Bram Ash moved with the swift, noiseless economy of a man who had spent a decade staging raids on unlicensed warehouses. He caught the iron lip of the drawer with his thumb, shoving the heavy steel runner back into the frame. The cabinet closed with only a dull, muffled thump as the rubber stop bumpers engaged.
From his pocket, Bram produced a small stub of carpenter’s graphite, soft and greasy. He spat once onto the lead, then smeared the black paste across the brass escutcheon plate of the lock, filling every tiny scratch that his pick-wire had scraped into the keyhole. To a checker shining a lantern down the aisle on an ordinary walk-through, the lock would look untouched. Dull, dust-filmed, and sealed by town grease.
“Move,” Bram muttered, gesturing toward the north cross-aisle. “The stairwell is twenty paces ahead. Don’t look back.”
Len turned, his boots finding the iron floor rails. His stitched left forearm gave a sharp, sickening throb as his driving force shifted. But his Road Sense was already working through the soles of his boots. He felt the shaking of the boots three stories above. Four men, heavy, moving with the disciplined rhythm of the Judge’s Internal Security Corps. Their axe-spear butts tapped the slate treads of the upper stairs at three-second intervals. They were forty seconds from the intermediate landing.
