watched, and hauled themselves free of the waters.
Their legs shaking, their whole body exhausted, they sat down on the edge of the old well and stared up at the star-ridden sky—not two minds within one body, as they’d thought previously, but one mind in two bodies. They did not have to give voice to their awe, their amazement, their wonder—for it was their own. They knew their own mind. They knew what they felt.
And then, very slowly, they separated: they disentangled piece by piece, falling out of alignment, becoming two minds, two bodies, closely linked across miles and miles…
Berenice stared up at the stars, and somewhere, very far away, Sancia stared up at the darkness of her blindfold. Berenice let out a breath, regretting for a moment that it was only her mouth, her throat, her body that did so.
said Sancia.
said Berenice softly.
They sat in awed silence as they tried to recover.
whispered Sancia.
Dripping wet, she slipped off into the streets of the Dandolo campo—a place she’d known for many years, one that should have been deeply familiar to her; and yet now she passed through the streets under strange skies, peering out through alien eyes.
said Berenice,
said Sancia,
* * *
—
Between Berenice’s knowledge of the campo and Sancia’s scrived sight and thieving instincts, there was no door or boundary or barrier that could hold them back, no soldier or guard who spied anything more of them than a hint of shadow or a wet footprint. Within minutes they’d acquired four scrived keys, two sachets, one scrived dagger, and one fire starter, and then they were shooting through the veins and capillaries of the campo like a blot of poison speeding toward a beating heart.
Berenice knew where she was going. She knew all the scriving workshops on the Dandolo campo, but only one would do for her work tonight: the Hypatus Building. The place where she and Orso had labored for years, dreaming up mad solutions to impossible problems.
She quietly slipped through the inner enclave gates, the guards barely paying attention to her: her sachet worked, after all, and the black skies made it hard to care about a wet girl in rather shabby Commons clothes.
No dreaming up solutions tonight, thought Berenice as she wove through the alleys. She spied the peaked roofs of the Hypatus Building just ahead. I know what I need to make. How fast I shall have to work…
She approached the Hypatus Building. She did not know much about scaling walls, but as she peered at the building with Sancia’s sight the knowledge blossomed in her mind, and she knew the second floor had the least defensive wards prepared against intruders.
She approached the wall, placed a hand against its stone, and all of Sancia’s experiences about infiltration and evasion poured into her thoughts.
whispered Sancia.
Berenice grabbed the edge of the first-floor window and hauled herself up, her toes expertly parsing the gaps in the bricks, her fear of heights suddenly vanishing.
She clambered up, ignoring the pain in her fingers and the webbing of her hand, and placed her palm to the window. Its scrived wards were nothing to her will, to her knowledge of their logic, and she batted them away like they were moss, opened the window, and slipped inside.
She studied the floors around her, reading the scriving—their logic, their placement, their interrelationships. She spied the workshop within seconds, and then the stairs down to it, and