25. The Plan

“Hey, Joren. You’re in for a drink today?”

One of the warehouse workers called out to Alistair, who was currently playing the role of Joren through Falsehand. Worker would have been the better class for the actual warehouse work, but Alistair had deliberately swapped to Falsehand near the end of the shift.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”

The answer satisfied the others. A loose group of about a dozen workers left the warehouse together and started toward their preferred tavern, which was also the cheapest one worth drinking in.

Normally, Alistair avoided unnecessary contact with his coworkers. The less people noticed him, the better. But after everything he had seen and learned in recent months, he had started to understand the value of contacts, habits, and solid personas he could rely on later. So now he accepted some invitations, not all of them, but enough for Joren to feel like a real person in the minds of the other workers.

Using Falsehand for this was deliberate.

In truth, Alistair was a little short on active clones, and wasting one on a useless social event was unwise. Tonight, however, the drinking invitation served a more important purpose. He was building an alibi, not for himself exactly, but for the Joren persona.

Elsewhere, his main body lay on a comfortable bed.

The room was not in his usual inn. He had rented it at the Lantern Court, a more expensive inn closer to the area where he needed to operate that night. He had chosen it for privacy rather than comfort. The rooms in that inn had separate entrances opening directly onto a rear courtyard, which meant he could come and go without an innkeeper or other guests noticing repeated movements. If the place were not so expensive, he might have considered moving there permanently. As things stood, it was an acceptable expense only when he needed it for operations like this one.

Once everything was ready, he set the plan into motion.

Inside Roe’s warehouse, hidden figures rose from concealment.

Escapee unlocked the special smuggling section quickly, then the smaller office inside it. As soon as he finished, the clone disappeared. Meanwhile, Saboteur walked to a certain wall that looked no different from the others and started pressing at a few specific stones.

Alistair had revisited the smuggling section several times over the last days, only to confirm that the Midnight Dream and the records had not been moved. During one of those visits, he had discovered something interesting. The idea had come from what Shade had heard during the investigation of the Split Cup. One of the officers had commented that Hedra had been clever, hiding so many shards in a concealed compartment inside the inn.

The realization had struck Alistair immediately.

The very same day, he had brought Seeker into the smuggling section and used Keen Find for general guidance toward anything valuable or hidden. The result had been frustrating at first. The direction pointed toward an ordinary wall. Still, after some effort, Saboteur found the weakness in it. By pressing the right stones in the right order, the wall unlatched and revealed a small hidden vault.

Inside, he had found trade tokens, a large number of shards, and, most importantly, a handful of cores.

Since then, Alistair had been restless to clean that vault out.

He had not dared while Roe remained unwarned and the larger plan was still taking shape. Robbing the vault too early would have alerted his enemy for no gain.

Now he could finally do it.

Saboteur opened the hidden compartment again. The contents were still there. The clone removed everything worth taking, then the others began preparing the rest of the scene. They moved some of the Midnight Dream into a more visible position, one that anyone entering the warehouse under emergency conditions would immediately see. One of the sacks was slit open so the powder spilled across the floorboards. Even before anyone touched it, its appearance and smell would cause alarm. Anyone familiar with the substance, or even with a proper description of it, would recognize it with a glance.

Once everything was set, Framer and Saboteur walked around the warehouse in silence, their minds sharing the same problem.

Eventually, Framer disappeared too, leaving only Saboteur behind to finish the final preparation.

Back in the tavern, Falsehand maintained Joren’s quiet, slightly withdrawn persona while preserving most of Alistair’s attention for the other bodies. He kept the performance restrained. Joren was quiet, but no longer strange enough for the other workers to remember.

One of the men at the table raised his cup toward him. “You’ve been less dead lately.”

Another snorted. “That’s because Mern finally started giving him easier tasks.”

“That’s a lie,” someone else said. “There is no easier in the warehouse.”

A few men laughed.

Falsehand gave a small shrug. “Could just be I’m getting used to it.”

“You hear that?” the first man said. “A month more and he’ll start smiling.”

A few more low laughs followed.

Falsehand took a drink, nodded once at the joke, and let the conversation drift over him. He needed to contribute little. Being present did the rest.

A little later, he rose. “Need to relieve myself.”

The excuse drew no special attention.

Falsehand left the room, rounded a corner out of sight, and dissolved.

Soon afterward, in another part of town, Shade and several other clones approached a certain building.

It was a two-story structure with a shop on the ground floor and a modest three-room home above it. The shop sold second-hand tools, common household goods, and items that had often passed through many hands before anyone asked where they came from. Pell rented the whole place. He lived upstairs and used the lower floor to quietly turn his extra profits into something that looked respectable. His brother-in-law and sister handled most of the daily business, but the place existed because Pell’s ill-gotten gains made it possible.

Most town guards did not live like that. They stayed in shared quarters or simpler lodgings. But Pell had a steady extra income. Some of it may have come from legitimate work, but much of it clearly did not.

Escapee opened the lower door quickly and disappeared so Falsehand could be resummoned and return to the tavern before anyone noticed Joren was gone too long.

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Shade and the remaining clones continued.

At this hour, Pell would normally have still been awake. A man with his habits and comforts usually stayed up later. The night shift at the gate had changed that. He had only recently returned, which meant exhaustion had beaten routine. He was in a deep sleep.

Still, Pell did stir when a faint disturbance touched the door to his room.

His PER was the reason.

Pell was narrow-minded and predictable in many ways. Left alone, a man like him would have shoved most of his free points into whatever stat favored his class skill. In his case that was STR, which increased the effect of Empowered Strike, one of the most common and straightforward combat skills among town guards and hired muscle. But the town guard did not train men according to their personal preferences. The position came with stats distribution obligations.

The job lacked glory, but the town offered useful benefits. A young recruit with any acceptable combat class, or another sufficiently useful class, could enter service and spend a year in paid training. The result usually pushed him to around level five if he had decent growth. The training covered more than discipline and guard procedure. It also established basic weapon competence and basic stat balance. Every guard had to bring all physical stats to at least six, and PER to ten, before being truly free to distribute points where they pleased.

Because of that, Pell woke when another man might have slept through the disturbance.

He failed to understand the reason. Sleep had left him too dazed and tired. But people with high PER learned to fear the possibility of being wrong more than the inconvenience of checking. Pell got up.

He sat first on the edge of the bed, grimacing, and rubbing his face. Then he listened.