The Republic of Thieves

“Of course you did.”

“Honest!”

“Seems to be troubling you. Or maybe you’re ill. You’re shaking.”

“I’m … I’m fine.”

“Have it your way.” Beth closed her eyes and massaged them with her fingertips. “I guess you’ve saved me a hell of a lot of trouble. Do you want me to … look, is there someone bothering you that you want to stop?”

Locke was startled. An older child, this older child, of all people, and a member of Windows, was offering him protection? Could she do that? Could she put Veslin and Gregor in their place?

No. Locke forced his eyes away from Beth’s utterly fascinating face to bring himself back down to earth. There would always be other Veslins, other Gregors. And what if they resented him all the more for her interference? She was Windows; he was Streets. Their days and nights were reversed. He’d never seen her before today; what sort of protection could he possibly get from her? He would keep playing dead. Avoid calling attention to himself. Rule one, and rule two. As always.

“I just fell,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“Well,” she replied, a little coldly. “As you wish.”

Locke opened and closed his mouth a few times, trying desperately to imagine something he might say to charm this alien creature. Too late. She turned away and heaved Tam and No-Teeth to their feet.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, “but you two idiots owe your supper to the arsonist of the Narrows here. Do you understand just how much hell we’ll all catch if you ever breathe a word of this to anyone?”

“I do,” said Tam.

“I’d be very put out to catch any at all,” Beth continued. “Any at all! You hear me, No-Teeth?”

The poor wretch nodded, then sucked his knuckles again.

“Back to the Hill, then.” Beth tugged at her kerchief and adjusted her cap. “I’ll keep the things and pass them to the master myself. Not a word about this. To anyone.”

She kept her now-customary grip on No-Teeth all the way back to the graveyard. Tam dogged her heels, looking exhausted but relieved. Locke followed at the rear, scheming to the fullest extent of his totally inadequate experience. What had he said or done wrong? What had he misjudged? Why wasn’t she delighted with him for saving her so much trouble?

She said nothing to him for the rest of the trip home. Then, before he could find an excuse to speak to her again once there, she was gone, vanished into the tunnels that led to the private domain of the Windows crew, where he could not follow.

He sulked that night, eating little of the supper his nimble fingers had earned, fuming not at Beth but at himself for somehow driving her away.

9

DAYS PASSED, longer days than any Locke had ever known, now that he had something to preoccupy him beyond the brief excitement of daily crimes and the constant chores of survival.

Beth would not leave his thoughts. He dreamed of her, and how the hair spilling out from beneath her cap had caught the light filtering down through the interlaced greenery of the Mara Camorrazza. Strangely, in his dreams, that hair was purely red from edge to root, untouched by dye or disguise. The price for these visions was that he would wake to cold, hard disappointment and lie there in the dark, wrestling with mysterious emotions that had never troubled him before.

He would have to see her again. Somehow.

At first he nurtured a hope that his relegation to a crew of troublemakers might be permanent, that Beth might be their minder on an ongoing basis. Unfortunately, the Thiefmaker seemed to have no such plans. Locke slowly realized that if he was ever going to get another chance to impress her, he’d have to stick his neck out.

It was hard to break the routines he’d established for himself, to say nothing of those expected of someone in his lowly position. Yet he began to wander more often throughout the vaults and tunnels of his home, anxious for a glimpse of Beth, exposing himself to abuse and ridicule from bored older children. He played dead. He didn’t react. Rule one and rule two. It almost felt good, earning bruises for a genuine purpose.

The lesser orphans of Streets (that is, nearly all of them) slept en masse on the floor of creche-like side vaults, several dozen to a room. When his dreams woke him at night Locke would now try to stay awake, to strain his ears to hear past the murmuring and rustling of those around him, to detect the coming and going of the Windows crew on their secretive errands.

Before he’d always slept securely in the heart of his snoring fellows, or against a nice comforting wall. Now he risked positions at the outer edge of the huddled mass, where he could catch glimpses of people in the tunnels. Every shadow that passed and every step he heard might be hers, after all.

His successes were few. He saw her at evening meals several times, but she never spoke to him. Indeed, if she noticed him at all, she did a superb job of not showing it. And for Locke to try and speak to her on his own initiative, with her surrounded by her Windows friends, and they by the older bullies from Streets … no presumption could have been more fatal. So he did his feeble best to skulk and spy on her, relishing the fluttering of his stomach whenever he caught so much as a half-second glimpse. Those glimpses and those sensations paid for many days of frustrated longing.

More days, more weeks passed in the hazy forever now of childhood time. Those bright brief moments he’d spent in Beth’s presence, actually speaking to her and being spoken to, were polished and re-polished in Locke’s memory until his very life might have begun on that day.

At some point that spring, Tam died. Locke heard the mutterings. The boy was caught trying to lift a purse, and his would-be victim smashed his skull with a walking stick. This sort of thing wasn’t uncommon. If the man had witnesses to the attempted theft he’d probably lose a finger on his weaker hand. If nobody backed his story, he’d hang. Camorr was civilized, after all; there were acceptable and unacceptable times for killing children.

No-Teeth went soon after that, crushed under a wagon wheel in broad daylight. Locke wondered if it wasn’t all for the best. He and Tam had been miserable in the Hill, and maybe the gods could find something better to do with them. It wasn’t Locke’s concern anyway. He had his own obsession to pursue.

A few days after No-Teeth got it, Locke came home from a long, wet afternoon of work in the North Corner district, casing and robbing vendor stalls at the well-to-do markets there. He shook the rain from his makeshift cloak, which was the same awful-smelling scrap of leather that served him as a blanket each night. Then he went to meet the crowd of oldsters, led by Veslin and Gregor, who shook down the smaller children each day as they came in with their takings.

Usually they spent most of their energy taunting and threatening Locke’s fellows, but today they were talking excitedly about something else. Locke caught snatches of the conversation as he waited his turn to be abused.

“… right unhappy he is about it … one of the big earners.”

“I know she was, and didn’t she put on airs about it, too.”

“But that’s all Windows for you, eh? Ain’t they all like that? Well, here’s something they won’t like. Proves they’s as mortal as we is. They fuck up just the same.”

“Been a right messy month. That poor sod what got the busted head … that little shit we used to kick the chompers out of … now her.”

Locke felt a cold tautness in his guts.

“Who?” he said.

Veslin paused in mid-sentence and stared at Locke, as though startled that the little creatures of Streets had the power of speech.

“Who what, you little ass-tickler?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Wouldn’t you like to fucking know.”

“WHO?”