Silk stared down at the wooden case on her desk, and at the object inside, whirring to itself and glowing softly. She stared back up at the thief, Sundial, sitting across from her, face nervous and expectant. She stared back down at the case.
She’d seen plenty of well-constructed fakes over the years, but this … no, there was no mistaking it. The longer she looked, the more the whirring seemed to resolve into whispered words on the edge of hearing, and the harder the clearly-unnatural sense of joyful wonder tried to shove its way in from the back of her mind. She lowered the lid of the case, closing it slowly with a fearful caution stronger than her sense of urgency.
Silk and Sundial stared at each other for a long silence. Finally, Silk spoke. “What. In God’s name. Have you done.”
“I – I brought it, just like you asked for? Oh, don’t worry about the box, the wood’s at least a thousand years old so it should hold fine for a week or two –”
“This isn’t about the damned box, you idiot! I know what the fuck you did, but why? Why would you actually go and steal the real thing, are you out of your mind?!”
“Y-you didn’t… want the real thing?” Sundial asked, shriveling under Silk’s glare.
“Of course I didn’t want the real thing! My clients don’t want the real thing, nobody wants the real thing! What they want is the mystique, the idea that just maybe it might be, so they can keep it in a fancy little box, maybe in a special room in their cellar, go down and look at it every now and then, feel that little thrill of terror and wonder, and then go upstairs and go to sleep and wake up alive the next morning! And they know me, they know I work with the best, they know I got whatever I’m selling from an expert thief, they don’t ask questions about where the thief got it from, and neither do I! But you, you, …”
Sundial looked like she might be about to start crying. Silk paused, took a deep breath, tried to regain a tiny semblance of composure.
“Did it not occur to you,” she asked in slow measured tones, “that the price I offered was a little low for stealing the real thing? Absurdly low, in fact? The supplies you must have needed just to get past the first couple floors would already cost you more than twice what I was offering, am I wrong? There’s no reason any sane person would take this job if they weren’t planning on delivering a forgery. Were you trying to impress me, or…”
Sundial’s face turned bright red. “I, I just thought, you were giving me a chance to, to show you I was a good enough thief to, to…” She trailed off mumbling.
Silk slumped forward, forehead hitting the desk with a thud. “They’re going to kill you,” she muttered. “They’re going to kill both of us, assuming this leaves anything for them to kill, because you couldn’t work up the nerve to ask me out on a date.”
“I, I’m sorry…”
Silk slowly lifted her head from the desk. “If I asked you to show me your master thief skills even more by putting the damned thing back…?”
“Uh, I, well… I can’t…”
“You can’t?”
“I mean, the place is going to be on high alert after the break-in, but, uh, the main issue is in order to break into the Terminal Sanctum, I had to contaminate the Creational Wards, so…”
“You can’t put it back… You can’t put it back. Because there’s nowhere safe to put it anymore.”
Sundial nodded nervously.
Silk pushed her glasses up on her nose, took another deep breath. “Okay. Okay, this is fine. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to go through my list of clients, pick out the ones with obscene amounts of money and zero sense, and find one of them who’ll shell out for this incredible, once-in-a-lifetime find. That’ll be enough for a rush order for a few sets of new identity papers, passage on the next airship across the ocean, and a tidy nest egg to build up the business from scratch in the Ursine Republic, while the authorities figure out for themselves how to sort out the mess over here.”
Sundial fidgeted awkwardly. “Uh, but, w-what do I do now?”
Silk sighed. “You’re coming with me, obviously. You deserve your share of the take too, and besides, I’m not about to let a thief of your caliber get killed by the Cloaks, and I’m definitely not about to let one wander around unsupervised causing even worse trouble. Now, go pack a valise with whatever you absolutely can’t bear to part with, and then meet me in the backroom of the Rat’s Nest in 8 hours. Understood?”