“Or the museum. But seeing as how Morgan’s on the main board of directors here, it amounts to the same thing.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” she told him. “The Order hates us.”
“True, but it wouldn’t be the first time they used us against each other. There are plenty in this city desperate enough to do nearly anything, including working for the Order.” He glanced at her. “Look at the Haymarket. Corey might not be in the Order yet, but he’s trying to get in. He might not be all that powerful, but he’s a Mageus, same as the guards he employs. Even if he keeps his own identity a secret, his people all know who he rubs elbows with, but they think they’re protected because they work for him. They’re willing to rat out other Mageus, even though the unlucky ones get handed over to the Order.”
Esta realized then how much danger she’d really been in that night. “That’s horrible.”
“Maybe, but you can’t really blame them. Corey pays, and he pays well. Bad enough that the Order forces us to live in the worst parts of the city and uses their influence with the public to keep us in our place, but that’s not enough for them. No, they still have one weakness—they can’t sense magic like we can. But if they turn us against each other, it solves the problem.”
“We didn’t plan for this,” Esta said. “We have to call it off and get out of here. Now. We can come back when we’ve figured out a different way in—”
But Nibs wasn’t listening. He glanced down the hall toward where the guests were beginning to arrive, his eyes soft and unfocused. Then, all at once, he seemed to come to some decision. “No.”
“No?” She gaped at him.
“Jianyu’s already inside the gallery.”
Esta went very still. “It’s already locked?”
Nibs nodded. “And the room is half-full of Morgan’s guests.”
“We won’t be able to warn him,” she said, as the realization of how tight a spot they were in sank heavy in her stomach. “The second the doors open, he’s done.”
It had seemed simple enough when they’d laid it all out earlier. Without motion sensors or cameras, it should have been an easy job of evading a few guards. Morgan was set to inspect the gallery and his exhibition before the show. Concealed, Jianyu would slip in with him and wait until they’d secured the room. There were no windows, no other doors—no way in or out except through the locked and guarded entrance to the next gallery where the reception would happen.
At eight o’clock, Morgan would give a speech, and then the doors to his exhibition would be opened to his guests. By then Jianyu would have cleaned out the room and hidden himself along with the loot. The guests—all the leaders of the city and newspapermen reporting on the event—would be the first to see that Morgan’s so-called great exhibition was nothing more than some empty frames and glass cases. All that would be left was for Jianyu to sneak out in the confusion. Easy.
All the while, Esta would be using the distraction of the robbery to clean out the rest of the guests—jewels, cash, anything that would embarrass Morgan further.
“We have to get him out of there,” she told Nibs.
Except that now Jianyu was locked in a room, blocked by a crowd that contained Mageus playing for the enemy, watching for any sign of magic. When the doors opened, the walls would be bare and the guards would find Jianyu, who would be using his affinity to conceal himself. Once they found him, everything could be traced back to Dolph and the rest of his people.
“Even if you could get him out, you can’t call off this job,” Nibs said. “Dolph wants this done, and he wants it done tonight.”
There has to be a way. “So we’ll have to do it without magic, which means we’ll need a distraction,” she said, thinking through the plan and imagining what the Professor would have done, how he’d taught her to use what was available. “The best we can hope for is to throw them off, to point them away from Jianyu and away from Dolph. And we’ll need backup if everything goes wrong.”
“What are you thinking?” Nibs said, curious now. Interested.
“I think we need Viola,” she told him, hoping that the half-baked idea she was formulating on the fly would work. And hoping that Viola wouldn’t kill her for what she was about to ask her to do.
CLEVER THIEF
Harte made his way through an empty gallery toward the sound of voices ahead. He’d been to the museum before, countless mornings on the free-entry days, when he stared at paintings that promised a world beyond the narrow strip of land he was trapped on. Usually, on those days, the rooms would be filled with the chattering of women more interested in discussing the fashions of the other visitors than looking at the art. So that night, the silence felt like a gift. It transformed the whole place into his own private gallery, allowing him to imagine—just for a moment—that he’d attained the life he’d dreamed for himself.
He stopped in front of a landscape, a dramatic vista of glimmering rivers and sky-capped mountains in the distance. Places like that existed. Places that were clean and open, free from the stink of the city with its coal-laden air and trash-filled gutters. He had to believe that someday he would see them for himself. He took a moment more to let the image fortify him, and then he continued on toward his destination.
Eventually, the voices grew louder, and he came to the large, airy gallery that held a series of medieval altarpieces. It was currently serving as a space for less spiritual concerns—the cocktail party for J. P. Morgan’s many guests. Servers in brightly colored tunics carried trays of champagne to Morgan’s guests, who glittered in their jewels and silk.
Harte handed his invitation to a doorman, who gave it only a cursory glance before handing him a program and nodding for him to continue. But as Harte passed through the entryway, he felt the warning warmth that signaled magic in the air. It crawled across his skin, tousling his hair as it inspected him.
The guards are Mageus. It was an unexpected and unsettling development, to say the least, but Harte forced himself to keep walking into the crowded room as though he hadn’t felt anything. People without affinities could rarely feel magic the way Mageus could, so Harte didn’t allow himself to so much as pause. Instead, he pulled everything he was inward, locking down his own power with a speed that made his skin go cold.