Small, coiled things, moving in tight, deliberate patterns.

  She muttered under her breath. “Come on, come on…”

  Silence. Stillness. Frustration.

  She’d memorized everything about Holt. His mistresses. His ascension. His list of enemies. Even the stupid cat.

  Then something surfaced—half memory, half instinct.

  A familiar guards the threshold.

  Bruno had tossed that phrase at her days ago, laughing like it meant nothing. Some local nonsense. They hadn’t given it a second thought.

  But now…

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “Ollie,” she said aloud, almost incredulous. “You smug, mangy little—”

  She punched in the sequence: 0-1-1-1-3.

  The keypad sighed. A soft, mechanical exhale. The gears stirred like waking limbs, and the vault door swung open with ceremonial grace.

  Inside, resting on black velvet, sat a box, darkwood polished to a gleam, etched with shifting patterns that glinted like clockwork beneath lacquer.

  A mechanism, like everything else in this place.

  And at its center, a keyhole, waiting.

  Her heart slammed against her ribs.

  The key.

  The one she’d lifted days ago. The one she still didn’t understand.

  She drew the key from her pocket, its weight suddenly immense. Cold against her skin. Her fingers hesitated, then slid it in.

  Click.

  The lid lifted.

  Nestled inside was an amulet.

  It was simple. Just a dark, tarnished metal, cool to the touch. A circular glass core swirled with something deep and restless, like a shard of the night sky bottled inside. A single needle-shard floated in its center, shifting as though caught in an unseen current.

  She reached for it. The moment her fingers touched the metal, a twist knotted in her gut.

  Recognition. As if the thing knew her.

  Just metal, she told herself. Just glass.

  A lie, even as she believed it.

  But… Before she could examine it further, the muffled thump of footsteps approached from down the hall.

  Her panic surged.

  She shoved the amulet hastily into her pocket and moved toward the window. Just as she climbed out onto the narrow ledge, the door slammed open.

  Two men entered, grim-faced and sharply dressed, eyes coldly scanning the room. Dani didn’t wait for them to reach whatever they carried beneath their coats.

  She leaped onto the rooftop, running swiftly toward a trellis she'd noted earlier, her heart roaring in her chest.

  Behind her, footsteps thundered onto the roof. She swung herself onto a trellis at its edge, scrambling down rapidly, splinters biting into her hands.

  Below, the gardens loomed darkly, offering her shadows to disappear into. Above, one of the men peered over the edge but didn’t seem to spot her.

  She dropped.

  Rolled.

  Vanished into the green.

  The Weaver’s District had erupted.

  Smoke poured from broken windows. Guardians barked orders over the din. Civilians scattered, some screaming, some staring in shock, all of them moving like a tide without direction.

  Perfect cover.

  Dani ducked low and joined the current, weaving through panic like it was stitched into her skin. Her heart race and mind spun with questions.

  What was this thing?

  Why had the Core’s name been circling it for weeks? Had they sent those men?

  Or had someone else just joined the hunt?

  She bolted. Slipped through an alley’s cracked spine and made for the Skein with its twisted streets and layered alleys. A place where secrets could still vanish.

  By the time she reached the outer edge, it was worse.

  Fire licked through the sky two streets over. One of the gates stood mangled. Debris smoldered in the gutter. Dani tasted smoke and copper, felt it claw down her throat.

  Her fingers found the amulet again.

  It lay still, but something in her bones knew it was more.

  Something had changed while she was inside Holt’s estate.

  And whatever it was—

  She had just stolen the reason why.

  Dani slipped through the half-open door of the Gear & Cog. The scent of oiled metal and dust hitting her nose was familiar.

  The eerie silence was not.

  The place lacked the usual clinking and whirring of Bruno's projects. She scanned the cluttered space, a jumble of half-finished gadgets and tools casting long shadows in the dim light. Empty.

  It felt wrong. She half expected a stray gear to roll out from under a workbench or a spring to suddenly uncoil, but nothing moved.

  The silence pressed in, heavy and unsettling. She wasn't usually one for creeping herself out, but the emptiness was starting to get to her.

  The front door to the shop swung open and she ducked by instinct, but recovered quickly.

  Bruno.

  He switched on a desktop lamp, illuminating the space in a dim grey light.

  "What are you doing here?" he hissed, voice tight with panic. "Are you nuts? Did you even see what went down?"

  Dani shook her head.

  "The Weaver’s District is a wreck! Something exploded—boom—one of the shops on Second. Nobody knows what was inside. Guardians are everywhere"

  "Wasn't me," Dani said, keeping her voice low.

  “Yeah, no kidding. Like you’d pull off something that big without me.” He scoffed, waved her off before she could roll her eyes. “Still. Feels too clean to be random.”

  “I don’t think it was,” she murmured.

  Bruno paused. His eyes scanned her face, then dropped to her hand. “So? Did you get it?”

  She pulled out the pendant.

  Swirls of shadow and light caught the lamp and twisted it back. Bruno’s mouth parted.

  “Wow,” he breathed.

  “Never seen anything like it,” he said again after a beat, voice quieter now.

  "Me neither," Dani replied. "So how in the world am I supposed to fence it? I can’t exactly walk this into Vann’s shop.”

  “Why not?”

  She just looked at him.

  “Right.”

  He held up his hands, fingers ticking through a mental checklist. “Okay. Let’s recap. One: someone blows up a shop in the district. Probably not random, probably connected to that—” he nodded at the pendant—“which means someone’s already after you. Two: you stole from Vann Grosse. Three: Holt is going to lose his well-fed mind when he finds out he’s been robbed.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “We need to talk somewhere less... lamp-lit.” He led her through the rear corridor, past leaning shelves and old blueprints, stopping at a metal hatch set into the floor.

  He bent, unlatched it, and swung it open. Cool air breathed out from the dark below as he lit a hooded lantern and held it out over the hole.

  Dani raised an eyebrow. “What is this?”

  Bruno flashed a grin. “Do I look like the kind of guy that doesn’t have a chaos bunker?”