Swallow's Nest

The dark was a cloak, but not a comforting one. Thomas led them out of the Breach not by sight, but by the memory of a thousand similar flights, his hand tracing the damp, crumbling brick of the culvert. Behind him, two sets of footsteps, unnervingly light. Mira’s, he knew the sound of, a soft-soled shuffle that was almost silence. The other was new. A whisper of leather on stone that seemed to mock the darkness, confident and unhurried. He did not like the grin he'd heard in her voice. It was the sound of a trap already sprung.

They emerged from the culvert into the Dyers' Run, a narrow canyon of brick slick with chemical runoff. The air, sharp with the fumes of indigo and lye, was a physical thing, stinging their eyes and catching in their throats. It was a good place to lose a tail; the stench clung for hours, a caustic perfume that no guard dog would willingly follow. The messenger didn't flinch. She moved through the haze, her cloak pulled tight, a shadow against the steaming vats that coughed plumes of colored vapor into the twilight.

From the Run, a rusted iron ladder took them upward. The rooftops were a different world. Here, under a sky bruised with the first hints of evening, the city became their board. Slate tiles, still warm from the day's sun, gave way to treacherous patches of moss and loose gravel. They moved in a low crouch, a dance of balance and nerve. Mira, ever the show-off, took a line that skirted a crumbling gargoyle, her silhouette a fleeting dare against the darkening sky. Thomas stuck to the shadows, his path less spectacular but more certain.

The messenger followed, a third, silent player in their game. She didn't mimic Mira's flair or Thomas's caution. Her path was a straight, brutal line, taking each gap with an unnerving economy of motion. She leaped with a wiry grace that spoke of a life spent just as high and hungry as their own, landing with a soft thud of leather on stone that was barely audible over the wind. She was no stranger to the city's upper pathways. This wasn't reassurance. It was a warning. At one point, as Thomas paused to gauge the next leap, she drew level with him. "Heard you Crowleys were quick," she murmured, her voice a low rasp. "Didn't hear you were quiet." Her gaze flicked to Mira, who was now perched on a chimney pot, a grin flashing in the gloom. The comment hung in the air, a subtle barb. A test.

Their destination was a ghost on the skyline, a splinter of stone against the fading light: the Old Spire. Once a watchtower for a garrison long since rotted away by politics and plague, it was now just a perch for crows and other, less feathered things. The climb was a vertical puzzle of missing stones and rusted iron rungs. Thomas went first, testing each hold, the weight of the Spymaster's missive a cold pressure against his ribs. Mira followed, and last, the girl, her face a pale smudge in the gloom below, watching them both.

The Swallow's Nest was a single, circular room at the tower's peak, open to the wind on one side where the wall had crumbled away. A ragged canvas sheet, patched and re-patched, served as a curtain against the worst of the gales. But the view... the view was a king's ransom. From here, Stitchwall was a map laid bare: the silver thread of the river, the fat purses of the merchant manors, the tangled knots of the slums, and the straight, sharp lines of the guard patrols moving through the streets below. It was a thief's throne, a place of power born from being above it all. Here, finally, they could read the letter. Here, the only ears were their own.

Thomas drew the folded parchment from his tunic. The black wax of the seal was cold to the touch. Pressed into it were the two intersecting stitches he now recognized—the Spymaster's sharp, clean mark. He broke it with a thumbnail, the crackle of it loud in the sudden quiet of the spire. The wind whipped around them, tugging at the corners of the page as he unfolded it.

The script inside was stark and angular, written in a dark, iron-gall ink. No pleasantries. No preamble.

Crowley Twins,

The old Tanners' Yard. Midnight, third bell.Come alone.

Don't be late.

That was it. A summons, sharp and cold as a shiv in the ribs. Thomas read it twice, the words feeling like stones in his gut. The Tanners' Yard was a maze of rotting vats and abandoned warehouses on the river's edge, a place where screams would be swallowed by the stench and the lapping water. A perfect place for an ambush.

"No," he said, the word flat. He refolded the parchment, the crisp edges suddenly feeling like a cage. "We burn it. Forget we ever saw it."

"And do what?" Mira snatched the letter from his hand, her eyes scanning the lines, bright with a dangerous spark that he knew all too well. "Go back to snatching bread from bakers' carts? This is a chance, Tom. A real one."

"It's a trap, Mira." His voice was low, urgent. "Best case, it's a test to see if we're stupid enough to walk into it. Worst case..." He didn't need to finish. They'd seen the results of worst cases in the gutters of the Breach.

The messenger, who had been watching them with the detached patience of a hawk, finally spoke. Her voice was still a rasp, but it carried an edge of finality that cut through the wind. "He doesn't like to be kept waiting." She didn't raise her voice. She didn't have to. "You think you're the first rats he's called out of the walls? Ignoring the summons is an answer in itself. And he won't like it."

Mira’s chin lifted, a stubborn set to her jaw. "We're going."

"We are not," Thomas countered, his hand instinctively going to the hilt of the knife tucked in his belt. "We know nothing about this Spymaster, except that he sends shadows to do his bidding and summons people to death traps."

"We know he's powerful," Mira shot back, her gaze flicking from Thomas to the messenger and back again. "Powerful enough to find us. Powerful enough to offer... more. Isn't that what we've always wanted? More than this?" She gestured with the letter to the sprawling, indifferent city below them. "I'd rather walk into a trap I can see than stay in the one we were born in."

The messenger gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod. Her work was done. The choice was theirs, but it was no choice at all. The Spymaster's hook was in. Now, all he had to do was wait for them to pull the line taut.

The girl lingered a heartbeat longer, as if measuring how much spine sat between the twins, then turned for the lip of the broken wall. She did not descend the way they'd come. She dropped, caught a jut of stone below—fingers, toes, gone. A swallow vanishing into the dusk. No farewell, no further warning. Professional.

Wind worried the canvas, setting a low drumbeat in the rafters that made the silence between them feel counted. Thomas watched the point where the messenger had disappeared until the ache in his shoulders reminded him he was still braced, still waiting for a shout, the scrape of steel on stone. Nothing. Only the city exhaling smoke and steam beneath them.

Mira rolled the parchment between her palms, not looking at him now. "We can scout it first," she said, voice softer. No flare. Strategy when she wanted something badly enough. "Yard like that has more holes than vats by now. We pick ours. We go early, map lines of sight, smell for fresh boots, ash piles, guard rotas."

He almost smiled at the way she stacked those considerations, half for him, half to prove she wasn't leaping blind. Almost. "If we go early we risk being seen staking it out," he said. "If it's watched, we show our faces twice."

"Masks, then." She jerked her chin toward the small crate near the wall where their hoard of salvage lived: bent nails sorted by usefulness, a coil of tarred rope, two waxed cloth wraps, a trio of cut-down scarves stained with soot. Their little arsenal of maybes.

Thomas paced the arc of the open side, eyes tracking the slow pulse of patrol lanterns below. Three together. Gap. Two. A longer gap near the riverside where the tannery quarter had hollowed out. The guards hated the stink same as everyone else. "We should vanish," he muttered. Habit. Safety murmured like prayer. "Let it all pass by."

Mira's boot scuffed stone behind him. "We spent years vanishing. Where did that get us? Cold and hungry on a good night. Rust take that. I'm tired of waiting for winter to pick which of us it wants first." The last words came raw, unvarnished. Earnest heart, exposed for a beat before she looked away, shoulders tightening as if she could yank the moment back out of the air.

He leaned both palms on the parapet, slate chill biting skin. Below, a barge pole knocked hollowly against a mooring. The sound carried up, thin and lonely. Hunger, cold, the slow grind of the Breach—her list was not wrong. He tasted lye still on the back of his tongue from the Run. Opportunity smelled no better than any other industrial rot tonight, but it was still different. A vector, not a static wall.

"We don't walk in at midnight through the front," he said at last. "We come from the river side. Current'll be low this quarter; the mud flats will show near the sluice. If we go light, we can cross the muck, take the collapsed fence line, get eyes on the yard before the bell. If there are watchers nested, we see them first." He let the plan build only as far as he could guarantee. Past that was mist and maybe.

Mira's answering grin was quick, feral, but it didn't linger long enough to turn into crowing. She understood the fragility of the shift. "We prep, then. Eat. Stitch any tears. And if we don't go?" A last test, maybe of herself.

He exhaled through his nose. The answer had already rooted. "If we don't go, he sends another runner. Maybe not one that smiles. Maybe not by letter."

They set to the familiar small labors of readiness. Mira dug in the crate, producing a stub of hard cheese, a heel of dark bread wrapped in burlap, two dried pear slices gone tough as leather. Shared without talk. Thomas uncoiled the rope, running fingers along each splice, feeling for rot—found a frayed section near the midpoint and worked a tight new whipping around it with waxed thread. Mira laid out the scarves, choosing one mottled enough with soot to break her outline even in poor light.

Night gathered in layers: first the purple bruise deepened, then the lantern points below sharpened, then the damp cold crept up through the stone into their calves. Above, a thinning cloud let a wedge of moon blade across the river, catching slack ripples where refuse bobbed. Far off, a kiln belched a dull orange glow that smeared against the low mist rising from tannery ponds.

"You ever think about what more even looks like?" Mira asked, voice barely above the wind. Not teasing. A real question.

He kept his attention on the knot he was tying—double bowline around a loop—because looking at her would make the answer harder to shape. "Dry. Warm. Not owing anyone who can bleed you if you're late. Choosing when to run instead of running because a bigger fist twitched." A beat. "And a roof that doesn't try to leave when the wind kicks." He flicked eyes to the rattling canvas, an attempt at slant humor to ease the earnestness back under armor.

She huffed, a small laugh, then leaned back against the surviving half-wall, eyes closed to feel the wind. "I'll take choosing, then. Tonight buys us a piece of that. Or kills us quick. Either way, different."

He didn't argue because the calculus, ugly as it was, made sense, and because arguing would not change the pull in her. In him, if he dug honest enough.

When they finished, they banked their small brazier—the Nest's one luxury—tamping ash over the embers until only a faint red seam showed. No point advertising occupancy. Thomas packed the letter deep in the crack of a loose stone where only he knew to pry. Insurance. If they didn't return and someone else found the Nest, the message would rot before a random hand uncovered it.

"Third bell minus a quarter we move," he said. "Until then—eyes. Mark any new lights. Listen."

They settled into their watch: Mira prone near the open edge, chin on folded arms, tracing invisible lines across rooftops with a forefinger; Thomas in a crouch, back against cold stone, counting breaths between patrol lanterns, letting the rhythm of the city soak into a pattern he could use later. Beneath the grit and the taut readiness, a thin, unwelcome thread of anticipation wound through his gut.

Somewhere below, a distant bell tolled once, testing its own voice before the formal marks of the hour. Sound climbed the Old Spire like a ladder.

There was still time to change his mind. The thought came and went like a swallow's shadow—fast, flickering, gone.

They would go.