I felt like my brain would melt.

  What the hell was actually happening?

  The girls did clean up the place nicely, but why were assassins here in the first place?

  If they were assassins at all. They did say that they wanted to kill the future king, Deimos, but maybe they were just disgruntled peasants?

  No. Peasants wouldn’t have access to the goo, would they?

  What even was it?

  They used it for armor, or that was my best guess. They had it over their normal clothing, and it seemed to completely cloak them in darkness.

  Stealth suits, maybe? But then why dunk body parts in it?

  God damn it. I really needed to find out more.

  But how? Ran into the night again, and see what I could find?

  Damn.

  The palace carried on as if nothing had happened.

  Everyone was busy with something important.

  Everyone except me.

  I tried keeping myself distracted - sitting through etiquette lessons with Io, where she kicked my shin under the table every time I slouched, and pretending to enjoy tasting ceremonies and bow-practice sessions. But my mind kept drifting back to shadows on the rooftops.

  What if they returned?

  I shouldn’t have been plotting counter-assassinations in a kingdom’s capital. But after setting up that I’ve already saved the future king once, I couldn’t let them actually do it.

  Every night since the attack, I have barely slept. Restless pacing. Rubbing my face. Going out to the balcony.

  On the fourth night, everything went wrong again.

  The wind shifted, cool and sharp. The torches of one balcony went out, and I knew instantly what was happening.

  Shadows moved.

  Same as before - fast, synchronized, roof-to-roof travel. They were dedicated to this.

  This time, they didn’t stop below. They went higher.

  They were headed straight for Deimos Amoon’s chambers.

  Not tonight.

  No hesitation- Well, just a little. I searched around and then found a simple linen sack to put over my head. I wouldn’t want anyone to know who I was if anyone saw me. So, for the time, this was my mask.

  I vaulted up and over the railing of the balcony above me.

  I caught my fall with a practiced drop in complete stealth. I trained hard for that.

  Four assassins climbed a window two terraces above me.

  This time, I acted first.

  I sprinted and slammed into the rearmost assassin. We tumbled across the stone. The man rolled gracefully and was already drawing a curved dagger - good reflexes, fast. But he was kind of surprised to see such a little figure be in his way.

  “Heca,” I tried to dispel his armor, but it didn’t work.

  It was worth a try.

  What I needed then was speed and strength, which I could conjure when needed.

  “Geb” for strength and “Mach” for speed.

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  I had to smash in their faces because nothing else vulnerable was open to hit.

  I wasn’t very sorry. It’s their fault; if they’d only worn helmets.

  You’d be surprised how much dignity a toddler can lose in the dark.

  When the first three assassins were out, the fourth turned tail and ran away.

  But I didn’t chase him instantly.

  I let him go for a little while.

  I grabbed the other three assassins to take them with me - it would have looked bad in the morning. I lifted them one by one - two by the shoulders, one over my back when his legs dangled like a heavy sack, and I jumped from one balcony and carried them over the rooftops, keeping to shadows, following the fourth.

  He moved like someone used to being invisible: low, fast, and careful. He headed east, away from the main roads and into the tangle of merchant roofs where patrols were light and shadows deep.

  Higher up, I saw him ducking into an alleyway, slipping through a loose door, and vanishing into a low, ugly building that reeked. The kind the guard would usually avoid. Perfect.

  I hauled the assassins into the same alleyway and dumped them outside. I tucked them under a cart and covered them with tarp and leaned some broken planks on it.

  No one seemed bothered by it.

  Then I pushed the door open and sneaked inside.

  The hideout was smaller than I expected. A backroom, with two simple rooms. There were a few sacks, a cot, and a table scarred with burn marks, and it stunk of alcohol. Paper littered the floor: a crude map folded into quarters, a ledger filled with names and dates, a small wooden box open and empty, and a scrap of cloth stuck under a nail.

  Just normal scummy things.

  The assassin, my target, stumbled in from the other room, coughing and bleeding from the mouth. He dropped to a stool and tried to staunch himself with a dirty rag. He hadn’t expected a tail, I guess. He assumed he was alone.

  He didn’t see me until I stepped out of the shadow.

  His eyes went wide - just a flinch - but then a hard, practiced face set itself. “You followed me,” he hissed.

  “You ran,” I answered. “You left a trail.”

  He tried to reach for a blade at his belt. I moved before he could. I didn’t want a fight. I wanted answers.

  Then I grabbed his jaw and tightened it and did my best Batman impression. “Tell me why. What are the girls for? What is the goo for? Why did you want to kill Deimos Amoon?”

  “Girls? I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he spat, bitter. “I’m just a hired mercenary."

  I could have forced more - tormented him, scarred him, broken an arm or a leg - but I had a different purpose. I wanted a trace, a breadcrumb I could follow.

  First, I punched the man out cold.

  Then I ransacked the hideout properly.

  I tipped the table over, shaking sacks, spilling their contents. Nothing important. The ledger was small - mostly payments, times, and a few names. But nothing as major as a political assassination.

  In a backroom, it seems that I found the “special” wares.

  I found vials, armor, and drugs, maybe? And other unidentified things. But there was one book among them.

  I lifted it like it was warm.

  I pulled off the sack from my head to read it.

  The pages were dense with cramped script, diagrams, and margins filled with corrections. Most of it was incompetent noise, lists of materials, warning signs, and chants that seemed half-finished.

  A fair amount of it was meaningless to me, because nothing seemed to really line up with what I had learned, either on my own or with Jakob and Master Orrin.

  I skimmed, my toddler brain hungry and greedy, and then I found a line that stopped me.

  “Replication: Simulacrum through sympathetic token.”

  In simpler terms: A clone spell. A replication.

  I felt a stupid grin creep over my face. Of course I found this. Of course the underworld trafficked in copying life. Of course.

  The paragraph below described a ritual that looked exactly like the kinds of stupidly overreaching magics I had adored in old fantasy books back in my first life.

  It was a four-part process: a token bearing the original's essence, a breath-binding sequence, and a final salve applied to the produced form.

  The token could be something as mundane as a scrap of clothing. “Bind at the center of pulse and thought.” And the salve? The breath-binding… Oh, fuck all this. Where were the magic words?

  In any case, this was brilliant. This was exactly the kind of problem/solution my brain thrived on. Feared also, but consequences could come later.

  I read the ritual twice to memorize it; there's no time to be perfect, only time to be convincing.

  The books had more than enough words to them. Ten, to be exact, but I had combined just five words it said would be the most resonant with each other: “Loki-Eshu-Ana-Rae-Susa.”

  Five words. Dangerous, supposedly. Eye-melting or blood-boiling most likely, like other spells with fewer words.

  But the book said that it was simple, and there wasn’t going to be any permanent damage. So, should I trust my instincts or a random book I found?

  I mean, if you think about it… I just had too much to handle just by myself.

  If there were more of me… Boom. Instant fix.

  One Caleb handles being the son of a lower noble.

  One Caleb spearheads the conspiracy to kill the king.

  And maybe another is responsible for the whole ‘being a prophet’.

  And maybe main Caleb actually gets to enjoy life and not sprint between scenes like a sweaty stagehand changing props.

  Plus, more Calebs means more backup if someone tries to remove me from the story.

  Greed brightened into decision. I had to try.

  I cleared a space on the floor and sat cross-legged like some ridiculous miniature priest. I was calm, and I tensed myself.

  “Alright,” I told the empty room, pretending for a fraction of a second that the god Geshich might be listening. “Hope this is entertaining - and won’t rip me in half.”

  I whispered the utterance from the book. The words tasted like iron and old dust and the back of a throat after shouting. I breathed, slow and shallow.

  I felt stupidly intimate and terribly exposed.

  I shivered and just closed my eyes. It wasn’t my problem anymore.