It started small the way bad things usually start.

  Reva came to the meeting on Thursday with a look on her face that was not her usual look. Not worried exactly. Alert in the specific way of someone who has noticed something they did not expect to notice and are still deciding what it means.

  Ervan saw it before anyone sat down.

  “Talk.” He said.

  Reva sat. “Someone’s been asking about the vault job.”

  The room went the particular quiet it went when something shifted from finished to not finished.

  “Who.” Ervan said.

  “Don’t know yet. Second hand. A contact of a contact heard someone in the lower Middling Ring asking about a private showing at a merchant’s premises three weeks ago. Asking about who attended. Whether anyone had gone somewhere they shouldn’t have.”

  “How specific.”

  “Specific enough that it’s not general curiosity.” Reva said. “Someone knows something happened. They don’t know what yet or they wouldn’t be asking around.”

  Ervan was quiet for a moment. He had the stillness he got when he was thinking, not the stillness of someone who had nothing to say but the stillness of someone who was saying it all internally first.

  “We sit on it.” He said. “Nobody moves on anything connected to that job. Nobody talks about it. We wait and see what shape it takes.”

  He looked around the room.

  “Understood.”

  Everyone nodded.

  Zelig nodded.

  He walked home with Flint after.

  The evening was cold, the tail end of the rain from earlier in the week still sitting in the gutters and on the stones, the Row reflecting the glow lanterns in the wet surface the way it did after rain, everything doubled and slightly wrong in the reflections.

  Flint walked with his hands in his pockets and said nothing for two streets which for Flint was a long time.

  “Someone knew to look.” Flint said eventually.

  “Yes.” Zelig said.

  “That means either someone saw us at the showing and knew we didn’t belong. Or someone knew about the vault contents specifically and is working backward.” He paused. “Which is it.”

  “Second one.” Zelig said.

  Flint looked at him sideways. “You’re sure.”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “We were clean at the showing. Thirty people in that room and none of them had a reason to look at us twice. The front was solid.” Zelig said. “Whatever is pulling attention is not coming from the showing. It’s coming from the item.”

  “The thing Reva retrieved.”

  “Or the thing I saw on the shelf.” Zelig said. He had not told Flint what he had seen. He was telling him now because the situation had changed and the calculation had changed with it. “Third shelf. Eastern artifact. Labeled in a script from a closed province. It should not have been in that vault.”

  Flint absorbed this without visible reaction which was one of the things Zelig had come to appreciate about him. Most people reacted to information before they had finished receiving it. Flint waited until he had the whole thing.

  “And you think the person asking around is connected to that artifact specifically.” Flint said.

  “I think someone moved that artifact a very long way to a very specific place and they would like to know if that place has been disturbed.”

  Flint was quiet again.

  “Did you tell Ervan.” He said.

  “Not yet.”

  “Zelig.”

  “I will.” Zelig said. “When I know more. Telling Ervan half of something is worse than telling him nothing. He’ll make decisions on incomplete information and those decisions will be wrong in ways I can’t predict.”

  Flint looked at him for a long moment.

  “You’re going to tell him soon.” Flint said. It was not quite a question.

  “Soon.” Zelig said.

  Flint accepted this without saying he accepted it, which meant he was not fully satisfied but understood the logic and was going to let it sit for now. That was as much as Zelig needed.

  They split at Arbor Street.

  Marie was awake when he got in, which was unusual for this hour. She was at the table with a cup of something and the particular expression she had when she had been waiting for him without wanting to seem like she had been waiting.

  “Late.” She said.

  “Meeting ran.” He sat down across from her.

  She looked at him the way she looked at him when she was deciding something.

  “The man.” She said. “The one Netta saw on the Row on Wednesday.”

  Zelig went still.

  Netta was the woman on the second floor, the one half of the couple who argued every third night. She knew everyone on the Row and everything that happened on it the way people knew things when they had lived somewhere long enough that the place was just an extension of their own awareness.

  “What about him.” Zelig said carefully.

  “Netta said he came back.” Marie said. “Yesterday. Same thing, just walking and looking. She said he stopped outside the old Carver building, the boarded one, for a long time.” She paused. “She said he looked like someone who was very calm about being somewhere he shouldn’t be.”

  Zelig said nothing.

  Marie looked at her cup. “I don’t know what you’re involved in.” She said. “I don’t ask. You know I don’t ask.” She looked up. “But that man made Netta uncomfortable and Netta has lived on this Row for forty years and does not get uncomfortable easily.”

  “I know.” Zelig said.

  “Do you know who he is.”

  A beat.

  “I’m finding out.” He said.

  Marie held his eyes for a moment. Then she nodded, once, the nod that meant she had said what she needed to say and was leaving the rest to him and did not love doing that but had accepted it was what she did.

  “There’s food from earlier.” She said, standing up. “It’s cold but it’s there.”

  She went to bed.

  Zelig sat at the table alone and looked at the wall.

  Hedral Stillson had come back.

  He was not just passing through. He was not just looking. He was returning to the same location with the patience of someone who had not found what they were looking for yet but knew it was there and was not in a hurry because they were certain enough to wait.

  That certainty was the thing that concerned Zelig most.

  Certain people were dangerous in a specific way. Uncertain people could be redirected, confused, made to doubt themselves. Certain people just kept coming back to the same spot until they found what they were looking for.

  He needed to know what was in that building before Hedral Stillson found it.

  He needed to tell Ervan.

  He needed to do both of those things in the right order.

  He sat there working out the order until the lamp oil ran low and the light started going yellow and thin. Then he went to bed and lay on his back in the dark and stared at the ceiling.

  Tomorrow.

  He would move tomorrow.