"One of our newest acquisitions," the attendant said, and there was a shift in her tone, a note of professional pride breaking through the careful neutrality. "A treatise on Sanguimancy. Appraised for Beginner to Intermediate practitioners."

  Alice's hand hovered over the velvet cover. Sanguimancy. Blood Magic. The word conjured Florence instantly, unbidden: the girl standing in that shack with her arms at her sides and a man's heart painting the walls behind her. The bewilderment on her face. The total absence of intent. Florence was a loaded cannon pointed in every direction at once, and she didn't even know where the trigger was.

  If she didn't learn to control that affinity, she was going to accidentally liquefy a professor.

  Alice owed the girl a life debt. Teaching her not to pop people like overripe fruit seemed like a reasonable installment.

  "Sanguimancy..." Alice murmured. She looked at the attendant. "What's the corruption index?"

  Every Grimoire carried a risk. The author's mana imprint lingered in the ink long after it dried. A Pyromancy text might leave you running hot for a week, craving salt, sweating through your sheets. Unpleasant, but manageable. The darker disciplines were a different matter entirely. Necromancy and Blood Magic were notorious for warping the reader's mind, inducing cannibalistic urges, or simply rotting them from the inside out.

  "According to our in-house appraisers, minimal," the attendant said calmly. "The author was a scholar, not a fanatic. The text focuses on the medical and kinetic applications of the blood rather than the ritualistic."

  Exactly what Florence needed. A textbook, not a manifesto.

  "Alright," Alice said, feeling magnanimous. "How much?"

  "Fourteen thousand, three hundred and thirty chips."

  Alice choked. She actually coughed, her grip spasming on the charcoal pyromancy book hard enough to dent the spine. "Excuse me?" The words came out a full octave higher than intended. "Fourteen thousand? This one is six hundred. You've added a zero."

  "I assure you, I have not," the attendant replied, her wooden mask impassive. "It is a matter of supply and demand, Madam. Pyromancers are common. You can find a fire mage on every street corner in the industrial district. Sanguimancers are rare. Those willing to write down their secrets without cursing the reader are rarer still."

  She tapped the wet-looking cover. "A clean, extensive Sanguimancy Grimoire is statistically non-existent. You are paying for the rarity."

  Alice stared at the book. Fourteen thousand crowns. A furnished townhouse on the Meridian. A merchant vessel with crew. A year's operating budget for a mid-sized firm. The number sat there in her skull, enormous and obscene, and the worst part was that she could feel herself already reaching for the justification.

  She gritted her teeth until her jaw ached. "Wrap it up," she hissed.

  The attendant beamed behind her mask, the golden arrows on her cheeks catching the light. "An excellent choice. A purchase for the discerning connoisseur."

  Alice watched her mental ledger crater. Nearly eighty thousand remained, which was still a fortune by any sane measure, but watching fourteen thousand crowns evaporate in ten seconds left a physical ache behind her sternum, like a bruise she couldn't touch.

  "I need to stop shopping," Alice muttered, clutching her purchases.

  "But Madam." The attendant gestured toward the heavy iron door at the back of the room. "We haven't even reached the Artifacts yet."

  The door groaned open on oiled hinges, and Alice followed the attendant through, her mind still churning the arithmetic.

  Fourteen thousand crowns. For a girl she'd known less than a week.

  She tried to frame it as a rational investment. Florence saved my life in the woods. She stared at the back of the attendant's immaculate dress and ran the calculation with detached, brutal honesty. Is my life worth fourteen thousand crowns?

  Realistically? No. Not really.

  If she were held for ransom, her father might pay the sum to avoid the scandal, but he would certainly complain about the exchange rate over dinner for the next decade.

  The Artifact Vault was nothing like the treasure hoard Alice had envisioned from adventure novels. No mountains of gold, no jewel-encrusted swords jutting from piles of coin. It was a sterile, climate-controlled corridor, narrow enough that two people would have to turn sideways to pass each other. Glass display cases lined both walls, each humming with its own containment field, the combined drone pitched just below the threshold of comfort.

  "Is there anything specific on your mind, Madam?" the attendant asked, her voice carrying a faint echo in the confined space.

  Alice's eyes flicked to the Shadow-Weave Cowl resting on a mannequin head near the entrance. One thousand chips. The cheapest item in the inventory, which naturally made her suspicious. If the cowl was the bargain bin, logic dictated the expensive items were where the real power lived.

  "I'm just looking," Alice murmured. "Do you have any Class B artifacts in stock?"

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The attendant paused and turned back with a polite, frozen smile. "We do possess Class B artifacts, Madam. However, the Vault is strictly Class C inventory. The Class B items are not for sale. They are reserved for House use or auction events."

  A ripple of disappointment, swiftly buried. She'd hoped to at least lay eyes on a Class B for the first time. Instead, she was browsing the retail floor.

  She wandered down the row of cases, passing a jagged dagger that seemed to weep its own dark oil in slow, viscous beads, and a necklace strung with what looked like petrified eyes, each one clouded and staring in a slightly different direction. Her gaze snagged on a smaller, less ostentatious case near the middle of the corridor.

  Floating in the center of the containment field was a glove. It was made of dark leather, worn and distressed, stained the color of old tobacco. It looked more like something pulled from a gutter than a display case. But the design was peculiar: it covered the thumb and three fingers only. The index finger was entirely exposed, the leather cut away cleanly at the knuckle.

  Alice stopped. "What is that?"

  "Ah," the attendant said, gliding over. "The Thieves' Glove. A unique piece, acquired from a rather frantic tomb raider some months ago. We were informed it was formed from the remains of his partner."

  The words settled in the sterile air.

  "Formed from the remains," Alice repeated, eyeing the dark, stained leather with fresh suspicion. "Raiders aren't known for their loyalty. Did he perhaps hasten the process?"

  "We did not inquire," the attendant said smoothly. "He was selling, we were buying."

  Alice dismissed the backstory with a shake of her head. Provenance didn't interest her. Function did.

  "What does it do?"

  "Would you like a demonstration?"

  "Please."

  The attendant unlocked the case. The containment field sizzled and died. She retrieved the artifact, then peeled off her own pristine white glove from her left hand and tossed it onto the floor a few meters away with deliberate casualness.

  Alice raised an eyebrow.

  The attendant slipped the Thieves' Glove onto her bare hand. The leather contracted instantly, shrinking with a wet, tightening sound until it fit her skin like a second dermis. The exposed index finger wiggled freely.

  "Like most apparel artifacts, it adjusts to the user," the attendant explained, flexing her fingers. She raised her open palm toward the white glove lying crumpled on the floor. "Allow me."

  No keyword. No windup. No theatrical gesture. A bright, silent glow manifested in the center of the leather palm, a white light that swallowed the shadows for half a heartbeat.

  The attendant closed her fingers into a fist, extinguishing it.

  She waited a beat. Then she opened her hand.

  The white silk glove sat crumpled in her palm.

  Alice looked at the floor. Empty.

  "Spatial displacement," Alice breathed. "Teleportation."

  "Correct." The attendant peeled the artifact off. The leather loosened immediately, returning to its stiff, worn shape. She slid her own silk glove back on with practiced ease. "The Thieves' Glove allows for the instant transportation of objects within a six-meter radius directly into the user's grasp. It holds two charges. Once the first charge is expended, the artifact begins a thirty-minute recharge cycle to restore full functionality."

  Six meters. About twenty feet. Not far in the abstract, but Alice could think of a dozen scenarios where twenty feet was the width of the world. Snatching a key off a guard's belt. Grabbing a weapon that had been kicked across a room. Pulling the pin on a grenade that was still hooked to someone's chest.

  "Useful," Alice admitted. "What does it cost me? And I don't mean crowns."

  The attendant tilted her head. "Should you deplete the second charge, the Thieves' Glove inflicts a wave of extreme paranoia and acute anxiety onto the user. The psychological strain persists until the charges are fully restored."

  "So thirty minutes of panic."

  "Essentially. We recommend keeping one charge in reserve unless the situation is truly dire."

  Alice almost laughed. Paranoia and anxiety. She'd been carrying a surplus of both since the carriage ride to Dunwick. If the price of teleportation was half an hour of looking over her shoulder, she was getting a bargain. It just made her thoughts louder.

  She could handle loud.

  "How much?"

  "Two thousand, four hundred chips."

  Alice didn't blink. "Put it in the cart."

  After fourteen thousand on a book she couldn't even read, two thousand for a teleporting glove felt like buying a pack of gum.

  She continued down the corridor, her boots clicking softly on the polished stone. The spending was becoming alarmingly easy to justify. The glove was for utility. The book was for Florence. Now she needed something for herself, something that would keep her off the grid.

  Her gaze drifted across a shelf of various headwear, then stopped on a mask sitting alone on a velvet pedestal. It wasn't ornate like the ones worn by the staff upstairs. It was a plain, metallic faceplate, smooth and featureless: two eye holes, a ridge for a nose, a simple horizontal slit for a mouth. It looked like a face that had been wiped clean. A blank canvas waiting for someone to fill it.

  "The Visage Mask," the attendant said, materializing at Alice's elbow with that soundless glide of hers. "We are unaware of its specific origins. It was recovered from the stockpiles of an abandoned warehouse in the industrial district. A diamond in the rough." She gestured toward it with a gloved hand. "One of our premier Class C artifacts. Shall I walk you through its capabilities?"

  Alice nodded.

  "At its simplest, it allows the wearer to replicate another person's voice with absolute fidelity. Provided you have a clear memory of the target's cadence and tone, the reproduction is flawless." She let that land, then continued. "The metal is also psycho-reactive. It can reshape itself to replicate any face, again depending on the clarity of the wearer's mental image."

  "Voice and face," Alice said. "That alone is worth the pedestal."

  "There is a third function," the attendant said, "and it is the most potent. While wearing the mask and observing a target, the artifact assists in replicating their demeanor. Posture, gait, the subconscious tics that make a person recognizable even from behind. It acts as a corrective brace for your performance, smoothing the seams that a human disguise always leaves exposed."

  A spy's entire toolkit in one piece of metal. Voice, face, and behavior. Alice stared at the blank faceplate and felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle.

  "And the catch?" she asked.

  The attendant's pause was almost imperceptible, but Alice caught it. "The side effect is psychological. While the mask is active, the wearer begins to experience identity dissociation. You fall into the belief that you are the person you are mimicking."

  Alice frowned. "How fast?"

  "It depends on the load. The voice and facial morphing are relatively safe for extended periods. But the behavioral mimicry is taxing on the ego. If all three functions are active simultaneously, we estimate the user has approximately three hours before the boundaries of identity begin to dissolve." She smoothed her skirt. "As for the monetary cost, five thousand, eight hundred and ninety-nine crowns."

  Nearly six thousand. Enough to make her wince. But Alice glanced back at the Shadow-Weave Cowl near the entrance. A thousand crowns just to muffle her voice. This was a complete identity overwrite.

  "If I get this, I don't need the Cowl," Alice said, half to herself. "And the side effects are manageable. As long as I don't try to live someone else's life for a day."

  She looked at the attendant. "I'll take it. Add it to the pile."