I wait until daybreak. This is something Gaxna taught me: merchants and guards expect thefts at night, so they increase numbers and stay vigilant. When the sun rises, they think the danger has passed, and guards who’ve been up all night relax and maybe take a few minutes to rest their eyes.

  As the rhythmic scrape of footsteps above me recedes, I scuttle up the last few feet of sandstone wall, slip across the catwalk, and drop to the far side.

  There are other advantages to daybreak too: while it seems light after the darkness, details are still hard to see, and the angle of the sun turns everything into silhouettes. The tower grounds are full of them—the lumpy forms of manicured bushes, the reaching fronds of date trees, and the still-life figures of marble statues. Perfect places to hide—for me or the guards.

  I did my research on vitality. It will make the guards stronger and faster, but if I can surprise the first one, I should be able to take his or her coins and use their power to my advantage. Would Gaxna approve? No, probably not. But she was never the fighter on our team, and life is already dangerous enough with overseers looking for me. It’s time to take some chances.

  Still, I stretch out my senses in the manicured courtyard, listening for disturbances in the patter of the fountains, or the gentle rustle of leaves in the ocean breeze. The air smells of desert flowers and stale incense. I keep a hand to the worked sandstone wall to feel for anything my other senses miss. I wish to Uje the ground was moist, or the air damp, anything to give my watersight a chance to read the other minds here, but Dahran is as dry as Serei is wet.

  No alarms sound. I run for the Tower of Many Names, its bulk massive and alien in the red light of dawn. Four steel pillars climb from separate corners of the courtyard to the cupola high above, with a thick vertical shaft running down the middle. That’s the lift, a route I might attempt if I was in Serei, but I am a foreigner here, in appearance as well as speech, and the disguises Gaxna taught me would do little good. I aim for the nearest support pillar instead—as thick as a wine barrel and built entirely of polished steel, its angle and the lack of handholds would make it difficult to climb under normal conditions. But the Daraa—fearful of assassins rather than thieves, I am told—have lined the bottom third of each with razor-sharp glass.

  I can just imagine Gaxna smirking. Handholds, she’d say. Uje, I wish she was here now. We were a team for all the big heists. I can do this, but I’d do it better with her here.

  I wait until a third guard passes, then scramble up. My hands are awkward, encumbered in three layers of leather gloves, but my booted feet find good purchase, propelling me rapidly up the pillar. I arch my back as I go—even a minor cut now would slow me down too much.

  I scoot past the eye level of the guards on the tower, then slow to take more care as a shard rips through my sleeve. My boots and gloves are beginning to shred by the time I clear the broken glass. I pause here, courtyard already looking like a sculptor’s miniature below, and pull them off. The boots I tie to the pillar—I won’t need them again, and I can’t risk someone seeing them fall—but the gloves I stuff into the pack strapped to my back, retying it awkwardly while I cling to the metal tube.

  Above me stretches another hundred paces of bare steel pillar before the top, angling slightly more vertical as it climbs. This is the stretch I am most worried about. Finding the chronicles inside the massive cupola will be hard, and the vital guards will be a challenge, but make a slip here and the fall’s guaranteed to cripple me. By the time I get to the top, it will kill me.

  I take a minute to steady my breath, then pull the other set of gloves from my pouch, these thin and dipped in rubber. I could get better ones in Serei, but I was happy to find this quality in a new city. I tie a pair of rubber-coated straps to my bare feet and start climbing.

  I move fast. The sun will heat this metal to blazing hot by mid-morning, and even without the heat, the rubber will start to pull off.

  I fall into a rhythm—grip with my legs, reach with my arms, jerk my body up, then grip again, reach again, jerk again. My arms burn, but I’ve kept in shape on the Pearler ship, swabbing decks, hauling cargo, and clambering up and down the rigging. My heart races, but it’s more with the knowledge that I am back on track, that I have a plan again, that I’m finally doing something. I may even have an ally here, if I can reach an agreement with Hiana.

  A foot slips and my heart leaps into my throat. My legs swing out over empty space and I lock my arms in a death grip around the pillar until I can swing my feet back and get a grip again.

  Uje. I am high enough to die, now. Is it strange that my first thought was Gaxna dying in prison, rather than me dying down there in the courtyard? Heart still pounding, I gauge the distance to the top. More than halfway there, but still too far to throw my rope.

  I think about just climbing down for a second. Taking Hiana’s offer to get the chronicles, even if it puts me in debt to her. Better to survive than die up here trying to do it my way. Then the view catches my eye, past the buildings of Dahran to the ocean that sits beyond the island’s steep ridges. Serei lies that way. Serei and Gaxna, who even now is a prisoner to the man who killed my father.

  “No,” I mutter under my breath. “Focus, Aletheia. You can do this.”

  I make it to the bottom of the cupola before the sun is more than a few fingers above the horizon, and cling there while I uncoil the rope from my waist. The tower’s architecture is unreal, support pillar meeting the round swell of the cupola with barely a seam. It’s amazing they even bother with the guards and glass down below—there are not many people who could make it this high, let alone try getting up the underside of the round cupola. I certainly wouldn’t have a year ago.

  Then I met Gaxna. Who would likely already be up there and tucking the chronicles in her culottes by now. Show-off.

  I let go of the pillar with one arm, intentionally not looking at the fall, and uncoil the rope from my waist. It’s no thief’s rope, but it’s thin and light and will carry my weight. I play it out, then sling it up and around, seeking purchase on one of the screened windows above.

  It clangs off the steel and falls back down, weight of the hook on the end trying to tug me off my perch. This is the most dangerous part of the job—if anyone hears that clang and decides it’s more than an unlucky bird banging into the tower, I’m dead.

  The next throw catches and my stomach unclenches. I chose this spot carefully—not only because the support pillar comes down close to the wall below, but because it ends up here below a few likely windows.

  I tug on it a few times, then take a deep breath. This is the second-most dangerous part of the plan: trusting my weight to a grip I can’t see. I release the pillar slowly, leaning more and more of my mass into the rope.

  It holds. I clamber up, and the curve of the cupola swings me away from the pillar into thin air. Anxiety claws at me and I ice it, stack it next to the massive pile I’ve already made this morning, then return to my steady breathing. The breath is my anchor, the ocean my blood.

  The hook has torn a convenient rent in the window’s delicate metalwork screen at the top. I push through it, and breathe a sigh of relief to stand on solid ground again. I’m in what appears to be a smoking lounge, a collection of waterpipes scattered amidst cushions and low tables. Shelves of glass bottles line the walls, and the air is fragrant with the scent of clove and rose and all kinds of herbs.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  This is how you spend your days, apparently, if you are so rich you can’t die. Smoking cloveleaf at the top of ancient towers.

  I reset the hook against the sill, then pool the remaining rope on the floor, ready to throw out. This was another of Gaxna’s first rules of thievery: always plan your exits.

  Satisfied, I creep to the door and focus on my senses. I hear nothing, but I smell fresh flatbread and over-brewed tea. Someone is awake then, if only the servants, and despite the tower’s natural defenses, I don’t doubt there are guards up here too. Vital guards.

  I push the door open, thanking Uje for quiet hinges. A hallway curves away in both directions, following the shape of the cupola. This is where Hiana’s information ran out: while she knew the general layout of the rooms here, she had no idea where the chronicles would be. But she’s not my only source of information.

  I stalk out on my toes, slipping to the interior side of the hallway, ornately carved teak latticework in place of a wall. Beyond it is a circular sandy courtyard spotted with day beds and manicured palms. Above it the cupola is open to the sky, another twenty paces overhead.

  I scan the space as though I expect to see the chronicles framed on a pillar in the middle, then kick myself, trying not to imagine what Gaxna would say. If the chronicles are here, and the owners went to the trouble of stealing them from Hiana, they will not be so obvious.

  Besides, I have more immediate concerns. The kind Gaxna wouldn’t be good at.

  I peer through the latticework to the far side of the courtyard, where the angle allows me to see the hallway there. Two guards stand outside what are likely bedrooms, or wherever the amaranth and his mistress are taking breakfast. Two guards, but they are far enough away that if I’m lucky…

  I try the nearest doors: a bath, a bedroom, a prayer hall. No chronicles, and the nearer guard will be able to see me if I try any more doors. Nothing for it, then. Time to see what vitality can really do.

  I dash around the curve with arms extended for Ice Fingers Rising. The man’s head nods, half-asleep. I deliver the blow perfectly, ready to catch him so he doesn’t crash to the ground.

  Only he doesn’t fall—a blow that is designed to knock anyone unconscious only sways him on his feet. Vitality. Bracers of coins around his neck shimmer with power.

  I follow up with Diver’s Bind, pressing my fingers to the three points in his face. Guaranteed to knock anyone out, but more time-consuming than Ice Fingers. And in that muddled moment where he should already be dead to the world, he lands a blow to my sternum hard enough to sink me to my knees, gasping.

  Okay, he’s strong. Impossibly strong. But strength is only a tool, as Urte used to say, not a win condition. I catch my breath, duck a second blow, and wrap legs around him in Kraken’s Kiss. I jam my fingers back into Diver’s Bind, squeezing with all my might to keep his arms trapped. I hold him, despite his strength, but he cries out, alerting the other guards.

  I mutter a prayer to Uje that the bind works before they get here. As his struggles weaken, I make use of our skin contact to read his thoughts, confirming there’s only one other guard up here. Good. I can manage that.

  Now for the chronicles.

  His knees buckle and I ride him down, pushing thoughts of the Immersion Chronicles and my father’s handwriting into him, trying to spur memories of the book.

  The other guard pounds around the bend, but before I leap off I read a vague memory of a cackling man, and see a curving room full of books. A library. I need to find a library.

  I rip his coins off and run back the way I came. If the second guard has the strength of the first, I’m going to need them to make up for the loss of surprise.

  I don’t feel any different with the coins on, but who knows how this city’s magic works. Fortunately, it’s not the only advantage I have over him. I duck into the bath and come out with a pail of water, then sling it at the guard as he rounds the bend.

  It surprises him enough to slow, and I dart in with Thunder Shakes the Rooftop, pushing my mind into the running water as I do. I read his thoughts just before his sword flickers out. It’s almost too fast to see, but the mind is always faster. I have time to fall right, then jerk left as I read his next move through the wetness of the floor.

  I roll up and out of the pool of spreading water. Either the coins aren’t working, or this guard is more vital than the last. He rushes in and I sidestep back onto the wet floor. His sword rips through a section of the fine wood lattice, and I find his weakness: he’s a swordsman.

  I grab the bucket and back up, twisting as though to sling it at him. He grins and darts forward, likely reading me as desperate. Instead, I shove the bucket between me and his sword. His chop rams it out of my hands, burying the wide-bladed weapon deep in the grain of the wood.

  Every advantage breeds weakness, trainer Urte used to say. Being smaller and less strong my whole life, I’ve learned to look for those weaknesses. This man’s is his reliance on the sword—his mind is raw panic as he tries to free it from the wet wood. I attack in Sleeting Rain stance, all jabs and chops and strikes for sensitive areas. His speed and strength hold me off for a few blows, but eventually I land a punishing kick to his left ear, then put him out of his misery with Diver’s Bind.

  I get up and take a deep breath, looping his necklaces over the ones I have. I’m not out of trouble yet—the water tells me it took him so long to come because he called for backup, which will be coming up the lift shaft now—but I don’t need much time.

  I sprint the rest of the circle, checking doors till I find the long curving library in the first guard’s memories. I close myself inside and spin, heart beating. The walls are lined with books, air musty with vellum and ink. It’s a library any university would be proud of, but I don’t need a library right now. I just need one book.

  “Think, Aletheia,” I mutter, even as I feel a shudder through the floor. Probably the lift, on its way up the tower’s central shaft. I need to be gone when they get here. “What would it look like?”

  The chronicles would be written in Ujeian script, for one thing—similar to Daraanese characters but distinct, less flowing. A quick scan finds me a section of Ujeian bindings, but there are still too many to possibly check every one.

  “What else, what else,” I mutter, scanning the first few shelves, though I know there’s no time for that. The binding itself! The books are in all colors of dyed skin and parchment, but the temple uses a distinct salt cure, and father’s copy of the chronicles would be temple-made.

  That narrows it down quickly, and in another few heartbeats I find it, Collected Chronicles of the Immersion written down the side in the same careful monastic script I was taught as a child. I open it to find calligraphic text, with my father’s narrow-looped handwriting filling the margins.

  …may indicate that their craftology has made more accurate measurements of the next deluge…

  My heart catches in my throat: here it is. The thing that consumed my father the last seven years of his life. The reason he ignored me, but his hopes too for trying to save us from the flood. Another connection to him, and in his true voice, not the one slowly fading in the waters.

  Shouts sound from below and I startle out of it, cursing. Flooding sentimentality. I ice everything but urgency and sprint into the hallway, pulling on my leather gloves. Just a quick drop down the rope while they are still coming up the lift…

  A guard steps from the next room, vitality radiating from stacks of coins around his neck. It has to be ten times what the previous guards were wearing—more than I want to deal with.

  I spin, only to find another guard stepping from the baths in the far direction, similarly laden with wealth. Then a figure drops to the center of the sandy courtyard, vitality warping the air around him like the man is a live coal. He straightens, and through the distortion I see white hair framing an ageless face, with obsidian eyes that look ancient. A single black coin hangs from his neck.

  An amaranth. I know it even before he speaks.

  “So,” he says, straightening. “Aletheia Vjolla. Let’s have a look at you.”

  I goggle—he knows my name?—then throw myself at the nearest guard. I know it’s hopeless, but what else am I supposed to do? It’s like attacking a brick wall. I slam three, four, five solid blows into him, then the man’s hand shoots out and grips my neck, lifting me from the floor kicking like a child. He grins.

  “Not too rough now, Jenelin,” the amaranth says. “You wouldn’t want to damage her.”

  The amaranth steps closer, face beatific in vitality’s glow. He peers into my eyes and clucks his tongue. “Violet. You really are Stergjon’s daughter, aren’t you?”

  I know better than to answer. There is nothing I can say here that will help me, though a thousand questions burn on my tongue. How did they know? Were they spying on Hiana and I? Was she compromised somehow?

  He plucks the chronicles from my grasp. “I’ll be keeping these, I think. Jenelin, Haghra, you will stand as witnesses to the theft?”

  They nod assent, and he turns to me. “Then as Fifth Amaranth of Dahran, I find you guilty of theft in the first degree, Aletheia Vjolla. Your life and property are now forfeit. Do you understand that?”

  I understand it, though regret threatens to push something else out of my mouth. Regret and rage. I was stupid to think I could pull this off. But that is my father’s book. Rightfully mine.

  I meet his coal-black gaze. “Fine. Now what?”

  “Now?” he raises his eyebrows. “Now we see just what kind of fighters you Ujeians really are.”