“How much more money do we need?” he asked.
I didn’t bother sugarcoating it. “Fifty thousand.”
He flinched. “I’m sorry. I know this is hard for you.”
“You mean hard for you.” He always put others before himself. That was the only part of his programming that wasn’t faulty. “We’ll get the money. Maybe I can find work somewhere else.”
But really, where would I go? My marketable skills consisted of lying, stealing, and building things that went boom. Not exactly clean-cut qualities.
Elio resumed reciting facts about himself (“My name is Elio. My favorite thing to eat is cookies…”) while I cleaned off my desk, organizing a stack of blueprints and sorting a cup of screws according to size and color. When I reached the bottom of the cup, my fingers hit something smooth.
I almost threw the object in the trash. It was a round piece of moonstone no larger than my thumb, a supposed good luck charm that Evelina gave me when I was a child—before she spent her time reciting all the ways in which I was a disappointment. But oddly enough, I couldn’t bear to throw it away.
Next to me, Elio was busy listing all one hundred and eleven species of bullfish, his deep blue eyes glowing, looking far more earnest and far more human than anyone else in this house.
I studied the piece of moonstone again. I didn’t know if I could ever get back to the time when Evelina gifted it to me—when I wasn’t just her employee but her daughter—but I knew what I could do to satisfy her now. I could give her something very valuable, and in turn she would reinstate my paychecks. Maybe then she really would look at me like I was her child.
Like I was more than just a distraction.
“Hey … Cora?” Elio pulled at my sleeve, his voice very small and close to breaking. “If we don’t find me another body, it’ll be okay.”
I shook my head. He didn’t understand. He wouldn’t be the one who would have to live in this house without their best friend.
“Absolutely not. I’m not letting you disappear. I’ll stick your memory core in Evelina’s pod ship if I have to.”
The corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “I’ve always thought it would be cool to have wings.”
“Well, don’t start practicing your liftoff techniques yet. We’re going to get that money, I’m going to stop being the family disappointment, and we’re going to fix everything.”
“But how are we going to do that?”
“By beating them to their next mark. We’re going to do their work for them.” I flashed him my wristband, then started scrolling through my recent comms. I knew there was a message about my family’s next job in here somewhere …
I jumped up when I finally found it. “Cruz’s pod ship heads back to Vaotis in two days. So we’re leaving tomorrow.”
Elio jumped up too, but he had to stand on his toes to get a good look at my comm link. “Back to the treasury? Are you crazy? Beep!”
“No. We’re not going anywhere near that place.” I lowered my wrist to show him the message, complete with a map of the planet. “There’s a cemetery in the backcountry that’s home to a very royal, very rich family.”
“Ohhh … wait.” It took a moment, but then my plan seemed to click in his head. “You don’t mean…”
“I sure do.” I tossed an arm around his shoulders. “Elio, how do you feel about grave robbing?”
* * *
“Enlighten me, dearest Cora, star of my life, best friend forever, et cetera, et cetera: Why am I the one who has to pilfer the dead lady’s tomb?”
“Because, dear Elio, my handsome friend, I’ll be the one running surveillance.”
“That is such a rip-off.”
I eased our pod ship into the gravitational pull of Vaotis, shielding my eyes against the frozen white expanse stretching out before us. I often complained about Condor’s constant dark, but being in a constant state of cold was, in my opinion, far worse.
I zipped up my heavy jacket as we landed in a deserted country field, and pulled a hat low over my ears while Elio released the air lock on the hatch. Already I could feel tendrils of ice creeping into the cockpit. What I wouldn’t give for a wool blanket right now.
“You’re also the only one out of the two of us who can’t feel changes in temperature,” I said. “Plus, you’re stealthier because you don’t throw off auras for people to read.”
“Flatter me a bit more, why don’t you?” He pulled on a coat and wrapped a scarf around his mouth, covering most of his patches. “I wanted to run surveillance.”
“The last time anyone let you run surveillance, the computer started smoking and then you roasted sugar snaps over the flames.”
Elio smacked his jaws together. “They were delicious. Way better than Earthan marshmallows.”
“You can’t eat!”
“Yet.”
He was impossible. And yet, if I failed to save him … Well, I couldn’t think about it. But I knew that I would miss him. Terribly.
Shaking myself back into action, I tossed Elio a comm for his wrist while I monitored the progression of the sun over the hills. I could just pick out the angular shapes of tombstones and vaults beyond the snowdrifts. The cemetery would be closed now, and once the sun disappeared and I hacked into the security monitors placed outside the gates, we would have no witnesses.
Elio exited the pod—almost tumbling into a pile of snow in the process—and waded through the field and up the hill to the cemetery. He made slow progress, the snow up to his belly, giving me more than enough time to disable the cameras and replace the footage in the servers with a recorded loop from the prior evening.
My fingers flew across the many monitors in the pod ship, never stalling, like a choreographed dance. I was at home in the silence of the ship, with only the lights of my control panel and the soft blue glow of the screens for company.
This was what I should have been doing during the job at the Grand Treasury. This was where I excelled. Once Elio and I pulled this robbery off, we would never have to be distractions again.
“I’m guessing all the rich, dead Vaotins and their heaps of gold are buried in the largest crypt?” Elio asked, appearing on the monitor closest to me. Graves filled the space behind him, poking out of the ground like teeth.
I consulted Cruz’s notes on my comm link. “Second-largest crypt. Apparently they were trying to throw off all the peasants like us. Oh, and once you get in, do me a big favor and take one of the queen’s bones. Cruz has written here that conspiracy theorists claim the bones are full of magic that can open a black hole into another universe or something equally ridiculous.”
Elio burst out laughing. “That isn’t possible.”
“As long as we can sell them to one of the suckers, then I don’t really care. I doubt Cruz and Evelina will either.”
“All right, then. Bone. Heaps of gold. Priceless gems. Is there anything else you would like me to retrieve for you? The moon, perhaps?”
“I’ve always wanted someone to get me a comet for my birthday.”
“Will do.” He gave me a quick salute, then turned his comm so I could see the door of the crypt, which was made of white moonstone, blending in perfectly with the surrounding hills and valleys. A twisting black lock cut across the width of the door like a river. “Can you crack this?”