Inside Marek's building, Kael barely took a second to exhale before his eyes danced across the furniture. Paper piled on the desk beside devices that smelled of ink. Though curious, he ignored them to turn toward shelves of thick ledgers. Likely experimental results, he thought. Crates took up the rest of the space. Not what he came for.

  Then... where was it?

  Biting his thumbnail, he checked the building again. Nothing. Or perhaps he searched wrongly. What made this pce stand out compared to the others? All the pipes came out of here.

  He gazed at the ceiling. A lone pipe crawled down the wall, vanishing behind the thick back of Marek's chair.

  He charged the desk, yet squeezed his thigh to stop himself. Marek would find out, but he wouldn't help him notice he stole from him by creating a mess.

  Slowing down despite the urgency of witnessing Giovanni break his anchor, he circled the chair without touching anything. The pipe was there, only half of it. The other half dug into the wall.

  It's inside. How do I get this damned thing out?

  The wall was too thick for him to break, not that he wanted to nor anyone whenever they needed to get things out. Either walled up for safety, or...

  Hands pressed against the wall, he felt each bump on its metallic surface. No cracks or openings. Instead, the ground rose on the left side, not by much, almost an unnoticeable bit he only felt because he was barefooted.

  He knelt, tracing the bump in a straight line to the left foot of the desk. As he suspected, there had to be a mechanism to open the wall like the facility doors. Integrated into the desk's leg, maybe connected to a drawer.

  A frown creased his brow as he pulled them one by one. The first two slid open, revealing wax-sealed documents and five bottles of ink. A whole five...

  Kael forced himself to leave them where they were and pulled the third drawer. It rattled beneath his tense fingers, refusing to move. Locked. Of course, it had to be locked. Marek would be a fool if he didn't hide the key or even carry it on him.

  So what now?

  Giovanni could break his anchor anytime now. He couldn't waste a second on a failed theft.

  For a moment, he drummed on the drawer, his gaze sweeping the room.

  Marek can't lose what's inside. Would he risk the key every time he moves out? I wouldn't. I'd hide it somewhere safe. And where is safer than his building? That is, if he thinks like me. Two minutes. I'll give myself two minutes to search. Now, where?

  Going over every crate would take too long, so he ignored them. The drawers on the right side of the desk? Just more documents and pieces of metal with protruding letters smeared in dry ink. Curious, but irrelevant. He lifted a bckboard on the right wall, hoping to see the key hanging behind its frame, but found nothing except for the nail it hung from.

  Sweat trailed down his temples, each drop mirroring the passing of seconds he couldn't waste. His two minutes were almost gone. But there was something he could quickly check. If paper was a treasure to him, to Garrick and his men, it was just a tool for recording debts and tracking business. So perhaps...

  With a trembling hand, he began to lift ledgers from the shelf and shook them. Paper rustled. His breath hastened. And when he reached the sixth, something cnged on the ground, the sound exploding in the silence.

  He looked down, eyes wide. There, a brass key glinted softly in the torchlight. He hurriedly picked it up, smmed the ledger back on the shelf, and rushed to the drawer.

  A turn. A click. It slid open.

  Only one thing inside: a crank that Kael instantly turned.

  The mechanical sound of spinning cogs broke the silence before the wall rumbled behind him. It parted, sliding to the sides to form an opening broad enough to let a man through.

  Dozens of pipes emerged from the walls, their mouths sucking up dense smog. A gray veil concealed the rest of the room. Was it the mist that made the facilities untraceable?

  Steal mist... Great pn, Giovanni...

  Eyes narrowed, he stepped forward. The pipe's suction diminished as he approached the center and the fog thickened. It smelled of... Kael didn't even know. Something sour that prickled his nose, maybe? At least it was breathable.

  With a wave of his hands, fog parted over grooves on the floor. They formed angur letters ending in sharp lines as if hacked out with a knife instead of engraved.

  A faint light glistened in their depths, something different from torchlight or fog, but present in every character across the circle they formed. What they meant, he had no idea, but they made him shiver.

  But less than what he saw in the center of the circle.

  A seated man, his parched skin hugging his bones. His nose missed its bridge, and he wore dark-framed, round gsses over his empty eye sockets. His chest didn't move, and Kael couldn't tell if he breathed.

  Except for a ragged loincloth, he was a naked mess of bones wrapped in a fog of his own making. A chill crawled down Kael's spine. Could anyone still be alive in that state? Maybe if he anchored the truth of the survivor.

  Slowly, unable to stop his fingers from twitching, he leaned closer, ready to jump back at the slightest movement. No reaction. Even when he held his palm beneath the man's nose, no movement, no breath—nothing.

  The man was dead. If so, how could he produce the fog that hides the facility?

  Kael focused on the gsses. Odd for an eyeless corpse wearing nothing else.

  His fingers hovered for a heartbeat before he snatched them. Around him, the fog cleared. The pipes continued to devour it, while no more emerged from the man to satiate their appetites.

  The gsses! They're what I came for, not the corpse or the fog!

  Kael barely celebrated for a second before he slid his spoil into his chest pocket and rushed from the room. He turned the crank until the door closed, locked the drawer, and set the key inside the sixth ledger on the shelf.

  Then, with a st gnce inside, he bolted out. Though he would have preferred to set the key between the exact pages where it had been, nothing else had moved. Marek shouldn't notice right away... At least, he hoped he wouldn't as he went down the stairs.

  The thugs on the second floor were gone. Likely joined the crowd below. Kael refrained from looking over the railing in case someone spotted him. Instead, he avoided the cells before reaching the first floor, then paused above the ground floor.

  No one on the stairs. Still, he crept down, his eyes darting from side to side. No one around either.

  "So, Marek, having trouble killing me?" He heard Giovanni's voice. It was half-groan, half-mocking, but low and feeble.

  Kael snapped his head toward the crowd, but couldn't see through the wall of men. What he saw, however, was blood beneath everyone's boots, much more than he had ever seen, and still spreading toward him.

  Shit. Truth or not, he won't st.

  Without hiding, he stormed his way to the doors. Screams drowned his footsteps, and thugs were more interested in guessing what strike would finish Giovanni.

  Riccardo and Tonio's eyes widened when he threw himself past them before hiding behind the wall. He slid down, knees trembling, breath ragged.

  After a dry gulp, he whispered, "What are you waiting for? Tell him I'm back."

  Riccardo shook his head, his voice tearing through the facility. "Give up, Giovanni. If you want to die, don't drag us into your mess!"

  Tonio sobbed as he tried to free himself, to scream that they'd return home together, that he wouldn't let Garrick's bad men kill his family. But Riccardo's hand pressed on his mouth, while his other wrapped around his neck.

  In the middle of the crowd, Marek paused mid-swing. A smirk contorted his lips. "Your own family abandoned you. You've fallen so much that I can't see the shadow of the man who spoke about broadening the sewers to set up root farms. Everything you built and loved is gone. You'll die with nothing but that inhuman body filled with regrets."

  Giovanni, hunched and bleeding from dozens of bone-deep cuts, pressed on his knee with his only hand. His back straightened. He gred at Marek, nothing betraying Riccardo's signal. "Here, let me help you. You can't even kill someone properly."

  With a hand pressed against his bleeding stomach, he felt the thing that kept cracking inside of him. It was a strange sensation, as if there was something in a pce where nothing should be. And now, he'd colpse that thing.

  Yet the moment he tried to, he froze solid. Sweat dripped down his half-melted face, which contorted into a feral grimace. His thoughts warped. What was he... trying to do?