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Inej makes one more sweeping check across the rooftop, and then gives the signal: an owl call, so accurate that an answering call comes from a white shape swooping over her.
Inej smiles. She thanks her Saints for moments like this, for the serenity of the starlight in the gentle absence of the moon, for owl and her call, for the concrete beneath her feet and the knife in her boot and the gun on her hip.
The calmness doesn't last, of course. It's not quite three hundred beats of her heart before there's motion from the treeline, and the diversion starts.
It's always a diversion, with Kaz. That, too, makes her smile.
This time it's Jesper, guns blazing, and Matthias, the hefty bulk of him charging at the main entrance. An explosion, and alarms blare.
Inej looks up at the sky one more time, then picks the lock on the door to the stairwell down from the roof. By all rights, it should trigger an alarm. But that's the thing, that's the fatal flaw: this building has linked all of their alarms. With Jesper and Matthias hammering their way through the armoured official entrance, those alarms are already all blaring.
She lets herself in, locking the door again behind herself, and finds herself a place in the rafters above the top floor of the warehouse and tucks herself in, wrapping her coat around herself. This is the type of mission that she does actually enjoy: the ones where she gets to make a difference without doing damage.
Somewhere in here, in one of those rows of lockboxes, is a USB with evidence of the tax fraud a human smuggler is committing.
Kaz had said, "There's at least one government after it. But we all know they'll fail, the amateurs. We can deliver it to them easily."
Jesper had laughed, and said, "You mean Inej will," and Kaz had had what passes for a smile on his face.
Inej runs through the memories like a meditation. The owl hoots again, muffled through the roof. Her legs cramp and then settle. The gunfire intensifies, then goes silent. Jesper and Matthias have been fought off, then. It's all going to plan.
The owl calls again, one note flat.
Kaz.
Inej smiles and lets herself drift off.
When she wakes, she eats the muesli bar hidden in her coat for that exact purpose. Below her, two guards are doing their rounds. "They didn't even make it inside," one says to the other, gleefully. "Couldn't even get past the second door."
"Amateurs," the second says. Inej bites down on her smile.
They walk directly below her, twice over the hours. They don't look up.
People rarely do.
The guards are behind their official schedule, but perfectly in sync with what Kaz had described. They turn sloppy corners, and take their lunch break together instead of taking turns like they're meant to, secure in the impenetrability of their warehouse.
Inej slips down, lands with barely a sound, walks three isles down, five steps in, punches in her birthdate, overrides the error message by requesting to change the code, puts in the generic back-up check-code and… yes, they hadn't changed it from the default.
Amateurs.
She changes the code to PIGEONS and types it again. The box hisses open. She takes the USB, a small dark thing, cool in her palm.
Thirty seconds ahead of the schedule she's following. Not a bad estimation, Kaz.
The guards should be finishing their lunch soon. She creeps closer, using their noise as cover as they throw garbage out and complain about aching feet, and then she ducks into the break room and the bathroom beyond it, heart pounding at a steady rate.
They don't see her. She thanks her Saints from atop a toilet, and then she unscrews the bars on the window—impossible from outside, laughably easy from here—and squeezes out the narrow gap, pulling every contortionist's trick that she knows. From there, it's just a short climb down three stories of brick wall. Every guard in the building is patrolling inside or watching the entrance: she goes unnoticed again.
Now the worst part, the most exposed part. She slides back her sleeve to check her watch: two minutes.
In one, she can hear the motorcycle. In another thirty seconds she can see it, Nina riding high and haughty, like she comes down this semi-rural road on a leisure drive every day.
"Hey boys," Nina calls. There's no gunfire, as expected. There's no real reason for it, to the guards, and Nina has a way of bewildering most people she meets.
Inej checks the USB is secured tightly in a pouch against her thigh, and takes off running.
Each stride is an exposed nerve. Shouts rise up behind her; she's been noticed. She hates that feeling, but it's necessary.
She sprints the few metres to the road, then turns down it. The motorcycle draws closer quickly, then beside her, slowing as it does.
Inej makes the leap, grabbing on to Nina's waist and holding true, legs tucked up beside her, as the road falls away. Nina leans the other way, providing the necessary balance until Inej can settle properly behind her. Her body is warm and steady, a grounding sensation. Inej clings, taking comfort in the stability.
"Holy shit, girl," Nina says when Inej is settled. "Holy shit!"
Inej laughs. "I was waiting a full minute," she tells Nina.
"I'll tell Kaz," Nina says, grinning. "He's gonna be so mad."
Inej presses her smile into Nina's shoulder. This is always the feeling she gets after it goes well: weightless, like she is tightrope dancing, like she is suspended above the world, and yet grounded at the same time, the string beneath her feet, her Saints in her belt and in her sky.
Kaz has food waiting for them when they get back, Nina dumping the motorbike in the garage for a Dregs rat to strip the plates from and take apart, just in case someone saw it well enough to come looking for it. There's a reason they run the mechanic's garage as a front.
It's good food, too, hearty, spiced enough that Wylan is coughing. Inej digs in. It's from the East Ravkan place two streets away, the one that charges what Kaz calls "rip-off prices" but that really just reflects the quality of their ingredients. It doesn't quite taste like her first home, but it has the right shape in her mouth. It's enough to make her smile. When she turns to thank Kaz, he's turned away from her pointedly. She rolls her eyes; Jesper snorts.
She doesn't intentionally go hungry when she does long missions like that, but a single muesli bar was hardly sufficient food, and now that she's home she can welcome the heavy sleepy feeling that comes with being satiated. "I have something for you, I believe," she says, when she's eaten her fill.
Kaz has to turn to her, then. She hands him the USB, an odd thrill singing through her at the barest scrape of her callouses over his bare fingers, pale and smooth from their years in gloves.
When he takes the gloves off is up to him. It has no obvious rhyme or reason, and if she can see a pattern, she will never ask to confirm it. She will never tell anyone, either. It is simply what it is: Kaz, bare-fingered, taking what she has earned them to put it to further use.
"Excellent," Kaz says. It vanishes up his sleeve.
"I was waiting a full minute for Nina," Inej informs him. "And I got the USB out of the lockbox thirty seconds early."
He scowls. "I'll account for that next time," he says, and she knows he means it. She accounts for him; he accounts for her. This is how they do things.
"Who're we dropping this to, again?" Jesper asks.
Kaz smirks. "It's been a while since we've broken into Central Intelligence, hasn't it?"
Wylan groans.
They're technically subcontracted by CI… sometimes. Through a shell company of Kaz's. They break in a lot more than that, though. Kaz thinks it's funny; he trusts the CI just enough to give them information and hope they'll use it to take someone down, but he also likes mocking them.
Wylan's a cleaner, supposedly. Inej sits under the cloth covering of his cart and lets him wheel her through the building. Jesper, beside her, it tapping a rhythm out on his palms. They go left, right, straight for a while, elevator, left, left, stop.
They've arrived.
Kaz is already there, wearing a little badge that says "INTERN: PLEASE BE NICE TO ME :)". Inej laughs, silently.
"I swear it's here somewhere," he's saying to a man, pretending at flustered. "Wait, wait, wait —"
"Here," Inej says. She hands Kaz her second gun, the one they are absolutely not meant to have been able to get past security with, and the USB.
"Wraith," he says, nodding. "What business?"
Ah, so that's the play.
"Dirtyhands," Inej responds, cooly. "Human trafficking. Not for much longer, I hope."
The CI guy sighs. Inej knows him, has staked out his house countless times. He's up high, not quite the top but not far from it. "We know about the failed break in," he says. "You can't con me, Dirtyhands."
Kaz grins. It's a smile Inej has watched him practice in a mirror, the cruel twist of his mouth, the I know more that you tilt to it, the way it is sharp as her knives. "The Wraith failed to break in?" he asks. It's a rhetorical question. The CI man blinks, clearly processing.
"Nah, that was me," Jesper says. "Ah, boss, sorry about that one."
"You were an excellent distraction," Kaz says. He hasn't looked away from their CI man, but the way Jesper preens isn't an act.
"You don't have anything to lose," Inej tells the CI employee.
He turns to her, then to Kaz. "I'm opening this on a secured computer," he says. "Nothing connected to our servers, you hear?"
Kaz smiles that smile again. "I would expect nothing less," he says, and drops the USB in the man's palm, black leather of his gloves flashing in the fluorescent office lights. "Now, are you going to walk us out?"
"How'd you even get in?" the man asks, exasperated.
"Your security is shit," Jesper says. "Almost as bad as the warehouse we stole that from."
"Better than the last time," Kaz says. "Still not good."
The CI guy sighs. "I'll walk you out," he says. "No detours."
Kaz taps his cane on the ground. "You think I'm faster than you?"
The CI guy rolls his eyes, which makes Inej like him, just a tiny bit. "I think you don't have to be. I'm no idiot."
"Just not as smart as Dirtyhands," Wylan remarks, sticking his head in the door, still in the janitor get up.
The CI man startles. "How many of you are there?" he says, despairingly. "I'm getting you out of here before you steal something, or someone shoots you."
"If we were going to steal something," Kaz points out, "we would have done that before we came to find you."
They get corralled out the door. "None of you seem old enough for this," the CI man huffs. "Fine, fine. Out."
As they walk through the halls, effectively escorted, he hits an alarm button. Klaxons go off. "We'll find out what you stole soon enough," he says, grimly. "I expect we'll be seeing each other, Dirtyhands, Wraith, the rest of you."
Inej inclines her head, and leads them out, Kaz making up the rear guard.
"What did you steal?" Wylan asks, curious.
Inej laughs. Kaz strips off his intern tag. "Nothing," he says, and his smile is a true one now, just one edge of his mouth turning up. "I just wanted to make them twitchy for a while."
They go home, after that. Curled up in her room over the garage, the window overlooking the yard, full of half-degraded cars and motorbikes, engine blocks hanging from chains, all the perfect hiding places she could ever need, Inej is at peace. There's a flowerbox below her window, and everything she's ever tried to grow in it has died, but when she scatters breadcrumbs there, the crows come, loud in their city voices.
Kaz pauses outside her room while she's brushing out her hair, taking out the tangles of the day. She knows it's him by the fall of his feet, by the sound of his gait, by the weight of his shadow.
"Come in," she says, soft enough that he can ignore it if he would like.
He doesn't. They don't, mostly. They know too much about each other.
When he opens the door, he's not wearing gloves. She's wearing sleeping shorts, bare from the knees down in a way that she so rarely is, and he's not wearing gloves. It's odd, sometimes, how their pasts echo past each other. Kaz sits beside her on her bed and they do not touch, and she's glad for it.
"Timing," he says.
She nods. "It was fine," she says. "We just underestimated how quickly I can go down walls when I'm unwatched."
"You spent too long exposed," he says, harshly, but directed towards himself. "I should have sent Nina earlier."
Inej smiles. "And if you had, and I'd been late, then what?"
He frowns.
"I hate being in the open like that," Inej admits. "But I can still do it. It was fine, Kaz."
That gets her a nod, accepting. He stays while she brushes out her hair, while she runs oils through the ends of it, smoothing it after the harsh wind of the road. He stays while she readies for bed, placing her knives, named after her Saints, in their order on her table, cleaning each and every one of them, checking the blades, checking the mechanism of her guns, the lacings of her boots.
He gave her the first knife, and she used it to save herself. The rest—the rest are all hers. She uses them to save them both. She uses them to try and save what she can of this world.
"You still feed the crows," he says. "I don't know why. They're ugly, grumpy things."
She pauses, putting down her boots. "I like them," she says. "Ugly or not, grumpy or not."
Inej can feel his laugh more than she can hear it.
One of the crows squawks balefully. Inej laughs, too. She imagines the sound rising out the window, out up to the stars, out up to the Saints. She thinks it's the best thanks she can give: her joy, true and shining.