“Okay, let’s try this again.”

Ishtal had made a double-handful more attempts at the street-market crowd over the past several days, and she thought she might be getting better. She had a good feeling about today, like she could slide like a shadow through the tiniest cracks. Maybe it was because she’d finally gotten to sleep as long as she wanted; Tem had renewed his “subscription” for the halfling menace with his dog and his trumpet to leave them alone, and the morning had been blissfully quiet.

She was about to step into the maelstrom once more when something abruptly snagged her elbow, and she found herself being hauled backwards against a shadowy patch of wall with far more strength than she would have thought Lilah possessed. “Are you crazy? Not now, there’s city watch right there. If you slipped up and got caught, that’d be it, you’d get arrested and we’d have to come rescue you.”

Ishtal blinked, glancing around and eventually spotting three men in armor and green cloaks amid the milling people. “Wait, those ones? I would’ve thought they were Dragons, if I’d noticed. How do you tell?”

Lilah looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “They’re wearing red,” she hissed. “Practically the only people in Lozhapad who wear that shade of red are city watch.”

This was making less sense with each passing moment. “What is ‘red’?” Ishtal asked. “I don’t think I’ve heard that word before.”

There was a pause, and then Lilah said slowly, “Ishtal, what do you see when you look at their cloaks?”

“Um…they’re green? About the same shade as your bodice and my trousers.”

Lilah’s eyes closed for a brief moment, and she breathed out something that might have been ‘explains so much’. Then she seemed to recover herself. “All right, so now I’ve learned something new today. Apparently, there’s a color you can’t see that the rest of us can. I honestly don’t know how to describe it, but the city watch always wear it to stand out in a crowd. And you said it looks just like green to you?”

Ishtal nodded in bewildered confirmation.

“Okay, then. I’m going to have to think about how we can work around that, but for now, just try to stay unnoticed if you see anyone around with armor and a cudgel like that, all right?”

“All…right.”

“Great.” Lilah huffed out a sigh. “Let’s just wait for them to pass through, and then you can take another run at it.”

“The trick to getting into most places where you aren’t supposed to be,” Lilah said one evening, walking with her after dinner towards the central area of town, “is to come from above. The average wealthy household is going to have most of their security focused on an approach from the ground, but if you come over the rooftops and through an upstairs window, you’ll probably only have to deal with some locks—which shouldn’t be a problem for you now.”

She paused beside a large half-timbered building and produced the crampons and spiked gloves that she had displayed before at Gerda’s, slipping them on. “All right, I’m going up, and you follow me and we’ll see how you do.”

As Ishtal watched, she made a small leap and caught herself on the exposed wood of the building, then crawled upward like some kind of spider until she reached the peak of the roof. The whole process only took a few moments.

Ishtal swallowed hard, then unsheathed her claws and made to follow. She had climbed plenty of trees before in Bosgarren Herria, including some that had required shimmying up with claws, but the latter kind had all been a part of guardian training, and she’d dropped it as soon as she was old enough to set her own schedule, thinking it onerous and a waste of time. And even then, the trees had been rounded enough that she could wrap herself around them, and have some hope of gripping on with her arms and legs if she slipped. That wouldn’t work here: the beam she was scaling was both broad and flat, so there was nothing for it except to crawl like Lilah had done.

It wasn’t the most pleasant experience, but she finally made it to the roof, hands aching, and pulled herself up to sit beside Lilah.

“Not bad,” her mentor praised. “Do you want to head back down now, or take a quick run of the rooftops first?”

Anything had to be better than repeating what she had just done, only backwards. “Let’s try the run.”

Lilah grinned. “That’s the spirit! Catch me if you can!” And then she had sprung up and taken off down the ridgepole on light feet. When she reached the far edge, she simply leaped, her momentum carrying her across the small gap to the next building.

Ishtal maneuvered onto her feet, and started after in a quick trot that soon turned into a full run. It wasn’t as hard to keep her balance on the ridge of the roof as she would have thought—her balance had always been naturally good, even before the honing it had gotten on Father’s obstacle courses, and the wooden shingles were easy for her claws to grip if needed.

At the roof’s edge, she didn’t let herself hesitate, throwing herself across the empty space and barely slipping at all as she landed, immediately taking off again. Lilah’s eyes widened, watching her, and then she darted away, leading a merry chase down the street. Only a short while later, though, she slowed, reaching the edge of the block.

Ishtal thought she could see the problem. The streets in this part of Lozhapad were about ten feet wide, too far of a distance for Lilah to jump, so she was evidently resorting to another of Gerda’s inventions, something that launched a metal claw across the space, trailing a rope behind it that Lilah seemingly meant to swing across on.

Perhaps she was meant to wait for the end of the rope to be thrown back to her, or perhaps Lilah had forgotten to get her such a device for her own, but as she calculated the distance, it occurred to Ishtal that she probably didn’t need any such equipment, any more than she’d needed spikes for climbing. The distance was at the far end of her abilities, but it was still within them.

As Lilah swung, Ishtal made a mighty leap—soared for a single stretched moment—and landed with all fours gripping onto the far roof. Her pulse pounded in her ears, and a reckless laugh escaped her.

A thud sounded next to her, and she glanced over to see Lilah with her arms crossed and her mouth twisted like she was trying not to smile. “I don’t think you’ll need to train very much on this,” she commented wryly. “Although you might find yourself a little more hampered further north where the streets are wider.”

Ishtal shrugged, trying not to appear to gloat. “This is actually something I was trained in before, sort of.”

Lilah raised an eyebrow, as if she knew there were more details to be had there and wanted to ask.

Maybe sometime she could talk about that. But not tonight.

Ishtal rocked back into a crouch and stood, shot Lilah a challenging glance, and took off again. The halfling woman’s surprised laugh and light running footsteps sounded behind her.

At least for a while, simply able to run and leap and exist above the city and all the problems it encompassed, Ishtal caught herself actually…happy for the first time since that awful night of exile.

“All right, one more shot at this. You almost had it before; you can do it.”

Ishtal stretched and bounced on her feet slightly, trying to loosen up. They’d run through the crowd-navigation exercise several times already that day, and while earlier in the week she’d made it through the gauntlet with a minimum of shoving, this had not been her day. Every single time so far, she’d either gotten stuck and had to have Lilah come pull her out, or half-panicked and abandoned all attempts at inconspicuousness just to get to somewhere with elbow room.

But she had come so close before to something approaching that effortlessness that Lilah always seemed to achieve in such situations. If she could just do it completely right once, capture whatever that feeling was, maybe she would be able to pull from that every time afterward.

With a deep breath, she moved, and slipped into the market street between a hornpate herding her two children along and a dwarf and a goblin having an argument.

And somehow—she couldn’t have said what caused it—she could see. There wasn’t a pattern to the movement of the crowd overall, but there were signals that hinted whether someone was going to move here or there, a gap just ahead, another one opening beyond that, someone turning their head away from where she would be at just the right moment. 

This was just another obstacle course.

Ishtal let her body follow what she was seeing, turning it almost into a dance of under that person’s stack of baskets, around the woman with the armful of squawking chickens, sidling back-to-back with someone as they turned, never making eye contact, never more than brushing lightly against anyone. For a few, transcendent moments, it was easy.

And then she had reached the end of the street to find Lilah waiting for her with an approving grin.

“Now that was impressive,” she said. “I told you you could do it.”

Ishtal huffed out the breath she’d been holding. “I’m really not sure I could duplicate whatever just happened. But at least I know how it’s supposed to feel now. That should help.”

“And you even picked up something on the way,” Lilah pointed out, gesturing at Ishtal’s clenched right hand. Sure enough, upon inspection, she’d managed to snag a handful of silver coins from someone. The guilt still wanted to rear up in her, but there was an odd trickle of warmth running through it—something that it took a moment for Ishtal to identify as pride.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked, a little bemused.

“Half of anything we earn goes to the gang, to Madam Akiba specifically if it’s coin,” Lilah explained in an undertone, leading Ishtal out of the main thoroughfare and into the network of alleys. “Mr. Trippingly manages the fencing of actual goods we get in a burglary or what have you, but Madam Akiba manages the money. The other half is for you—buy some street food, save up for something you need, make it into a necklace, whatever you want. That’s the beauty of it.”

She paused, and gave Ishtal an assessing look. “Speaking of burglary, though…I think you might be ready to come with me on a job later this week.”

“Ready? Let’s go.”

Lilah shimmied in the blink of an eye down the rope they had secured, from their rooftop perch to one of the windows of the three-story house they were about to break into. It wasn’t one of the great ruling Houses that had filled Ishtal with such awe, but it was solidly in one of the wealthier parts of the north side. According to reports, the family who owned it was away traveling on business for the month, so it should be easy to get in, get a good take, and get out.

Ishtal slid down the rope in her turn, to where Lilah was perched on an empty window box. There was no way the thing would take both of their weight, but Ishtal lashed the rope to her belt and used one hand to brace herself on the box while she went to work with her gleaming new lockpick set. Perhaps it would have been more efficient to have Lilah, as the one with a more stable position, do that part, but Ishtal was determined that if she was going to do this, she would prove that she could be good at it, and had insisted. 

She was rewarded in a moment or two by the smooth click of the lock, and Lilah eased the window open and slipped inside. Ishtal, untying herself, followed suit only a little less nimbly. They had both already donned light leather gloves as opposed to the spiked ones (or, in Ishtal’s case, bare hands) needed for wall-climbing. “The city watch have been testing out a new kind of magic,” Lilah had explained, “one that lets them identify a criminal by the places their fingers have touched. In the best-case scenario, they won’t suspect anyone was here at all, but that’s no reason to not take sensible precautions.”

The room they entered would have probably seemed dark to the eyes of other Peoples, but Ishtal could make it out quite easily: a well-sized and luxurious space, with the walls hung in silks and luxurious tapestries, and an impossibly soft rug on the floor. There was a large, curtained bed against one wall, and around the rest of the room were a large wardrobe, a fireplace with a comfortable chair, a cluttered desk, and a smaller, elegantly carved table with a mirror above it and various small cases scattered across it.

It was towards this last that Lilah moved, gesturing for Ishtal to follow. Upon closer inspection, many of the items cluttering it were various types of cosmetics, but some of them—judging by the one Lilah cracked open—were jewelry boxes.

“What a complete, precious idiot,” Lilah breathed. “Who leaves this much stuff just out in the open, in this city? This is Lozhapad, she’s practically asking for someone to walk off with it all.”

Ishtal was not entirely sure that objects inside closed, locked cases in a third-story room in a locked-up house could technically be described as “out in the open”, but it did not seem like her job to point this out. Instead, she made quick work of gathering out a double-handful of rings, a bracelet, a pendant, and a pair of earrings, and secreted them in her pockets and belt pouch.

Beside her, Lilah was doing the same—not taking everything, by a long shot, but just a piece here and there, apparently at random. At her nod, they replaced everything as it had been in a flurry of motion, and retreated back out the window. Relatching that was more tricky with only the picks, and Ishtal finally had to concede and let Lilah do it. But when the lock snapped back into place, they were back up the rope in a heartbeat, and raced away over the rooftops. The entire operation had taken less than ten minutes.

Once they were safely perched on the Salamander’s roof, they both sat to catch their breath, and Lilah nudged her. “So go on, show me. What’d you pick out?”

Ishtal produced the items she’d chosen, one by one, until they were all spread out in her hands. Lilah whistled, impressed, and picked up a piece or two to inspect them more closely. 

“You’ve got a good eye,” she praised. “These’ll fetch a good bit, even fenced. You won’t have to rankle at Tem and Kleev’s charity anymore.”

That was excellent news. Ishtal knew the two of them meant well and were only being kind, but she would rather not have to rely solely on that if she could help it.

“You know,” Lilah went on, “you’re really good at this, for someone who’s coming to it completely new. I mean, I can tell you have some kind of issues with the criminal lifestyle, but honestly, you’re a natural at so much of this. It’s like you were born to it.”

I was born to be almost the opposite of this, actually, Ishtal thought. And then they told me it didn’t matter anymore.

Habitual shame warred with pride in work well done, but in the end, what finally made its way out was “Thank you.”