As Brendon worked the storeroom, he kept an ear to the corridor and the sound of the meat counter being tended. He found the manager's office door, soft as a promise. The office light had a faint smear of cigarette smoke over it; someone had been here recently. He eased the handle and the latch gave like a sigh.
Ninja Fox watched the shuttered window, then crossed to the safe beneath the desk. She had a kit that fit like a glove — picks that tasted of old metal and patience. Brendon kept one hand on the knob of the door, his free hand on the butt of a short metal rod hidden in his jacket. He had no intention of firing a weapon here; the public noise would be worse than any bullet. Close combat was his preference: a knife's whisper, a palm to a throat, a shoulder into a jaw. It kept things quiet and messy in a way that bureaucracy could not paper over.
The safe yielded with a soft complaint and a clink like coins falling. Camelia's voice floated in thinly, "Two minutes left. Police checks are still one turn out. You have to go quick."
Ninja Fox murmured, then set to work with the filing cabinet's drawers. She kept the light low, preferring the slant of a single torch to the wash of the overhead. She pulled folders out, flattened photographs of crates, invoices with stamps, and pages of signatures. Brendon watched the manager's drawers like a man waiting for an answer to a question he wasn't sure he wanted.
She opened the false bottom like an act of reverence. Inside were wooden tubes — small, varnished cylinders packed in sawdust, sliding in like teeth in a box. They looked harmless at first: wooden tubes stained with age and perfume, bound with a thin strip of leather and a faint wax seal. Alongside them, a stack of photos had been folded carefully: images of men and women whose faces were rubbed raw by life and work, pictures that looked like they had been taken for passports and then used for something else. There were letters in a coded hand, invoices stamped with shell company names.
Brendon's breath left him slow. The tubes hummed in the silence like bees in a jar. He knew, in the center of his bones, that they were more than wood.
Ninja Fox's fingers hesitated over the tubes. "What are these things?" she asked softly, genuinely for once. Her voice had a shade of curiosity stripped of the arrogance she wore in the streets.
The look Brendon gave her was a thin blade. He hadn't planned to reveal the truth — not like this, not among buzzed men and a filing cabinet full of lies. But the presence of the tubes made all the metaphors concrete and terrible.
"Magic tubes," he said. He kept his voice low, the way a man speaks when a child sleeps in the next room and you do not want to wake them. "Used to… to let some mythivens wear a veneer. For those who can't shift themselves, or won't risk showing what they are. It's like a costume made from someone else's will."
Ninja Fox's face did not change at first; then a thin line of something crossed it. "I thought mythivens were in fairytale stories or so I thought. I thought you are the only kind." she said. "So that means my friend was mythiven too?"
Brendon wrapped his hand around himself. He didn't know what to say anymore. The friend she was talking about... maybe she was too a mythiven. If that's true then her motivation will grew stronger to take down Mayor Guerieo. But rage can blind people and make them unforeseen mistakes. It coup be deadly.
Instead answering her he decided to divert the topic. "Maybe, I would like to have a closer look. May I?"
Without saying anything Ninja Fox gives him one of the tubes.
The tube was rough edged from outside. But inside the tube, it lay a strip of something like skin folded small and pale, and a pin of carved bone. It was intimate and obscene all at once — an object that had been cut from a thing that might have been alive. Brendon swallowed hard; his mouth tasted of rust.
Camelia's voice stuttered in his ear. "I'm seeing images on the feeds. I can't hold them long. They're streaming a copy to a secure node — for legal reasons later. You need to move now; I'm getting a spike on the east gate."
They had what they came for: photos, papers, invoices with the brand, and the wooden tubes, the latter the most damning evidence that these shipments weren't meat or mundane exports. The tubes proved intent: disguise, trafficking, a market for those who could not — or would not — be themselves. Paper could be faked. Bones and skin and carved pins were harder to hide in courtrooms.
"Grab what you can and go," Ninja Fox said. She spoke like a commander who had been waiting for months to release force. Her fingers worked the cabinet with a speed Brendon is forced to admire: fingers nimble as a pickpocket's, but with the surgeon's caution. She slid the photos and the tubes into a satchel and closed the false bottom gently, like someone closing a coffin and not daring to look inside.
They moved to go. The plan lived in the air like a map left unfolded; the steps had been easy — up to a point. Drago had promised a run of noise to distract and provide an exit. He had promised two men two streets over with bicycles and a crate of smoke. Brendon felt the tiny pulse of relief at the plan's success.
Then the world turned hard and close.