Zetun at dusk was a city of contradictions.

  We walked through the Copper Quarter, where the last daylight painted everything in shades of amber and rust, and I watched Nyssara take it all in with the careful attention of someone who is cataloging escape routes. The streets here were narrow and winding, built long before anyone really thought about planning them properly, and they twisted back on themselves like the coils of a sleeping snake. Merchants were closing their stalls for the evening, pulling bright fabrics over tables piled with spices, brass trinkets, and mechanical curiosities that clicked and whirred as we passed them.

  "I forget how alive this part of the city feels," she said. "The Upper Terraces are all marble and silence. Down here it actually smells like people live."

  "That's one way to describe the smell."

  She laughed; a real one this time, not the sharp, brittle thing from the catacombs. "You know what I mean. There is energy here. Movement."

  She was not wrong. A boy darted past us, carrying a cage full of songbirds, their feathers shimmering between blue and gold. Two women argued loudly over the price of a clockwork music box, while a crowd gathered to watch, placing quiet bets on who would win it. Somewhere above us, suspended between buildings on cables humming with mana current, a tram car rattled past, carrying workers back home from the refineries.

  Zetun had been built in layers, each generation stacking their lives on top of the ones before. The foundations were old sandstone from an empire that crumbled centuries ago. The middle levels were brass and copper and the bleeding edge of magitech, from the time when the refineries first opened and money flowed like water. And at the very top, where the air was clean and the views stretched all the way to the desert horizon, the nobles built their palaces out of materials most people in the Sump would never even see once in their life.

  We were somewhere in between now. Not quite respectable, but also not quite dangerous. The kind of neighborhood where you could get a decent meal, without worrying too much about getting a knife in your back for dessert. Most days.

  "There," I said, pointing at a doorway marked with a faded sign showing a bowl and steam. "Food is not terrible. Owner does not ask questions."

  "High praise."

  "I'm a man of standards."

  The place was called The Bent Spoon, though nobody called it that for years already. Everyone just called it Mira’s, after the old woman who ran the kitchen, and had been running it since before I was born. She looked up when we came in, took one look at my face, and started preparing two bowls without asking us what we wanted.

  "You're known here," Nyssara observed, as we found a table in the corner, with sight lines to both exits.

  "I used to run errands in this part of the city. Mira fed me when I could not afford to feed myself."

  "Errands?"

  "Messages, mostly. Sometimes packages. The arena let me out during the day, as long as I came back at night and kept winning." I settled into my chair and felt something in my shoulders unknot, for the first time in days. "The Master figured out early, that I was more valuable as a courier than as a corpse. I knew the streets, I was fast, and nobody really paid attention to a skinny kid with sand in his hair."

  "So you weren't locked up the whole time."

  "That would have been easier. Locked up, you only have to survive the fights. The way they did it..." I paused, as Mira brought over two bowls of something that smelled like lamb, spices, and memories I would rather not examine too closely. "The way they did it, I had to survive everything else too."

  Nyssara was quiet for a moment, watching me with those grey eyes that saw more than I wanted them to see. Then she picked up her spoon and started eating, giving me the space to continue. Or not, if I chose so.

  I chose to continue. Something about her made it easier to talk than it should be.

  "I ran messages for half the factions in the Sump. The gangs, the merchants, the fixers that connected one to the other. There is a man named Kayael who runs the dockyards; I used to carry payments between him and the arena, when they wanted bets to disappear from the official books. He is brutal and he is smart, and he does not forget when someone does him a favor."

  "Useful contact."

  "Maybe. If we need muscle, he has it. But Kay does not work for free, and his prices tend to be complicated."

  "Complicated how?"

  "He does not want money. He wants influence. Favors. The kind of currency that needs no numbers." I took a bite of the stew and let the warmth spread through my chest. Real food. Real flavor. The curse had not stolen this yet, though I knew it was only a question of time. "What I am saying is, I know this city. Every street, every shortcut, every back door that nobody is supposed to know about. That's what kept me valuable to the Master for eleven years."

  "And now you're using that knowledge to rob the most heavily guarded building in the empire."

  "Seemed like a waste not to."

  She almost smiled at that. Almost.

  We ate in a comfortable silence for some minutes, the sounds of the restaurant washing over us; other conversations, the clink of spoons against bowls, Mira humming something tuneless in the kitchen. It felt normal, in a way my life had not felt for a very long time.

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  "Tell me about the conspiracy," I said eventually. "The real version, not the summary you gave me in the catacombs."

  Nyssara set down her spoon and leaned back in her chair. "What do you know about the Grey Hand?"

  "It is a secret society. Old money, old magic, old grudges. They have been pulling strings in the empire for centuries, though nobody can really prove it."

  "That's the public story. The truth is worse." She traced a pattern on the table with her finger; an old habit, I was starting to notice, something she did when organizing her thoughts. "The Grey Hand is not just a society. It is a death cult, built around the Portal that the First Emperor sealed three hundred years ago."

  "The Portal?"

  "It is under the palace. And it nearly destroyed everything during the Blood Pact War." Her voice was steady, but I could hear the weight under it. "They believe that what is on the other side is not a threat; it is the next step of evolution. That opening the Portal will bring some kind of purification and make everyone better and richer."

  "That's insanity."

  "That's faith. Different thing, similar outcome." She picked up her spoon again, stirring her stew without really eating. "I have been tracking them for two years. Following money, following bodies, following whispers that did not quite make sense, until you put them together. And everything points to the coronation."

  "They will try to open the Portal during the coronation?"

  "Or use it as cover for something else. I am not sure yet." She frowned at her bowl. "What I do know is, there are at least three people in positions of power who are connected to the Grey Hand. Lord Valric Thenn, who advises the Duchess. Abt Mordris, who runs the Temple of Three. And Commander Selyse, who controls the palace guard."

  "That's a problem."

  "That's an understatement." She finally took another bite, chewing slowly before continuing. "Valric is the money. He has been funneling resources to the Grey Hand for decades, hiding the transactions in legitimate trade. Mordris is the ideology; he is the one who keeps the faithful believing that the Portal is a door to paradise, rather than a mouth to hell. But Selyse..."

  Something changed in her voice when she said the name. Something personal.

  "Selyse is the teeth," she said. "She was Inquisition, back when I was still active. One of the best hunters they ever produced. Ruthless, efficient, completely without mercy. She killed more pact-bearers than anyone else in her generation, and she did it with a smile on her face."

  "You knew her."

  "I trained with her. For three years, before she transferred to the palace guard." Nyssara's jaw tightened. "We were not friends, exactly, but I respected her. I thought she believed in what we were doing; protecting people, hunting monsters, keeping the empire safe from things that wanted to tear it apart."

  "What changed?"

  "She did. Or maybe she was always what she became, and I just did not see it." She pushed her bowl away, appetite apparently gone. "The last time I saw her, she was overseeing an execution. Twelve people, all accused of demon worship, all burned alive in the public square. Most of them were innocent. I had evidence that proved it. She burned them anyway."

  "But why?"

  "Because she said the accusation was enough. Because she said doubt was weakness, and mercy was a luxury the empire could not afford." Nyssara's hands clenched into fists on the table. "That was when I left the Inquisition. That was when I started asking questions about who was really giving orders, and what they actually wanted." I watched her for a moment, this woman who had killed dozens of people like me, and was now sitting across the table sharing her story. That contradiction was something I was still trying to understand properly.

  "If Selyse is guarding the palace," I said slowly, "then getting to the Tear becomes much more complicated."

  "If Selyse is guarding the palace, getting to the Tear might be impossible." She met my eyes. "She knows me. She knows how I think, how I move, what tricks I am likely to try. And she has been training the palace guard for five years now. They will be ready for anything conventional."

  "Good thing we are not planning anything conventional."

  "That is what worries me."

  I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the table. "You are suggesting we go in quiet. Minimal footprint. Avoid detection entirely."

  "That is the smart play."

  "The smart play assumes we can avoid detection. With Selyse in charge of security, with my eyes going black every time I use Blood-Sense, with you still recovering from a curse that almost killed you..." I shook my head. "We cannot out-sneak them. We are not good enough."

  "Then what do you suggest?"

  "We go loud instead."

  She stared at me. "You want to make noise during a heist of the most valuable artifact in the empire."

  "I want to make so much noise, that nobody is looking in the right direction. A distraction. Something big enough to pull the guards away from the Tear, long enough for us to grab it and disappear."

  "That's insane."

  "That's practical. Stealth fails the moment something goes wrong. Chaos gives us options."

  "Chaos gives us a hundred ways to die."

  "Stealth gives us one surefire way to die; when Selyse catches us in a corridor with nowhere to run." I held her gaze. "I know this city. I know how it moves, how it panics, where the pressure points are. Give me a big enough distraction, and I can get us in and out before anyone realizes what is happening."

  "And where exactly are you planning to get this big enough distraction?"

  "Kay."

  She was quiet for a long moment, turning the idea over in her head. I could almost see the calculations happening behind her eyes; risk versus reward, trust versus paranoia, the weight of doing something stupid versus the weight of doing nothing.

  "You trust him?" she asked finally.

  "I trust that he hates the Inquisition, and everyone connected to it. I trust that he wants influence in whatever comes next. And I trust that he is smart enough to recognize a good opportunity when he sees one."

  "That's not the same as trusting him."

  "No. But it is close enough, for our purposes."

  She picked up her spoon again, took another bite, chewed slowly. Processing.

  "If we do this your way," she said, "and it goes wrong, we will not just fail. We will bring the entire Inquisition down on our heads. Selyse will hunt us to the ends of the empire."

  "If we do this your way and it goes wrong, we die in a palace corridor, and nobody ever knows what happened."

  "At least we would die quietly."

  "I have never done anything quietly in my life."

  That surprised a laugh out of her; a real one, warm and unexpected. "No, I do not suppose you have."