Lain was moving the moment she woke up. She wasn’t sure exactly what had pinged against her senses, but a lifetime on the streets of Lowrun left her ready to move the moment an unexpected noise reached her ears.

  In bed, Jewel made a soft noise of discontent at Lain’s sudden disappearance, but Lain paid the other girl little mind.

  She crept to the edge of the lofted balcony, looking down at her still apartment; her body humming as she focused entirely on her senses, the awareness of an Adept thief enhancing all of them beyond human limits.

  There! A soft scratching noise, a furtive whisper.

  Right at the door.

  Someone was trying to get into her apartment.

  Lain moved again, leaping effortlessly from her loft, the wooden boards of her floor flexing underneath her as she landed, displacing her weight without a sound.

  The thief stalked to the door and promptly rammed the heels of her hands into the heavy wood with a small act of will, sending quintessence into the wood even as she struck. The wood rippled like a stretch of cloth, and with a resounding crash, it suddenly splintered outward, shards of wood as long as her forearm shooting out, leaving behind a hole exactly large enough for her to leap through.

  The two potential assailants were caught completely off-guard by Lain’s sudden, violent emergence. One was on the ground, tugging weakly at a jagged splinter of wood that had speared through his guts, while the other had thrown herself to the wall across the hall, leaving her covered with small cuts.

  Lain didn’t let the girl recover. Her motion never stopped as she sprang through the door, taking in the sight of the familiar duo as she sprang forward. Lain’s hand slammed into the girl’s sternum in an open-palm strike, knocking the breath out of her and sending her crashing back against the wooden wall. Immediately, boards flexed and moved at Lain’s urging, binding her arms and legs in place.

  “Alice,” Lain greeted the girl through clenched teeth. “Albus.” She added the last to the groaning boy on the floor. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”

  The brother and sister were urchins, street kids that had taken their first fledgling steps to becoming freehands as they practiced their pickpocketing and shoplifting. They were still kids, though, barely sixteen years old and only possessed of one gift each. Not even Novices.

  “L-Lain!” Alice said, eyes wide. Her face was twisted in obvious discomfort, her lithe body twisting in an obvious effort to adjust her weight and find a weakness in Lain’s bindings.

  Lain flexed her fingers and the bindings tightened. “I know who I am, Alice. My question is what two thieves think they’re doing breaking into my apartment.”

  “W-we were just trying to get the bounty!” Alice gasped, her entire body buckling to one side to keep pressure off of her left shoulder, which was increasingly getting twisted.

  Lain did nothing to ease the discomfort. “A bounty, huh. What bounty?”

  “Shut up, Alice!” Albus snarled.

  Lain made a sharp gesture towards the boy, and the jagged splinter in his guts wiggled around a little bit, drawing another gasp of pain from him and silencing any further protests. It probably wouldn’t kill him, unless it had ruptured anything vital, but it would certainly incapacitate him with pain.

  “What bounty, Alice?” Lain asked again, her voice calm.

  “I-I don’t know who posted it!” Alice said. “But word is, there’s two hundred mantles in it for anyone who delivers either of you two!”

  Lain swallowed, and tried to keep the trepidation those words inspired from showing on her face. “So. What was your plan, exactly? Break into my apartment and… What? Ask nicely to take Jewel with you?”

  “W-we went by this alchemist,” Alice stammered out. “He sold us a sleeping potion!”

  Lain’s face went flat, her growing anxiety briefly smothered by true anger once again. “You were going to drug and sell us?”

  Alice’s eyes went wide.

  #

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  “Jewel,” Lain said tersely, “you need to get up.”

  She shook her partner’s shoulder brusquely, and Jewel reluctantly rolled over, her grouchiness vanishing in an instant when she saw Lain’s face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We need to go,” Lain said simply. “Get up, get dressed, and get anything you might need. We might not be back for a while.”

  “What? Lain, what’s going on?”

  “No time,” Lain said. “I’ll explain on the way. We just need to get moving, now.”

  Apparently the panic in Lain’s tone was enough to impress the urgency of the situation onto Jewel, because she finally got out of bed, moving quickly to her hanging dresses.

  While Jewel got dressed, Lain made her way to her accessory box. She had little need for jewelry, but that didn’t stop her from preparing for a worst-case scenario. Small pouches of coins–a mix of scepters and mantles–she split and tucked into her breeches, strapped against her ribs, and hid in the false bottoms of her shoes.

  She replaced the simple tie she usually used to hold back her hair with a chunky wooden barette, put a polished wooden ring on each of her fingers, then completed the look with a bracer she had to manipulate to wrap around her wrist while an intricately carved wooden amulet, covered in gold foil, went around a cord on her neck.

  While the accessories looked simple and cheap, they represented a small arsenal in Lain’s hands, and she felt a little better once they were on.

  In the meantime, Jewel had finished getting dressed in one the second hand, dark purple work dresses Lain had bought for her. She threw the tools of her trade–two ink vials, a case of quills, and two portfolios–into a satchel that she tossed over her shoulder, and nodded to Lain.

  “Ready,” she said quietly, the first words either of them had spoken since Jewel got out of bed.

  Lain blew out a long breath, and looked around her loft thoughtfully.

  It was her sanctuary, her island of peace in a city all-too-often defined by chaos. She had always known that impression was an illusion, but it still hurt her to leave the place behind. Unfortunately, if even a pair as low-level as Alice and Albus knew about the place, it was all too likely that others did too, and the next bounty hunters to show up wouldn’t be as incompetent as the two teenagers.

  “Okay,” Lain said, “let’s go.”

  The two made for the front door, where Jewel paused.

  “Uhm… Lain. What happened to the door?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Uh-huh. And the two passed-out teenagers?”

  “They may be related.”

  Jewel paused, looking at the two. They were clearly insensate, deeply unconscious, one bleeding on the floor, the other bound to the wall in an awkward way that had obviously dislocated her shoulder.

  “Are they going to be okay?” Jewel asked.

  Lain shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care. If it helps, it was their own sleeping potion I used on them.”

  #

  “This bounty,” Jewel asked, after Lain had explained her confrontation with the two urchins. “Kole?”

  “It has to be,” Lain said. “Your father’s enforcer failed a few nights ago, so Kole must’ve convinced Brooker that she had a better shot at resolving things.”

  “Does she?”

  “Kole knows Lowrun,” Lain said grimly. “A bounty will turn more people against us than any Gold Council order, and it’ll be rogues who know what they’re doing, rather than wardens and guards that half of Lowrun will distrust on instinct.”

  Lain stopped, lifting a hand. Jewel obeyed the silent instruction, sliding behind Lain and pressing herself against a wall. The two were creeping through the streets of a pre-dawn Lowrun, yet Lain still insisted on sticking to alleyways, stopping any time they saw any traffic.

  The two women waited in silence, crouching in the heavy shadows of the alley, until a wagon passed. Only once it was out of sight did Lain lower her hand and lead Jewel across the street.

  “Our only hope is that Alice heard the amount wrong. That it got inflated by rumor. Otherwise…”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “Four hundred mantles for the both of us. That’s a big haul, the kind that the bigger factions are lucky to pull over the course of months. Some of the freehands are rich enough that they won’t be swayed by that–but it’s still the kind of gold that can get people to make stupid choices.”

  Jewel swallowed, and Lain noticed her walk a little faster, staying in her shadow.

  “What are we going to do?”

  Lain stayed silent for a long moment, not wanting to tell Jewel the truth but not having any better answer for her. Finally, she gave up.

  “I don’t know.”

  “O-oh.” Jewel’s voice trembled, and Lain quickly turned, wrapping her arms around the taller, more slender girl. She held Jewel close for a long moment, releasing her only enough for them to bring their lips together in a brief, reassuring kiss.

  “But we’ll figure it out,” Lain promised. “First things first–we need information."