Little Thieves

The apple should have been a quiet victory, a sun-warmed globe cooling in Mira Crowley’s palm. It wasn’t even the fattest of the merchant’s stock, but the crate it came from bore the chalk slash of the tithe inspector, and that was a challenge she could not resist. Hunger was a dull ache; pride was a sharp sting. She lifted it, and the market’s din rolled over her, a perfect cover until the merchant’s eyes found the gap her small hand had left. He hauled in a breath deep enough to rattle his ribs and loosed it in a trumpet blast of outrage.

“Oi! Levy crate! Thief! Guards!”

Levy. He bellowed the word as if she’d knifed his purse, not lifted a piece of fruit. A fine for him if the count was short; a reward if he helped collar the pair of urchins warned off his stall only last frost. His shout cracked across the square, jolting gulls skyward and rousing a stray dog to bark in the sudden chaos. Heads turned. Eyes searched.

Mira didn’t run. She flowed. Her shoulders slipped past a fishmonger’s swinging cleaver, her toes light on the slick scales scattered across the stones. The air, thick with the sweet-sharp reek of crushed fruit, tar, and hot iron, only made the thrill sing brighter in her chest. A shadow detached from an awning and became Thomas, his face already a mask of disapproval as he matched her stride.

“You were seen,” he hissed, his words clipped. “Stupid odds for one bite, Mira. Drop it.”

She bit the apple instead, a defiant crunch that sent juice streaking down her wrist. “Too late.”

Behind them, the merchant’s voice, finding authority in its own echo, climbed toward panic. “Guard! In the name of Lord Aldric—stop them!”

The pound of steel-shod boots answered—a single set at first, then more, the rhythm staggering as men in mail took up the chase. Thomas snagged her sleeve, veering them left into a seam between leaning tenements where the air grew thick with the mildew of laundry that never fully dried. “Not South Row—blocked since the fire. Trust me.”

The alley pinched to darkness before spitting them out into a lane choked with rusted, empty birdcages. With practiced economy, Thomas leaped, caught a jutting window frame, and swung himself upward. He paused on the ledge, a silhouette against the sliver of sky. “Up,” he said. One word, a command, but the choice, as always, was hers.

She vaulted after him, her soles finding purchase on chipped mortar, her fingers digging into old brick. Below, a guard rounded the corner just in time to see a bare heel vanish. Chain links rattled as he slammed to a halt, his breath gusting curses into the damp air.

They rolled onto the low rooftop, lungs pulling in air that tasted of ash and tannin. The city opened before them: a broken quilt of tiles, vents, and sagging laundry lines—a map of routes they had charted with their own bruises.

Thomas pointed with his chin. “Three roofs, then the narrow stack. It’s loose.” The warning was for anyone else; for Mira, it was a dare.

She drove forward, a blur of motion. The first gap was a clean leap. The second, a familiar dance across tiles she knew by their missing corners. But on the third, her momentum carried her wide, her feet landing on a ridge that ran wrong beneath her soles. A snarl of chimney pots blocked the familiar line toward the Hollow.

Below, the guards’ curses shattered and bounced between the buildings, the sound multiplying until the weight of their pursuit pressed at her back. The next span of open air yawned wider than it should have. A cold slip of fear uncoiled in her gut. Too far.

She checked her sprint hard, her boots skidding on loose grit at the roof’s lip. Beyond lay only air smelling of dye smoke and frying fat. No landing, just a sagging awning two stories down and a ladder lashed to barrels, already shuddering as the foremost guard hauled himself up, his mail scraping against the wood.

“Thomas,” she breathed, the word less a call for help than a warning. Nowhere forward; behind was the law.

The guard’s gauntlet swept for her ankle, a metallic claw reaching through the air. But Thomas was already there, a ghost emerging from a chimney’s shadow. He stamped, hard and sharp, into the crease behind the man’s knee. The joint folded with a sickening pop. The guard’s breath left him in a wheezing burst as the ladder kicked away from the wall, spilling him backward into a pile of sacks with a meaty thud that cut his shouting short.

“Move.” One word, and then his hand—scar tissue pale over the knuckle—closed around hers, anchoring her for a bare second before releasing.

They dropped to a lower roof, a patchwork of warped shingles slick with soot, and slid down its slope to land on a drying rack strung with damp laundry. The rack groaned but held. Thomas yanked a bedraggled cloak free and tossed it over Mira’s shoulders. “Hood up. Keep low.”

A horn blast split the air, sharp and close. Mira flinched. “They’re signaling.”

“Only means they’re guessing,” Thomas said, his voice tight. He angled them toward a row of smoke-belching chimneys that marked the dyers’ quarter. The caustic fumes of lye and indigo stung their eyes, a welcome veil that would hide their silhouettes and muddle their scent. They vaulted another gap to a squat tannery shed. Below, laborers glanced up from their work, then hurriedly looked away. No one risked trouble for two urchins. A second squad of guards fanned into the lane, spears leveled, their eyes scanning the rooflines.

Thomas flattened himself against a crumbling parapet, his breathing still measured. “We can’t go straight. They’ll have the Hollow watched.” Their warren of alleys was the most obvious destination, and therefore, the most dangerous.

Mira swallowed, the apple suddenly tasteless in her mouth. “Salt Cellar instead?”

He shook his head. “Too many eyes. We take the run-off.” A grin flickered across his face—reckless, sharp, a spark to cut the fear’s edge. “Race you.”

Before she could protest, he dropped over the far edge of the roof, catching a jutting beam and swinging down to an external stair that clung to the side of an abandoned cooper’s shop. Mira followed, splinters biting her palms, and they landed in a narrow service court ankle-deep in the gray, chilling water that sluiced from the dye vats.

Shouts from above—boots hitting the beam they’d just left.

“Left,” Thomas hissed. They splashed into a dark culvert where the runoff trickled toward the river. Overhead, a grated opening spilled a blade of daylight and the muffled thud of pursuing feet. The tunnel bent, then narrowed to a stone throat stained with mineral bloom. Mira’s breath rasped in the close air. A thought needled at her—of rain-swollen nights, of water roaring through this very passage.

“Thomas… this floods when it rains.”

“It’s not raining,” he answered, though his voice was softer now, the bravado gone. He knelt by a wall where the mortar had crumbled away and pried at a fist-sized brick. It came loose with a gritty pop, revealing a hollow space beyond. He reached inside, his fingers searching, until metal clicked against bone. He drew out a rust-flecked ring holding two keys, bound by a leather thong.

“You hid them here?” Mira whispered, astonished. “Since when?”

“Since we almost got trapped last time,” he said, his words a quiet rebuke. He was always planning while she was chasing the taste of a dare. Guilt pricked at her, and she swallowed it down. “Hideout’s faster if we cut under the granary.” He shoved the brick back into place and pushed deeper into the squeezing dark.

The culvert opened abruptly into a forgotten crawlspace beneath stacked grain bins. The air was cool and dry, smelling of husk and dust. Ahead, a slatted, half-rotted hatch barred their way. Beyond it, faint lantern light pulsed. Their refuge, the cellar they called the Breach, lay just past it.

Mira pressed her ear to the boards. Above, the coarse voices of warehouse clerks argued over tallies, oblivious. Farther off, a guard’s horn sounded again, fainter now, a fading threat.

Thomas lifted the smaller key, but hesitated, the pulse ticking in his throat. He lowered it as a shadow crossed the light beyond the slats. Someone was already inside.

He shifted his weight back into the grain-dust gloom, his free hand finding Mira’s sleeve. Two squeezes: wait. She leaned in, a stubborn heat in her posture, and he put his mouth to her ear. “One,” he breathed. Unknown. Not ours. Her eyes narrowed, mischief coiling in them, ready to strike. He shook his head once, a silent command. Not yet.

The lantern light wavered again. Through the slats, a figure moved—bent, deliberate. Not a guard; the figure was too slight, and there was no clatter of plate or hiss of authority. Only the whisper of cloth. A gloved hand tested the inner side of the hatch, as if mapping the weaknesses they themselves had discovered. The gall.

Mira mouthed the word, Ours. He answered with a thin shrug. Territory meant little if you were caught asserting it.

Above, one of the clerks laughed, the sound covering the small risk they were about to take. But if the intruder bolted, that cover would be shredded. Thomas lowered himself, his cheek near a splintered board, and angled his eye to the largest gap. A hooded head. A jawline smudged with soot or shadow. Fingers that moved with the care of someone who understood locks, rather than bludgeoning them. The small key in his own hand felt slick with sweat.

He slid the key ring along the floor toward Mira and formed the shape of a three with his fingers, pointing first to himself, then to her. On three. He would distract; she would flank, using the bin crawl to get to the side vent they’d widened weeks ago. She set her jaw and nodded, the quick, fierce light in her eyes a confirmation.

He counted in his chest, the dry, husk-sweet taste of grain dust on his tongue. At two, Mira ghosted sideways, her shoulders compressing as she slipped through a seam where the boards bowed. Her breath brushed his wrist, and then she was gone, moving with the weightless silence of someone who had never known a full meal.

Three. Thomas eased the hatch forward a fraction, until the rusted hinge gave a complaining tick. The hooded head snapped toward the sound, a sharp, reflexive movement. Thomas let the gap widen, then froze, as if he’d made a mistake and regretted it. A lure.

The silence stretched, taut and heavy. The lantern flame licked at the air and settled.

Then a voice—low, roughened, but young beneath the grit. “If you’re coming through, do it before the clerk above decides to look at saints and sees my light. Or I put it out and we all sit in the dark until your courage ripens. Your call.”

Not a plea. Not frightened. Annoyed. Thomas felt Mira’s impatience like a current at his left flank. She had circled fast. Good.

He let the hatch creak wider and slid through, coiling low to the ground. The cool cellar air hugged him. The lantern hung from a nail in a support post, its hood trimmed to cast a narrow tongue of light. It was enough to show the intruder’s outline: a girl, perhaps two winters older than him, lean and wiry. Her wrists were roped with the old scars of twine burns, her cloak a patchwork of indigo and waxed canvas. A small blade rested casually on her palm, its edge kissing her skin, not yet aimed. Her boot heel covered the loose flagstone that hid their stash niche. Bold.

Mira came up silent behind her, settling into the shadow of a grain chest until her shape was just another part of the stacked geometry of the room. The intruder’s gaze flicked past Thomas once—a quick, dismissive sweep—and came back. She hadn’t seen Mira. Good.

Thomas kept his hands open, where she could read them. “Cellar’s taken,” he said, his voice flat.

“By ghosts, then?” Her voice was dry. Her eyes drifted to the side—still not seeing Mira—and then back to him. “The door was unlatched.”

It hadn’t been. He’d latched it himself last night. His skin prickled. Either she lied with the ease of breath, or someone else had forced it earlier.

“You want something,” he stated. It wasn’t a question.

“Sharp boy.” Her mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Maybe I just like the smell of grain.” She shifted her heel, a subtle pressure-testing of the flagstone, and his pulse flicked in his throat. She had mapped more than just the door in the few breaths she’d had.

Overhead, a clerk coughed and spat. The sound fell into the silence like a dropped seed.

Mira moved then, a whisper of cloak, the shadow of her blade kissing the intruder’s throat before the girl could fully register the darkness filling in behind her. Her shoulders locked. Surprise, then annoyance—she wore them both like old shirts.

“You’re in our Breach,” Mira murmured, a soft thread of triumph in her voice.

The girl’s eyes cut sideways, taking in Mira for the first time. Calculating. “Crowleys,” she said. It wasn’t a question. The name landed between them like a tossed coin.

Thomas felt the world tighten. Few respectable mouths in Stitchwall carried their name, and those that did rarely said both parts of it. “Who sent you?” he asked, his voice low.

The not-a-smile returned, thinner this time. “A message. There’s coin in it if it’s delivered. Trouble if I leave without your ears on it. Pick which you fancy.” Her free hand dipped into her cloak and came out with a folded missive. It was sealed with a disc of black wax, stamped with a sigil that made the air in the cellar feel suddenly thin: two intersecting stitches, clean and sharp.

Thomas’s breath caught. He’d only heard whispers of that mark. The Spymaster. A name spoken in shadows, a ghost who wove the city’s secrets into a web of his own. To be noticed by the Spymaster was to be either a tool or a loose thread. He wasn’t sure which was worse. A cold curiosity, sharp and dangerous, pricked at him.

Mira’s blade, steady as stone until now, wavered for a barest second. Her eyes locked on the seal, the usual fire in them banked by a flicker of something new. Not quite fear. A darker sort of interest. “Read it,” she said, her voice tight.

“Not for me,” the girl said. “The wax breaks by your hand, or I don’t get paid.” She looked at Thomas. “Decide. Those horns won’t stay faint forever.”

Horns. He had almost let the heat of the chase flush from his blood. They were distant now, but the city rearranged itself quickly when the guards tasted failure. The choice was no longer simple. Refuse, and they’d face the messenger’s promised trouble. Accept, and they’d step into the Spymaster’s web. He looked at the seal, the two stitches like a scar waiting to be made. Ignorance was a luxury they couldn't afford.

He reached out, his movements slow and deliberate, and took the missive. The wax was still warm, as if it had been sealed only moments ago. His thumb hovered at its edge. The weight of the Spymaster’s attention settled in his hand.

Above, the clerks’ argument broke off. A floorboard groaned under a heavy tread.

Thomas pocketed the letter instead of breaking the seal. “We move,” he said. Mira’s mouth flattened in displeasure, but she eased her blade back a hair. “You come with us. We’ll read it where the only ears are our own.”

The girl tilted her head, considering him. Then she hooked the lantern from its nail and snuffed the flame with a pinch of her fingers. Darkness folded in, thick with the smell of husk and sweat and the ghost of lye clinging to their clothes.

“Lead on, then, little thieves,” she whispered in the dark. Thomas heard the shape of a grin in her voice, and he did not trust it at all.