Thieves

by Lyn South

  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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  Also By Lyn South

  About the Author

  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 it scrapes across the stone tile. I creep backward, out of view as he passes the door, and hold my breath. Papers rustle as his frantic hands rummage through something I can’t see.

  I creep back to the door for another look. The duke crouches over the bags on the floor, his body positioned so that his face, with its hooked nose and deep-set eyes, are in profile. He retrieves a small, square leather box with a looped closure from the bag.

  He opens the case and I glimpse its contents: an enormous, yellow-tinted stone. Gently removing it from the case, he holds it up for inspection. The jewel sparkles, refracting the candlelight at dozens of interesting angles. It’s so breathtaking, my palms itch at the thought of holding it.

  This is it. The Florentine Diamond. The jewel worth more than all the other jobs I’ve ever done combined. This is the payday I’ve waited for.

  This legendary stone, so coveted by royalty and thieves alike for nearly five hundred years, disappeared in the mid-twentieth century. For this part of its long and storied journey, in the year of our Lor
d Sixteen Hundred and Fifteen, the de Medici duke has reclaimed it from the stone cutter hired to finish it.

  It looks odd, this lemon-shaped thing with its 126 facets in a double-rose cut. The stories say it’s at least 137 carats of unrivaled worth. I breathe a little prayer that the seams of my small pouch can hold its eight-pound weight.

  There’s a knock at the door. Startled, the duke tucks the diamond into its case, and slips it into the top draw of his desk and locks it. He drops the key, threaded with a black silk cord, around his neck.

  “What do you want?” the duke says through the bedroom door, not bothering to open it.

  “Your wife. She calls you,” a man answers.

  “I am busy.”

  “She is most insistent, Your Grace. She says you must come at once.”

  The duke sucks air through his teeth. “Anon. I come, anon.”

  He strides over to the desk and, though he locked the drawer moments ago, tugs on the handle. Satisfied the drawer is secure, he throws a robe over his nightshirt and rushes from the room, pulling the bedchamber door closed behind him.

  I listen for the last echoes of his footsteps to fade at the far end of the corridor and I am at the desk in a wink. I drop to my knees and retrieve the lock pick tools tucked inside my waistband. The lock is intricate, with three ornately scrolled openings, two of which are likely false keyholes.

  Choosing the center keyhole in the cluster, I slip the pick into the top of the hole. Two pins move when I poke them, but the sound isn’t right, which means the lock mechanism isn’t released. I move to the keyhole on the right and slip the pick inside. This is the one. I feel and hear the difference as the pick slides over the pins, moving them in sequence to release the lock.

  Just another few seconds.

  Almost there.

  Almost.

  There is the sound of heavy footsteps moving up the corridor at a fast clip. It could be the duke.

  Scrambling back to the water closet, I barely make it into hiding before the duke bursts through the door and closes it behind him. He tugs on the drawer handle and sighs, relieved. Still locked.

  I tick off the time that has passed since the final warning from Carter. Twelve minutes left. Maybe thirteen.

  A quick review of my options doesn’t produce any perfect solutions for escape. I could wait for him to fall asleep, but time isn’t on my side. Any distraction I create would only draw him closer to where I’m hiding.

  I could feign an overpowering sexual desire for him — one so strong that I had no choice but to disguise myself as a boy and hide until the opportune moment to seduce him — but it would be hard to explain my presence to his satisfaction.

  I curse myself for not bringing tranquilizers with me. It would’ve been easy to add a sedative to the glass of brandy on his desk and be fairly certain he’d drink it. The duke loves his brandy.

  I met the duke at a dinner party hosted by a rich Marchesa; her family’s jewels were the deepest desire of a disinherited progeny living in 2533. The duke undressed me with his eyes more than once during the evening and, since I flirted back, I could make seduction believable, then knock him unconscious the moment his back is turned.

  I’m out of time. If I don’t get out now, I’ll be left behind. Taking a deep breath, I steel myself to make an impassioned entrance into the bedchamber and profess an unquenchable fire in my loins for this scrawny, chicken-legged man.

  There is a groan followed by a heavy thud.

  I sneak into the room and see the lower half of the duke’s motionless body sprawled on the floor, his upper half obscured by the canopy bed. Moving carefully to peer around the foot of the bed, I nudge the duke’s foot with my toe.

  Is he breathing? A loud snore, then a snort, answers the question.

  The duke must be deeply inebriated because he doesn’t stir when I remove the desk drawer key from his neck. This is awesome. Now, I don’t have to seduce this scrawny bag of bones.

  Within moments, I have the desk unlocked and the diamond out of its case. It’s as heavy as I thought it would be. Into my small bag it goes. I slip the cord around my neck, tuck the pouch into my shirt, and sneak into the hallway.

  Just as I did during dozens of hologram rehearsals, I walk on tiptoe to avoid clacking the heels of my shoes against the tiles in the marble hallway. As I move through the darkened corridor, I pause to ensure the small sitting room between me and the North staircase leading down to the first floor is empty.

  Every landmark along my escape route is where the hologram blueprints said it would be. I make a mental note to find a creative way to thank the hologram programmers for their precision. There’s only one torch in the stairwell, so I feel my way along the wood-paneled walls as I go down the stairs. The first-floor landing opens to the main hall which boasts five columned archways on each side of the room. The house is asleep. The best plan to get out the front door at the far end of the foyer without waking anyone is to skirt the north wall until reaching the ornate entry door.

  In a trice, I’m outside in the cool night air. The house faces west toward Florence, our ship is nestled in the fruit orchards to the North. I make a quick right turn and follow the outline the villa toward the upper terrace wall.

  If I am the luckiest I have ever been in my life, I might make it to the extraction point with seconds to spare.

  “Carter,” I whisper into the CommLink. “I’m on my way.”

  Nothing.

  “Carter.”

  More silence. My heart skips a beat. Did they really leave me?

  Instead of Commander Carter’s condescending tone, I’m relieved to hear the Spanish-accented voice of our ship’s co-pilot. “Five minutes, Dodger,” Nico says. I like Nico because he’s smart, doesn’t pry, and sometimes laughs at my jokes. He’s the only one I allow, other than Fagin, to use my nickname.

  He’s also the only one sharing my bed. He has an ass that could stop time itself if the temporal gods had a mind to marvel at perfection.

  “Don’t make me come after you,” Nico says.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I ask, volleying the banter back to him.

  “As a matter of fact, I would.”

  Moving briskly through the door in the stone wall that surrounds the terraced villa, I make my way toward the first of several fruit tree orchards. There is one hundred meters of exposed ground between me and the relative safety of the trees.

  “Intruders! Intruders in the garden!” A man shouts.

  I turn to see three of the duke’s guards running toward me. I break into a dead run. My heart pounds in my ears as I race through the grove, dodging low-hanging branches and weaving in and out through rose bushes and ornamental sculptures.

  “Four minutes,” Nico says.

  I’m back out in the open, headed toward the next section of the orchard. A quick cut left, and I duck into a path lined with tall boxwoods which temporarily shields me from the soldiers’ view. Their shouts continue, calling others to the chase.

  They’re not far behind. I run another mental time check based on the remaining distance to the ship.

  It will be damn close.

  At the end of the pathway, I spot the darkened outline of the Marchesa’s house in the distance beyond the orchards. Our Timeships are chameleons. No matter what time period or the terrain, the ship’s hologram program projects a three-dimensional image that camouflages the sleek hull. It can also hover—cloaked—ten feet off the ground, keeping locals from bumping into it.

  The LensCams detects the faint outline of our ship, a robin’s egg-blue aura glowing at the grove’s perimeter, unseen by the naked eye.

  “Left the lights on for you,” Nico says. “Two minutes.”

  My legs pump harder, faster than I have ever run; my lungs heave with labored breath. I’m getting light-headed. There’s more shouting behind me.

  “Open the door.” My voice wheezes with the effort to speak.

  There’s a moment’s hesitation
between my command and the response before the door slides open and I tumble inside. The palace guards are so close, it will be mere seconds before they topple into the ship after me.

  One of the other mercenaries shouts, “We’ve got her. Go!”

  The three men outside skid to a halt, their shoes scuffing the dirt up in small clouds around their feet. Their mouths hang open in disbelief. From their perspective, it looks as though trees have opened to reveal a strange world. They can see the blinking lights on the console panels and hear the sounds of our ship coming to life.

  One guard drops to his knees and cries, “God save us.”

  The others backpedal, arms wind-milling as they trip over each other to escape, leaving their companion to scramble after them.

  The door slides shut and a high-pitched whirring sound mellows into a deep hum as the ship launches. I wish I could see the faces of the palace guards as they try to answer why they returned from the chase with no prisoner. Would they be able to speak of the strange world inside the trees? I bet they never tell a soul what they’ve seen and only speak of it to each other in hushed, drunken voices.

  Still gasping for breath, I push myself up to sit against the wall. Before I’m able to make a joke and ask if I’m on time, Carter’s voice booms over the speakers. “Arseneau. Get your ass up here. Now.”

  Chapter 2

  There are technical explanations for the mechanics of time travel, but I don’t care what they are. Let scientists and academics discuss warp drives, harnessing the unpredictable power of wormholes and dark matter, and manipulating the fabric of space and time. I want to eat pomegranates while watching the pyramids at Giza being built, infiltrate Catherine the Great’s royal court, and play muse to Vincent van Gogh as he paints just for me.

  If there’s a universal complaint among time thieves—aside from minor seasickness ripping through time can produce—it’s the pieces of shit we’re forced to travel in. Living in the shadows to avoid capture for illegal time travel means the state-of-the-art Timeships are reserved for government sanctioned time travel missions. We make do with antiquated ships that afford little privacy other than the cramped crew quarters. Even worse, the meal replacement bars from the replicators—nutritionally complete and filling—are shit.