The ocean is always freezing, no matter what optimists try to claim in the summer. It had never bothered Millie much to begin with, as swimming around soon sorts out that problem, but thanks to the warming bracelet on her left wrist, she feels only a small chill at best.

  Holding her breath is still instinct. It is hard to discard twenty year’s worth of basic survival intuition. But then she releases the air and watches the bubbles float up towards the surface. Her next breath is all water.

  Millie committed many minor crimes in order to afford the materials to build up a wizard’s spellbook. And she will commit many more to add to it. All of it work. All of it earning every scrap of power she’s obtained.

  But when Ms More called Millie into her office some six months before, and put a mysterious compartment ring on her desk, Millie couldn’t resist one shortcut.

  This ring seems to have an uncanny affinity for water, Ms More said. And a strange, raw power I’ve never seen. How do you feel about a deal?

  Ms More appears a regular woman. But the longer one talks with her, and stares into the dark eyes that gleam behind oval glasses, the more anyone with common sense would know there is something beneath the surface to be wary of.

  And thus, she is very nearly the last person one should owe an ambiguous favour to. But some opportunities are worth the risk. Millie is in her debt, and cannot regret it.

  Especially not today.

  Millie swims towards the cliffface, seeking the passageway described. Sure enough, there is a way through the rock wide enough that she can stretch her arms out comfortably. She kicks through, past the seaweed that snags on her boots, and finally comes up into an air pocket with a small platform.

  Millie spurts out the sea water from her lungs into the water in front of her—an undignified side effect of breathing underwater is needing to be rid of said water once back in the air.

  Above her, built into the rock with an odd octagonal shape to the design, is a stone door with a small round crevice where the two halves of it meet.

  “Inventor’s tits,” Millie curses under her breath.

  Managing to perform a simple spell after weeks of practice in the library? Logical. Devoting herself to getting the money she needs at any cost, to create a spellbook? Worthwhile work. Being offered a strange ring in exchange for a future favour? Questionable, but a risk worth taking when she has so little.

  This is something else. This is surreal. How could some strange hidden door be so close to her home, undiscovered by everyone until now?

  Millie laughs because there is nothing else to do. It echoes, and she hauls herself out of the water to stand dripping on the rock as she reaches into the coat for the key stone. Once in her hand, she uses her other to summon Evie back to her, and the dog reappears with a cheerful bark.

  “Wish me luck,” Millie says, and she presses the key into the stone.

  The door shudders and the two halves slide apart, the key popping out and back into Millie’s hand. She tucks it away and steps into the dark passage beyond.

  “People love to talk about ruins from the old elves,” Millie says to Evie. “But... this isn’t ruined at all.”

  Evie barks with agreement. Millie steps further in, and pulls her wand out to murmur the words to the first spell she ever learned outside of her mundane magic—a light spell. When her wand taps the ring on her finger, the metal glows.

  The passage ahead goes deeper than the light can pierce, but is wide enough to walk two-abreast, which would have been helpful if Millie had trusted Claude to come along. But her stubborn independent streak and protectiveness of Claude agree on several things, and with theft from a high noble on the line and complete unknown ahead of her, she cannot justify bringing Claude into such a thing.

  Besides, Claude’s voice tends to stay with her wherever she goes, in the back of her mind, like a better version of her own conscience or instincts.

  Right now, as she considers the passage, the tiles lining the floor, she can hear him. Nothing worth anything is ever unguarded. Millie reaches into her satchel and pulls out a single copper coin before throwing it ahead of her.

  The coin hits a tile. The tile erupts with fire—a bright orange column that reaches almost to the ceiling, lasting several moments before vanishing. Other tiles light up. Ready. Waiting. All with the same rune as the one that had created the fire.

  “Fuck,” Millie mutters. She scoops Evie up into her arms, holds her tight, and begins determining a path through the tiles not glowing.

  Don’t slip. Don’t rush. One step at a time. It’s an easier path than the web of arcane tripwires she and Claude had encountered on the last robbery they did with the guild, but the fiery consequence is certainly worse.

  Evie’s warmth against her chest helps keep her nerves under control, and they reach the other side unscathed.

  There’s another door ahead of them, but this one without a key. As soon as Millie steps closer, it opens to reveal a large room beyond.

  A quartet of pillars dominate the central space, only two of them still standing while the other two are broken. The furniture is mostly intact—a table with chairs in the far left corner, some seats against the right wall.

  But at the back of the room… is a glowing, swirling circle of energy. And in front of it, a bipedal shape.

  Stepping further into the space, the closer Millie gets, the more certain she is that it’s not a person. The proportions are too uncanny, the lines too angular. Is it made of metal?

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  “Hello?”

  A glow, matching the colour of the circle behind perfectly, radiates in the chest of the thing standing there. The figure shifts, straightens up, and speaks words Millie cannot understand.

  There’s a familiar sound to some of them, though, close to the Elvish language she learned from her mother and speaks with plenty of others around the Greenlands.

  When Millie doesn’t respond, it says the same words again. Millie swirls her wand in front of her, pressing her thumb into one of the metal beads near the base of the engraved wood. Because most of her spells take around a minute to cast, she made sure to work with Ms More—who is the guild’s magical specialist when she’s not making questionable side deals—to get the hang of imbuing her spells in something physical, to be released much more quickly. It makes for a lot of morning prep work, but crime is usually a nighttime errand.

  Pulling a basic comprehension spell from the metal and uttering the final word, there is a soft ripple of amber magic and a tingle in the back of her head.

  “Identify yourself,” the metal thing says. Is it a construct? Now that Millie looks at it, it has two arms on one side of its body, both clutching a long polearm weapon, while two broken stumps rest on the other side.

  Millie’s spell allows her to understand, but speaking in an unknown tongue is a much deeper magic she does not possess. All she can do is think on the Elvish she knows, on the most stiff and formal syntax she’s aware of or has ever come across.

  “Student,” she says. “Of the arcane.” It sounds a lot better than thief.

  It tilts its head ever so slightly. “Specify.”

  Millie resists the urge to curse. What the fuck was this thing made to do? How could she know what the right answer is, when she is no doubt exactly the kind of intruder it was designed to keep out?

  “Illusion and teleportation focus,” she says, stumbling over her attempt at saying the words as old fashioned as possible in their Elven versions.

  The construct lifts its long weapon. “… intruder.”

  It throws the polearm across the room.

  Millie yelps and ducks, just in time for the bladed staff to soar over her head. A laugh of pure nerves leaves her. Could this really be happening? The first construct she’s ever seen, and it’s attacking her? While she’s alone?

  She straightens up. A soft whistle near her right ear is the only thing that makes her twist to look behind her.

  The polearm is shooting back towards her, back the way it had come, towards the construct.

  “Shit,” she exhales, and only turning a little further saves her from the worst of the blade. It slices through the fabric of her shirt with ease, nicking her stomach.

  Millie has thrown spells at training dummies in the underground yards of the guild, and blasts of raw magic channeled from her ring, but never in a real fight. She’s stayed away from the more dangerous jobs so far, sticking to things that keep her in the shadows.

  Today is full of firsts.

  As the construct advances on her, Millie lets her feet carry her backward. She raises the wand and focuses on the ring’s power, pulling it into herself and through the wand. Her magic, amber and amplified, blasts from the wand and into the construct’s chest.

  It jerks at the impact, but continues walking forward. It throws the spear again and Millie feels it graze against her magical protection as she throws herself to the side to avoid it. This time, she hits the ground until the polearm flies over her head and back to the construct’s hand.

  From the ground, Millie has a great view of the intricate design detail on the construct’s ankles and knee joints, and at any other moment they might have distracted her terribly. Instead, she looks up, at the psuedo-face sitting atop its neck, missing half its plating, and grins.

  In the same way that a few simple illusions come far too easily to her, she has a few other tricks up her sleeve.

  Disciplined magic is a bitch to learn. Hours, pages, diagrams, words, in the dozens and hundreds. Without the proper paper to transcribe new spells, with nothing except the ravenous feeling in her soul, Millie had memorised the same two books from cover to cover. She’d scribbled the runes and words over and over in every combination she could imagine.

  And like a complex equation on a classroom blackboard, something about the essence of those magics, the teleportation and a while after, illusion, clarified itself. The answer. The formula. The way to tap into the potential directly, without a whole spell.

  The construct stands over Millie. It lifts the polearm to bring it down on her sprawled body, and Millie reaches into the potential around her and pulls.

  And then she is not on the ground, at the construct’s feet. She is across the room, forty feet behind it. She runs for the magic at the back of the room, in the hopes of it being a portal that could get her out of here.

  Her hand passes right through. Closed. Dormant? Guarded?

  “Shit,” she mutters, and blasts the construct with more magic before running further away. Skidding to a halt, when she reaches the table and chairs at the back of the room, she shoves the table over and ducks behind it.

  Her heart races. She’s laughing again, wordlessly, breathlessly, and she shouldn’t be. Why can’t she just be sensible? Why is she having fun while in the greatest danger she’s ever been in, in her life?

  “Teleportation magic detected,” the construct says.

  Its tone is so neutral that Millie could not begin to guess what this detail means to it. It is possible now it will stand down, deciding her statement of arcane learning was true?

  She readies another blast but holds it at the tip of her wand, waiting to see if it will attack again.

  A few seconds pass.

  Then, the polearm appears right in front of her, blade pointed and ready, and surges at her torso. Millie shrieks and throws up her wand in a desperate gesture, releasing her blast toward the ceiling as she shouts the word for a deflection spell.

  The blade hits the deflection, slides across it, and goes through her side just above her right hip.

  Pain slices through her and turns everything to blur, and Millie tries to push it aside as she pushes up to hurl another blast at the construct over the top of the table. The magic slams into the automaton’s chest, knocking off a plate of metal and further exposing the glowing core.

  Millie tries to reach into the potential to teleport again, somewhere the construct might expect her a little less. The potential pushes back at her, making her wince. Not yet. Temperamental fucking essence of the universe.

  The construct throws the polearm again, and this time she is able to hide behind the half of the table remaining and yank it around to catch the return.

  Millie kisses the end of her wand, prays to the First Inventor for her assistance in dismantling something so interesting, and unleashes another blast.

  The shining amber magic slams into the core of the construct and shatters it. The construct shudders and stops. As it does, the portal flares and swirls, coming alive.

  “Oh, thank fuck,” Millie says, clutching her wound and putting as much pressure she can on it. “I mean, thank you, Miss…Inventor…Autumn…Lady.”

  Perhaps she needs to visit the Greenlands temple and brush up on the honorifics of the gods if she’s going to find herself in bullshit scenarios more often and make it through when she has little right to.

  Letting herself sit again, she reaches into her bag for the old first aid kit that definitely needs replacing soon. The dimensionally transcendental bag is the most expensive thing she owns aside from her spellbook, but having access to a satchel whose inside is technically elsewhere entirely from the space outside it is actually invaluable to her. Otherwise, said spellbook might befall some mundane tragedy, such as becoming waterlogged now that she can traverse the ocean and odd underwater passages under the cliffs with ease.

  One roll of bandages remains. No padding. No antiseptic lotion. All Millie can do is yank up her shirt, wrap the bandages as tight as she can, and stand up with a wince.

  Evie, now back at her side and making soft noises of worry, licks her hand. Millie smiles at her and looks at the portal.

  “Time to find out if it was worth it,” Millie says.

  And with that, she and Evie step through the portal and from a dank chamber into fresh, open air.