"You hear that? Come on. Get moving. We'll see what it is."

"Dammit, who's creeping about in the dark like that?"

Fay heard the guards below, their voices carrying up the slope in short uneasy bursts.

The camp had ears. Too many. She pressed herself flat for a breath, listening for footfalls, counting the pauses between words.

She needed cover. A few shrubs clung to the rock nearby, miserable things that had learned to live on little.

Fay flicked her whip. The lash bit through branches with quick clean cuts. Leaves and twigs fell into her hands.

She wove them together around her shoulders and back until she wore a rough suit of green and shadow.

She did not stay in one spot. Stillness got noticed.

She moved at once, low and quick, heading for the most guarded place in the camp.

The one with the most patrol passes. The one with the most light and the heaviest silence around it.

If the bandit leader was here, it would be there. Sangno.

As Fay climbed, the atmosphere thickened. Men watched the paths with solemn faces, not laughing, not gambling, not drinking the way bandits in stories did.

"When d'you reckon the boss'll be back?"

"Dunno. Didn't think we'd ever see a day like this."

Their eyes were hard. Their mouths were set. A spitfire of a camp, all coiled temper and held breath.

For a heartbeat Fay felt a sting of pity. These were men who had decided the world would never feed them unless they took.

Then she shook it off. She sent qi into her feet and made her steps light.

No scrape. No loose stone kicked. No sound that did not belong to the night. Who would think a bush was a thief at this hour.

The large hut sat higher than the rest, broader, guarded by two men who walked slow circles as if they had been ordered to stay awake forever.

Fay edged closer, and her senses brushed the life inside.

Women. More than one. Waiting. Listening. Their hearts beating in a room that smelled of smoke and sweat and cheap perfume.

Fay hesitated for only a breath. Her first mission. Her first true test. She could not afford faltering now.

She slipped toward the entrance. The first person who saw her was a woman near the door, eyes widening, breath drawing in for a scream.

Fay stepped in and drove a fist up into her jaw. Bone clicked. The woman folded without a sound and hit the floor like a sack of grain.

She caught her before the impact could thud. She dragged her fast behind a storage shelf and stripped her outer clothes with hands that did not shake.

The fabric smelled of smoke and oil. Fay layered it over her own robe, covering the black and white for a red evening gown.

Then she began to walk the room Not normal steps.

A bouncing rhythm. Each footfall carried a thin thread of qi that spread out through the floorboards, probing, listening, mapping.

She was searching for the array's bite points, for the place where the wood stopped being wood and became a lid.

It would not be upstairs. No one hid a vault under straw.

An incense stick's worth of time passed before she felt it. A faint click under one heel.

An unassuming patch of kitchen floor that did not creak like the rest.

Fay knelt, lifted the board, and found a huge stone underneath.

Four directions were carved into it. Up. Down. Left. Right. A simple device made dangerous by how easy it looked.

She had read about these. Hit the right sequence and the hidden mechanism would open. Fail too many times and it would lock, or worse, call for help.

She checked the wear on the grooves, tracing them with her fingertips. The most used paths held faint smoothing, tiny signs left by anxious hands.

She tried a simple combination first. Up, down, left, right.

Nothing. One of the lines in the array dimmed.

Fay's breath caught. Four red lines remained bright. Four tries left.

She needed the right pattern fast.

Sangno. The man with the huge gauntlets. A boxer type. Men like that did not move like scholars.

They moved like habit. Like drills. Like stance and sequence repeated until the body remembered even when the mind was drunk

Fay rose slightly and took a basic close combat stance, letting her shoulders settle as if she wore gauntlets herself. Right hand first.

A forward bias. A rhythm. Up. Right. Down. Left.

A second line faded out. Footsteps, soft and small, pattered in the hall beyond the kitchen.

Fay stilled. She eased her head up and peered through a gap in the straw floor covering, watching without moving.

A child. A little girl, no more than four, lips cracked, eyes dull with thirst.

She shuffled into the kitchen as she had done it a hundred times, seeking water, seeking warmth, seeking anything. Her gaze lifted and caught Fay's.

For an instant the world narrowed to those eyes.

Fay's heart trembled. Her teeth clenched. The thought rose ugly and immediate.

Silence her. Now. If not then everything collapses.

Her hand slid toward her whip. Qi began to gather.

The child blinked, then turned away, not screaming, not running

She walked out like she had seen someone she trusted.

Fay followed the motion with her eyes and saw who the child was going to.

Her mother. The woman Fay had punched. Bruised at the jaw now, stirring, confused, not yet understanding what had happened.

The mother, still naked, took a vase from the shelf and poured water into a cup with hands that shook from sleep and pain.

She gave it to the child without looking around, then rubbed her jaw and muttered under her breath, trying to remember how she had slipped.

Annoyance sat on her face, sharp and petty. A bruise meant less favor. Less attention. She looked at her reflection in a bronze mirror and scowled.

Fay understood the thought without needing the words. If she looked ugly, she might not get a taste of her man.

She returned her focus to the stone beneath the floorboards. Three tries left. She could not afford to waste another.

She breathed once and changed her posture, shifting her weight as if her dominant hand was the left. A different rhythm. A different habit. A different man.

Up. Left. Down. Right. A click answered. Clean. Certain. The mechanism loosened under her palm.

Fay eased the hidden door open and peered into the dark space below, breath held, taking in the first glint of what Sangno had buried.

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