Neil looked around the room. The shelves took up most of the wall space and there was a single clear section of floor between them, roughly enough space for two people to stand without being pressed together if they were thoughtful about it.

They were not going to be able to be thoughtful about it for very long.

He moved to the wall beside the door and sat down with his back against it, pulling his knees up to give more floor space.

Cynthia looked at the available floor, looked at him, and sat down beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched because the alternative was sitting directly on the shelf supports.

The two leaned onto one another, enjoying the silence and closeness.

Although they had done far more in the clash realm but in the end it was not exactly reality.

After all, Cynthia is still a virgin in reality, though she had gained plenty of experience with her student.

Outside in the treasury passage, the guards were talking in low voices, the kind of conversation that happened after something unexpected and before anything had been confirmed or denied.

"Probably a gas line." One of them said.

"In this building?" Another replied, unconvinced.

"Sigh I just don’t want to do extra work damnit why does it always happen in my shift?"

A pause, then: "Still, we stay double until the warden confirms."

Footsteps, steady and unhurried. Someone doing a perimeter check.

Neil tracked the sound without moving.

Beside him, Cynthia had her head tilted back against the wall, eyes forward, perfectly still. The Eye of the Future was inside her coat, invisible and perfectly hidden.

’How long do you think?’ he asked internally.

"Nemo is not here, master." Nemo’s voice replied dryly.

Neil almost smiled at that. ’Right. I wasn’t asking you.’

He looked at Cynthia without turning his head fully. In the dim light of the room, with no performance required from either of them, she looked different from how she looked in the hall. Less composed in the formal sense and more simply herself, which was a different thing.

"This heist was sure crazy, have you done this before?" He said quietly.

"What, steal things?" She replied, a faint smile on her beautiful face.

"yea, that and going to places that don’t want you there, like right now." He said.

She considered that for a moment. "A few times. When I was younger more often than now." She paused. "Why?"

"You don’t hesitate." He said simply.

She turned her head slightly and looked at him. "Heh this is pretty normal, there are no saints in this world, it is normal to steal to get what you want."

"I know." He said.

She held his gaze for a moment and then looked back at the door, though the very faint shift in her expression suggested she was not thinking about the door.

The footsteps outside passed and receded. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

Meanwhile, Caleb had been looking for Cynthia for twenty minutes.

He had started casually, moving through the hall the way someone moved when they were looking for a person they expected to find easily, just a matter of checking the obvious locations in sequence. She had been near the stage. Then she had been in conversation with some of the attending wardens. Then she had been beside a column near the far wall.

Then she had simply not been anywhere.

He had checked the outer reception areas, the quieter side corridors where people went to have private conversations during events like this, the balcony level, the doors to the exterior plaza.

Nothing.

He had also, in the course of his search, noticed that Neil was no longer sitting at the edge of the main floor where he had been after the fights.

His chair was empty.

That was where the casual quality of his searching had changed.

Caleb stood near the center of the hall now, scanning the crowd with the steady and deliberate attention of someone who had decided this was no longer a minor thing. His jaw was set and his expression was doing the work of staying neutral while the thing underneath it was not neutral at all.

"Looking for someone?" Randy appeared beside him with a cup of something and an expression of total innocence.

Caleb looked at him. "Cynthia. Have you seen where she went?"

Randy took a sip. "Cynthia? No, I haven’t been tracking her. Why, is she missing?"

"She was here earlier." Caleb said.

"People move around at events. That’s generally what events are for." Randy said helpfully.

Caleb looked at him for a long moment. Randy returned the look with the serenity of a man who was very comfortable with silence.

"And Neil Yates. Where is he?" Caleb asked.

"No idea." Randy said, with exactly the same tone he had used for everything else, which gave nothing away in either direction. "I imagine he is around somewhere. That boy doesn’t go far."

Caleb said nothing. He turned and moved toward the outer corridors with the focused purpose of someone who had stopped looking casually and started looking seriously.

Randy watched him go, took another sip, and his expression shifted very slightly into something that was working hard not to be amusement.

Caleb was really going mad, it has been so long but there were still no signs of Neil or Cynthia.

And the more he thought about it the more of a sinking feeling he got.

He didn’t even want to imagine that the two could be together and doing something together.

His face instantly turned pale, and legs wobbly, and killing intent burst out.

Caleb wanted to kill Neil so badly.

***

Back in the treasury room, the sound of the guards outside had settled into the steady rhythm of people doing their job with no particular urgency, which meant the situation had normalised enough that they were no longer treating it as an active event. That was the first sign that the window was opening.

Cynthia had been quiet for several minutes, her shoulder against Neil’s, her breathing even. She was not asleep, her eyes were open, but she had the ability to simply be somewhere without filling the space unnecessarily, which Neil had noticed before and found he had no objection to.

"When this is done." She said quietly, not finishing the sentence immediately.

Neil waited.

"The Eye of the Future. I want to use it with you." She said. "You should be there when it opens."

He looked at her.

She was still looking at the door, her expression entirely composed, but there was something in the way she had said it that was not purely logistical.

"Alright." He said.

She nodded once, and that was that.

The footsteps outside thinned. One set of boots moved away, then another. The conversation dropped to just one voice saying something short, and then that too faded.

Neil looked at Cynthia.

She was already looking at him.

"Now." She said.

He activated Escape.

The ability settled over both of them, extending outward to include her with a slight additional drain that he noted but disregarded. He had done this before with Nemo, carrying another presence through the skill’s effect, and the principle was the same.

He opened the door.

The passage outside held one guard, the original single post, standing at his position and looking down the corridor away from them. No additional presence nearby. The explosion had been assessed and dismissed and the situation had returned to its default state.

They moved out of the room in complete silence.

Down the west passage, back through the stair, through the two corridor bends, and then Neil took them through the wall rather than the route they had come in through, stepping sideways into the stone and pulling Cynthia through after him by the hand.

She came through without hesitation or sound.

They emerged into a different corridor entirely, one level up and considerably further from the treasury room than any straight path would have placed them.

Neil held Escape for another thirty seconds as they moved, long enough to put real distance between themselves and the area.

Then he let it drop.

The noise of the settlement filtered back in around them, distant and ordinary.

Cynthia looked at their joined hands, the one he had used to pull her through the wall, which he had not released. She did not pull it away.

This felt way better than the touches in the clash realm.

"That skill is useful." She said.

"It definitely is." Neil replied, although only few but the skills he possessed were very useful.

They stood in the quiet corridor for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.

Then Cynthia straightened her coat with her free hand, composed and unhurried, and looked back in the direction of the event hall.

"We should return separately later." She said. "Different times, different directions."

"Hoo yea we should." He said, nodding.

There was a brief pause as the two heaved a sigh of relief.

"Neil." She said.

He looked at her.

She looked at him for a moment with that expression she sometimes had, the one that sat between something she was going to say and something she had decided to save for later, her desires clearly visible from her expressions.

Then she let go of his hand, turned, and walked towards the opposite wall, then turning back and looked at him with an enticing expression.

Neil stood where he was for a moment.

’That went well.’ He thought, which was the full extent of his internal debrief.

He could see desires in her eyes, a burning desires that soon made him feel excited too.

❖❖❖

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