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Tailing Darkness through morning Yeddaw is not the same job as tailing a tired guard captain after dark, and Lift feels the difference at once. She tries the high road first, picking her way across the gardens and bridges along the trench tops, but the bridges are too sparse for a target who never slows at an intersection, and she has to drop down into the slot. Down here the crowds carry her along; what they will not do is make her conspicuous, because everyone is already moving and jostling. She keeps her hands out of pockets she would normally have lifted from, because the job today is not pockets. Wyndle scurries along the stone beside her.

Darkness moves wrong. He does not pause for shops or vendors and seems faster than his own steps, as if he were melting from shadow to shadow. She is most of the way through a fruit market — having snitched a fruit she does not recognise and dropped it heel-first into the crowd when she is spotted — when the cry of *stop, stop!* turns out to be aimed at someone else. A young woman a few years older than Lift has just bolted with a whole basket of fruit pressed to her chest. Beside Lift, a knot of urchins by a broken cart begin laying bets on how long it will be before *Tiqqa* slips this one too.

Darkness does not slip. He flows out of the crowd, snaps a hand round Tiqqa's shoulder, picks the basket up, and walks the both of them back to the shopkeeper as if returning a parcel. He produces his *special operative of the prince* paper. Tiqqa, terrified into pure panic, throws a fruit at him, bites his hand, and finally yanks out a knife and swings. He slaps the blade away with his free hand, summons his Shardblade, and runs her through the chest. She is dragged onto it and her eyes burn out before her body knows it is dead. The shopkeeper screams; the surrounding stretch of market goes still; two of the urchins beside Lift start sobbing into each other. Darkness, unbothered, makes the shopkeeper countersign a kill report, notes the time of death, and walks away — explaining as he goes that, by the law, drawing on an officer is death, and amputation only sends thieves back to stealing because nobody will hire someone missing a hand.

Lift runs to the body the moment he is gone. She turns Tiqqa over, breathes her awesomeness into her the way she did into Gawx in the Bronze Palace, and watches a luminous quivering shape stir for one heartbeat and then puff away. The body stays where it is, eyes burnt to charcoal, not even bleeding. Wyndle, gently: too much time has passed, and a Shardblade is different from any other kind of killing, near-instant down to the soul; even if she had reached this one a heartbeat sooner she would not have had the power. She kneels there until her shame turns to fury. She gets up, shoves past the stunned shopkeeper, steals two fruits out from under his nose, glares him in the eye while she takes a deliberate juicy bite, and chases off after Darkness. *Her name was Tiqqa,* she thinks. *I will remember you, Tiqqa. Because few others will.*

He has gone uphill, past an archway, and out into a piece of the city she has not seen: a great inverted cone hollowed into the rock and brimming with water, with a bridge across it and a ledge around the rim. The cistern. Wyndle notes happily that the rim is raised so storm runoff drains outward away from it, and that the rest of the city's streets slope outward for the same reason, to keep the water pure. The ledge is the empty route and the one Darkness takes; the bridge is shoulder to shoulder. Lift takes the bridge. Halfway across she loses sight of him in the crush of bucket-haulers and feels, irrationally, that he is now the one tailing her. She lets a thread of awesomeness loose to pep her up, not enough to be slick, and squeezes through to the other side.

She picks his trail back up the way one picks up a stone in a stream — by reading the ripples around it. People in the wealthier quarter on the far side stand differently for him, look different ways. She follows the eddies up a flight of low steps along a row of ornamental trees so lazy they have been bred not to retract their leaves at human contact, and she catches a glimpse of him going up a stoop and shutting a door behind him.

The building is cut into the rock and has no back doors. The first-floor window above her, however, is shuttered and could be coaxed open from outside, given cover. She still has a sliver of the morning's stolen fruit in her belly. She kneels by the foot of the nearest tree and bleeds her awesomeness into it until it stretches, buds, unfurls a thick canopy, and reaches branches halfway over the window; rockbud seeds at her feet puff up and vines crawl up her ankles. A passer-by would notice an urchin breaking a shutter; nobody notices an urchin sitting by a tree that is having a particularly good morning. When the crowds thin she swings up into the branches.

Through the cracks of the stormshutter she rattles to find the bar across it, then sends Wyndle's vines through to ease the bar up out of its slots. She coats the hinges with the last of her power so they swing open without a sound, and slips into a room of practice swords and worn sparring leather and the smell of oiled steel. Wyndle suggests, in a small voice, that they could just go found a farm instead. She steps out into the hallway.

To her right, an elderly doorman in Darkness's black-and-silver uniform is dozing on his stool between checks of the porthole. To her left, the corridor runs back toward darker interior rooms, with voices echoing from the far end. She turns left, slips into a workroom that yields nothing useful — and then her nose does. The guard up the hall has wandered off to use a chamber pot. She slips farther down, into a bedroom with a door cracked open, and there on a peg is a stiff coat with a circular fruit stain on the front from the market this morning. On the floor below the coat, under a metal cover of the sort fancy people use to keep food warm, are three plates of pancakes.

Darkness's breakfast. Mission accomplished. She sits down and starts to eat. One pancake is salty and full of chopped vegetables, one is sweet, one is light and fluffy with a sauce she drinks straight from the dish rather than dip. She eats every scrap. Wyndle, with the faintly hopeful tone of someone promised they can go home now, asks whether all this was really only so she could steal his breakfast. *Yep,* she says, mouth full. *Course it is.* She has stolen from an emperor and a palace already; she needed something interesting to try next.

Then she sits a while with the tray empty beside her and feels her awesomeness begin to gather inside her again. *So,* she says. *Guess we go spy on them, eh?* Wyndle whimpers — and then, astonishingly, nods.