The Alchemists of Loom (Loom Saga #1)
Elise Kova
1. Arianna
Arianna had a bomb, three bullets, two refined daggers, a mental map of her heist, and a magic winch-box. All she waited for now was darkness.
The refinery she stared down upon had been coughing up only wisps of smog from its spiraling smokestacks since sunset. Ari had been watching it dwindle for weeks until it finally all but wrote “Tonight is the night, oh White Wraith” in the sky. She’d been eager for this job; the pay was astounding. But that hadn’t been what drew her to it. No, she loved the challenge of it, the way it dredged up patience and planning and calculation from her like rare minerals from a mine.
Weeks of preparation—listening in on grunts describing their rotations, lifting papers from refinery manager’s homes, studying the logic behind the blackened, mammoth skeleton of steel and iron that was known as the refinery—had come down to this night. She looped her line through the stonework next to her and clipped it to itself. Dortam’s infamous White Wraith was so very ready for what was coming next.
Moonlight streamed bright enough to cut her shape into the ground far below, making her presence known to any who bothered to take note. But Ari stood with relaxed shoulders and a slack posture. The grunts would be called into the refinery’s core to provide extra protection when the reagents were switched. They wouldn’t know they were a glint in her eye until it was far too late.
The refinery belched up a sudden stream of smoke. Thick, inky, oppressive. It sizzled across Ari’s nose with the uncomfortable tang of magic turned sour. The reagents had been exhausted.
The moon’s annoyingly attentive stare finally faltered in the clouding sky, and Ari stepped forward into welcoming blackness. The winch box on her hip sang as it funneled golden cabling from spools attached to her belt and through the harness strapped across her waist and chest. Seconds ticked by in her mind, sharp and precise. Ari knew how fast she would fall, and the exact height of the building where she’d perched just a moment ago. After that it was basic arithmetic to determine how long it’d take to reach the top of the iron-spiked wall that bordered the refinery.
Magic pulsed from her fingertips as she tapped the winch box. The gears within clicked smoothly, slowing her descent at her behest. Ari reached down and felt the top of one of the spikes just beneath her, exactly where she had expected. Vaulting off the wall, she pulled the linchpin of her line and tumbled onto the barren ground below.
Ari rested a hand on one of the two crossed daggers at the small of her back and summoned the line back into the spool on her hip. The metal cord shuddered and sprang to life at her silent magical command, slithering back to its home like a snake to its den. She turned on her heel and strode through the murky darkness without need of a light. The refined goggles that served to enhance her already-above-average eyesight made easy work of navigating the night.
A giant, ineffective padlock attempted to bar her entry. She’d taken apart her first Rivet lock when she was a toddler; the satisfying weight of the tumblers engaging with the soft click that followed filled her with a familiar delight.
Numbers remained consistent. Numbers and facts attempted to bring order from a chaotic world, to make sense of the impossible. They were the foundation for colossal structures and the tiniest of clockwork machines alike. Ari loved numbers, and not just because they saved her life by keeping her alert in her surroundings.
She knew that each of her long strides were about a peca. She knew the dimly lit workers’ passage she went through was about twenty pecas long. And just for fun, she knew—based on the foreman’s old schematics that she lifted from his home office a week earlier—that they placed tiny bioluminescent scones about every two pecas.
She moved with the ease and purposefulness that came from being unafraid and unhindered by the concerns that clouded the emotional mind. It all vanished the moment she became the White Wraith. Like this, she was an extension of the will of her benefactors, an enemy to all Dragons, and more than just a Fenthri. She cast aside the mortal coil to become something…more. When Ari felt the tattered flaps at the bottom of her white coat hit her booted calves, she felt like a bloody god.