Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,16

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?”

They went through the rest of the locks, one by one. Every time, the second Clef penetrated the keyhole, the lock sprang open.

said Sancia.

said Clef.

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.

said Clef.

Sancia snapped out of her reverie.

Sancia pulled a face and wondered how in the hell to explain scriving.

said Clef.

said Clef, disgusted.

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.

<’Course I can. You want me to prove that too?> he said, smug.

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.

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