Silk and Sundial

Sundial stared out at the Arctos skyline through the large window of Silk’s new 18th-story office, and wondered, not for the first time, what she was doing with her life. She was great at dealing with the sorts of problems she could infiltrate, exfiltrate, and purloin her way out of, but that didn’t seem to be a useful approach here. If a girl buys you tickets on an intercontinental flight and has you move in together, does that mean she likes you? Or were they just fleeing the country as friends?

Her thoughts were interrupted when the front door was kicked in with a loud BANG, and a tall muscular woman with a face mask and a pistol stormed into the room.

“Hands where I can see ’em! Sundial Votive, the Reliquary would like a word with you. Now come along quietly, or –”

As Sundial turned startled to face the door and raised her hands slowly, she heard a faint sound from the window behind her, and felt the blade of a knife held against her throat.

“Sundial Votive, my employer sends their re—” The quiet voice in her ear stopped abruptly. “Anchor?”

“Tulip, what the hell are you –”

The two intruders stared at each other.

“Anchor, you said this was going to be a nice little vacation, no work stuff!”

Anchor stared pointedly down at the knife in Tulip’s hand.

“… Okay, yes, point taken, but look, the money on this contract was way too good to just pass up!”

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, …”