<What do I do?> she asked. <Just put you in the keyhole?>
<What else would you do with a key?>
Sancia lined Clef up, gave him a mistrustful glance, and slid the golden key into the lock.
Instantly, there was a loud click, and the Miranda Brass sprang open.
Sancia stared.
“Holy shit,” she whispered.
<Believe me now?> said Clef.
Sancia dropped the Miranda Brass, picked up another — this one a Genzetti, not as durable as a Miranda, but more complicated — and popped Clef in.
Click.
“Oh my God,” said Sancia. “What in all harpering hell…how are you doing that?”
<Oh, it’s easy. All closed things wish to open. They’re made to open. They’re just made to be really reluctant about it. It’s a matter of asking them from the right way, from inside themselves.>
<So…you’re just a polite lockpick?>
<That’s a really reductive way of thinking about it, but sure, yeah, whatever.>
They went through the rest of the locks, one by one. Every time, the second Clef penetrated the keyhole, the lock sprang open.
<I…I don’t believe it,> said Sancia.
<This is what I am, girl,> said Clef. <This is what I do.>
She stared into space, thinking. And an inevitable idea quickly captured her thoughts.
With Clef in her hands, she could rob the Commons absolutely blind, build up the savings to pay the black-market physiqueres to make her normal again, and skip town. Maybe she didn’t even need the twenty thousand her client was dangling in front of her.
But Sancia was pretty sure her client was from one of the four merchant houses, since that was who dealt in scrived items. And she couldn’t exactly use a lockpick to fend off a dozen bounty hunters all looking to lop her to pieces, and that was precisely what the houses would send her way. Sancia was good at running, and with Clef in her hand, she could maybe run quite far — but outrunning the merchant houses was difficult to ponder.
<Well, that was boring,> said Clef. <You don’t have any better locks than that?>
Sancia snapped out of her reverie. <Huh? No.>
<Really? None?>
<No mechanist has ever dreamed up anything stronger than a Miranda Brass. There’s no need to, not with scrived locks available for the really rich people.>
<Huh. Scrived locks? What do you mean?>
Sancia pulled a face and wondered how in the hell to explain scriving. <Okay. Well. There’s these things called sigils — it’s some kind of angelic alphabet that the scrivers discovered, or something. Anyways, when you write the right sigils on things, you can make them…different. Like, if you write the sigil for “stone” on a piece of wood, it becomes more like stone — a little stronger, a little more waterproof. It…I don’t know, it convinces the wood to be something it isn’t.>
<Sounds tedious. What’s this got to do with locks?>
<Hell…I don’t know how to put this. The scrivers figured out a way to combine sigils to make a bunch of new languages. Ones that are more specific, more powerful — ones that can convince items to be really, really different. So they can make locks that only open for one key in the whole world, and they’re completely unpickable. It’s not a matter of pressing and pulling on the right lever, or something — the lock knows there’s only one key it’s supposed to open for.>
<Huh,> said Clef. <Interesting. You got any of those lying around?>
<What? Hell no, I don’t have a scrived lock! If I was rich enough to afford a scrived lock, I wouldn’t be living in a rookery where the latrine is just a bucket and a window!>
<Yeesh, I didn’t want to know that!> said Clef, disgusted.
<It’s impossible to pick scrived locks, anyways. Everyone knows that.>
<Eh, no. I told you, everything closed wants to open.>
Sancia had never heard of a rig that was capable of picking scrived locks — but then, she’d never heard of one that could see and talk either. <You really think you can pick scrived locks?>
<’Course I can. You want me to prove that too?> he said, smug. <Think of the biggest, meanest scrived lock you can, and I’ll bust it down like it was made of straw.>
Sancia looked out her window. It was almost dawn, the sun crawling over the edge of the distant campo walls and spilling across the leaning rooftops of the Commons.
<I’ll think about it,> she said. She put him in her false floor, shut the door, and lay on her bed.
Alone in her room, Sancia thought back to her last meeting with Sark, at the abandoned fishery building on the Anafesto Channel.
She remembered navigating all the tripwires and traps that Sark had set for her—“insurance,” Sark had called it, since he’d known that Sancia, with all her talents, would be the only one who could safely circumvent them. As she’d gingerly stepped over the last tripwire and trotted upstairs, she’d glimpsed his gnarled, scarred face emerging from the shadows of the reeking building — and to her surprise, he’d been grinning.
I’ve got a corker for you, San, he’d rasped. I’ve got a big fish on the line and no mistake.
Marino Sarccolini, her fence, agent, and the closest thing she had to a friend in this world. Though few would have thought to befriend Sark — for he was one of the most disfigured people Sancia had ever seen.
Sark had one foot, no ears, no nose, and he was missing every other finger on his hands. Sometimes it seemed about half his body was scar tissue. It took him hours to get around the city, especially if he had to take any stairs — but his mind was still quick and cunning. He was a former “canal man” for Company Candiano, an officer who’d organized theft, espionage, and sabotage against the other three merchant houses. The position was called such because the work, like Tevanne’s canals, was filthy. But then the founder of Company Candiano had gone mysteriously mad, the company had almost collapsed, and nearly everyone had gotten fired except for the most valuable scrivers. Suddenly all kinds of people who’d been used to campo life found themselves living in the Commons.
And there, Sark had tried to keep doing what he’d always done: thieving, sabotaging, and spying on the four main merchant houses.
Except in the Commons he hadn’t had the protection of a merchant house. So when he’d finally gotten sniffed out by agents of Morsini House after one daring raid, they’d taken him and ruined him beyond repair.
Such were the rules of life in the Commons.
When she finally saw him that day in the fishery, Sancia had been taken aback by the look on Sark’s face — for she’d never seen him…delighted. A person like Sark had little to be delighted about. It was unsettling.