Thieves

Thieves
Stolen Time, Volume 1
Lyn South
Published by Creative Force Publishing, LLC, 2020.


This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
THIEVES
First edition. July 22, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 Lyn South.
ISBN: 978-1732921535
Written by Lyn South.


Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgements
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For my Head Boy with the Ravenclaw lanyard.


Chapter 1
This is the last heist I’ll ever pull. After this, I’ll have enough money to do as I damn well please. I’ll never be hungry or homeless again. I’ll pick my favorite year, go off-grid, and disappear into time itself. I’ll be free.
As soon as I get out of this cramped, stinky bathroom, I’ll be free.
My only escape route is closed. Merde.
A mere six feet from my hiding place, the Grand Duke of Tuscany pens a letter at his desk. Peering through the crack in the door allows a glimpse of the Duke as he works. His feathered quill bobs in staccato rhythm with each furiously scribbled stroke, but my attention is drawn to the closed door to his right.
I can’t leave without the diamond. I’ve planned too long, risked too much, to abandon my prize. I had only been in the Grand Duke’s bedroom for a few minutes when my search was interrupted by his early arrival home. By a rough estimate, I’ve been hiding for thirty minutes. I’m forced to wait until the duke leaves the room or retires for the night before finishing my search for the jewel.
Patience is not a quality I possess.
The bells of the nearby church tower ring midnight. It doesn’t faze the master of this house. Cosimo de’ Medici sits in a linen nightshirt, his coat discarded next to the chair. Close at hand are dusty, unpacked saddlebags. A decanter on his right has dispensed three glasses of expensive Italian brandy since he sat down to work.
His bony shoulder blades strain against the opaque fabric of his shirt, and he looks like an overgrown schoolboy in his father’s clothes. More to the point: He looks settled into work that could burn further into the night than his half-spent candle will bear. I bite my lip to suppress another, louder, curse. Fagin chides me for being vulgar, but I find it a useful means of self-expression.
The maids empty the chamber pot — a cream-colored ceramic piece adorned with the five red balls of the family’s coat of arms — and the acrid smell of aged piss hangs in the air. It doesn’t bother me; as an indentured servant on the merchant ships of New Orleans, I’d smelled worse. The bigger problem? There’s nowhere to hide if the duke relieves himself before going to bed. I have one small advantage: Sneaking into the villa dressed as a servant boy allows more stealth and anonymity than the seventeenth century gown I wore earlier in the evening.
“Clémence Arseneau, where the hell are you?” Commander Jackson Carter says. I don’t know why he’s whispering. The CommLink all Observers wear sits down inside the ear canal, so only the person wearing the thing can hear its broadcast. The unit includes an integrated microphone that allows hands-free voice-activation and volume control.
Damn. I turned the volume down earlier, because I was sick of hearing him talk. I give the computer a command. “Increase audio volume twenty-five percent.”
I know I’m late to the extraction point. The other thieves made it on time, I’m sure. They all resist the urge to stray outside the strict boundaries of our fortune-hunting mission rules. Incentives for mercenaries to stay on the straight-and-narrow lie in the penalties for taking a cut of the Benefactors’ plunder: A life sentence to a prison planet or a slow, painful execution.
Fearing imprisonment or death is no excuse for the absence of imagination and having the courage of profiteering convictions.
“Arseneau, acknowledge,” Carter says, his voice tinged with irritation. I know what he’ll say when we’re face-to-face because I’ve heard it dozens of times—I put the mission and the team in danger with my side jobs. I disrupted the legendary clockwork precision of his plan by going off on my own. Again.  Blah. Blah. Blah.
My mentor, Fagin, has said that I’ll regret ignoring rules, but I don’t believe in regrets. They’re a waste of time and energy.
My tongue sweeps over parched lips. “I’m trapped,” I whisper.
A beat. I imagine him peering at his display screen to see where I am. “In the toilet? Again?” Carter asks. “You have twenty minutes to get your ass back to the ship or you’ll be walking home.”
He thinks he’s hilarious.
He knows I’m stuck in the loo because he can see everything I see. I could turn off the LensCam contact lenses—another piece of required equipment—without removing them, but there would be questions. They’re designed to broadcast the minute they’re inserted; the operations team, back on the ship, uses them to record everything Observers see. Turning them off without authorization comes with a hefty fine—up to twenty-five percent of the commission for the entire job.
There are ways to manipulate the LensCam; all it takes is a little help from a friend. When I need to keep mission commanders from poking their noses in where they don’t belong, Nico Garcia—my co-pilot and partner-in-crime—manipulates the LensCam feed with a recorded video of the physical environment, running on a loop, so the commander continues to see the physical environment, and not whatever shenanigans I’m getting up to in real time. Once I can get out of the toilet, Nico can interrupt the LensCam broadcast with our custom-made footage, and I can finish this job.
There’s a noise from the bedroom. The duke shifts in his chair, stretching his Condor-like arms out to each side. He pushes back from the desk, and the chair makes a jarring noise as