"Left at the next junction," Zeke says, low.

  "You're guessing."

  "I'm calculating. The drawing room is the heart of the east wing. Servant paths converge there."

  "Calculations don't matter if we trip a ward."

  The corridor splits. Then splits again. Ten minutes of slow, careful walking and the air gets heavier and the smell gets worse and I'm fairly sure we've passed this particular crack in the plaster before. Zeke stops at a three-way junction, his silhouette pausing a beat too long in front of the branch ahead.

  He won't say it. He doesn't have to.

  I step past him and trail my fingers along the lime-washed stone until I find what I'm looking for - a small blue square painted near the baseboard, half-hidden behind a stack of empty crates.

  "Blue square." I point with the tip of my rod. "The laundry was running toward red circles, by the kitchen. These lead up."

  The floor inclines. A staircase opens up behind a heavy velvet curtain - narrow, steep, barely wider than my hips. We test each step before committing weight, working our way up in silence. At the top, the air changes. The lye smell drops away and something colder takes its place - flowery perfume and marble and the particular stillness of rooms kept for guests that never come. I drop to a crouch and pull Zeke back against the wall before he can crest the final step.

  The Grand Hall.

  Too much gold leaf, too much ceiling, too many sight lines. It takes me a moment to spot what I'm looking at in the center of the space, because they move so quietly I initially mistake them for decorative statues. Three big porcelain cats. Or maybe jaguars? I don't know, but they look like predators. White, with gold filigree tracing the anatomy of muscles under the glaze. Two of them patrol in slow, separate arcs. The third sits immobile at the main entrance, its head rotating in a constant, mechanical sweep.

  A single petal drops from the arrangement on a pedestal near the stairs. The nearest cat doesn't look toward it. It moves - a blur of white and gold with no gear-noise, no warning - and pins the petal flat to the marble before it lands. It holds there for a beat, head tilting, then retracts and resumes its circuit as if nothing happened.

  "They aren't looking for us specifically," I say.

  "Sudden movement," Zeke says. The bravado is gone from his voice entirely. "Light change."

  "Back down," I say. "We find the kitchens and cut across the dining hall. We need a route with more cover."

  We backtrack through the maze of corridors, following the red circles now, the temperature climbing as we go.

  The kitchens are a cavern of black iron, the stoves still warm from dinner service. Two servants are on hands and knees at the far end, scrubbing the flagstones, brushes the only sound. A bucket near the center island has been overturned - a wide shallow pool across the floor. One step into it and we're leaving wet prints through the rest of the house. I signal Zeke wide and we work around the edge with careful, tested steps.

  Halfway across, the back of my throat begins to itch. An uncovered bowl of powdered spice on a prep table, fine and acrid. My eyes water. Beside me, Zeke has gone still. One of the servants stops scrubbing and turns their head toward the dark.

  I bury my face in my elbow and force the sneeze into a small, muffled huff. The servant waits a moment, then goes back to their brush.

  We keep going.

  The dining hall is vast and empty, the long table cleared and dark. I do a quick check - no tripwires, no shimmering ward signatures. The Baroness trusts her perimeter in here.

  "Too easy," I mutter. "She spends a fortune on guards and leaves the interior unprotected. The paranoia is overrated."

  The room is too bright - a dozen candles in silver holders throwing our shadows large against the walls.

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  "Less light," Zeke says.

  We blow them out one by one. The room drops into proper gloom - and at the archway connecting to the Grand Hall, something moves. White and gold, silent.

  I grab Zeke's shoulder. "Table! Fast!"

  We go down. I press flat, arms in, legs tucked. The construct flows in from the hall and pauses, head tilting, scanning for whatever caused the light change. It steps onto the carpet. Holds.

  I don't breathe.

  It lingers, then retreats back toward the hall.

  "Overrated, was it?" Zeke says, from the dark beside me.

  "Don't start. Let's go."

  The other side of the Grand Hall is a dark archway - the music room, no doors, open access. Straight shot across twenty feet of marble, and beyond it the connector to the drawing room.

  "We can't walk the hall itself," Zeke murmurs. "We cut through."

  "Not together. Two shadows are twice the risk."

  I wait for the lead cat to complete its turn, then cross. Not running - running displaces air. I keep my weight low and my steps barely touching the marble, and press myself against the music room's inner frame.

  Zeke follows. He's nearly clear when moonlight catches the crystal chandelier above the hall and scatters a brief flash across the floor.

  The nearest construct stops. Head snaps toward the light. Zeke is mid-stride, one foot hovering. He doesn't move.

  The moonbeam shifts. The flash goes. The cat considers the empty air, then resumes its arc.

  Zeke steps in beside me.

  I put the lenses on. The room reorganizes in cold grey and blue, and I stop moving.

  In the center of the room a golden harp sits on a raised podium, and through the lenses the air around it is threaded with silver - dense near the strings, thinning only at the walls. A monitoring system. No player at the podium, and the harp reads the room and plays itself. One note and every cat in the house responds. I keep looking. Ornate cages against the far wall light up in lens' view. Sleeping songbirds. The cages are proximity-sensitive, walk too close and they'll react.

  "The cages by the door," I say, barely moving my mouth. "Don't get within four feet."

  I move to the harp, approach slowly with deliberate rhythm - a musician's presence, not an intruder's. I press the rod to the floor at the podium's base and feed a steady pulse into the wood. The silver threads settle.

  "Go."

  Zeke takes the left wall toward the door. His shoulder drifts a tiny bit too far. The nearest cage begins to glow. Amber, pulsing, brightening. A bird stirs, wing against the bars. The light catches the pale angles of Zeke's face.

  He freezes.

  I stare at him. Just don't move.

  One slow step back. The amber fades. Bird settles, tucking its head back under a wing.

  Zeke reaches the door and opens it without sound. I hold three more counts, then pull the rod and cross the floor and we're through.

  The connector is short and narrow, a final tight passage before the estate's private rooms. Zeke stops at a small side table and sets his wooden box down, unlatches it. Two masks come out - molded leather, thick glass goggles, a heavy cylindrical filter at the jaw. Functional and grim.

  "During the audience," he says, "I saw the vases. The stone lilies on the side tables in the drawing room. They're not decorative - they vent a sleeping mist when room gets dark. Chemistry, not magic. The lenses won't show it until it's already in your lungs."

  I take the mask. It smells of charcoal and oiled leather. I pull it over my head and feel the seal tighten around my jaw with a low hiss. My breathing becomes a rhythmic, hollow echo inside the filter. Everything from here is hand signals.

  We enter the drawing room.

  High ceilings. Velvet drapes so thick the walls behind them might not exist. The smell of old wealth and flowers going soft at the edges of the petals. Near the divan, a young maid lies on the rug with her duster still in her hand, her chest rising and falling in slow, deep rhythm. Not dead. Just new - nobody told her to leave before the flowers started their night work. I ignore her and go straight to the far wall.

  The gallery passage should be here, according to the plans. All I can see is just silk wallpaper, unbroken, hung with a row of portraits in heavy frames. All of them grim. None of them hiding an obvious door.

  I sweep the wall with my rod, holding the tip inches from the surface, working in a careful grid. Nothing. No pulse, no resistance, no sign of a hidden seal. Dead stone and paper all the way across. I work my way down the full length of the wall, frustration building behind the goggles, and come up with absolutely nothing.

  Behind me, Zeke has wandered toward the fireplace. He's looking at the clock on the mantelpiece - tall, ornate, dark wood and silver gears. He tilts his head at it the way he tilts his head at mechanical problems, which is to say with the particular attention of someone who grew up understanding how things are put together.

  He reaches behind the clock's housing.

  There's a small lever there. He pulls it.

  The ticking stops mid-beat. A heavy mechanical groan runs through the wall, behind the wallpaper, and the entire section - portraits and all - shudders and slides backward into a hidden recess.

  I'm standing in the center of the room with my rod held out like a divining stick and absolutely nothing to show for it.

  Zeke looks at me through his glass goggles. Even through the mask I can see the angle of his head. He didn't need magic. He just needed to know that the Baroness hides things the same way clockmakers do - with a lever, in plain sight, behind something that looks more interesting.

  I lower my arm. I'm annoyed, mostly because it's the obvious thing and I didn't think to check it.

  Zeke gestures toward the opening with a small, unnecessary bow.

  I walk past him into the dark.