Claire did a great job of remaining stealthy. I struggled to keep up, wondering why my shoes seemed to make so much more noise than hers did. The parked carts were slowly leaving their bays, one at a time, plodding over to the checkpoint where they were thoroughly searched. Our cover was being slowly eaten away, and the last twenty or so meters before the checkpoint were all empty space.

“You got a change in uniform?” I whispered.

“A change in approach,” she clarified.

I felt like a member of a heist team who’d just been brought along for fun. I had no fancy gadgets, no idea what my other heister was doing, and no confidence that she knew either.

Without warning, Claire swung into the driver’s seat of a cart and thumped the driver on the temple with the hilt of her dagger. He fell onto the soft cushioning of the bench seat with a whoosh as the air was pressed from the material. Next, she disappeared into the rear of the truck, entering from a small window behind the driver.

I was a sitting duck, just waiting for the unconscious driver to wake up and sound the alarm. The driver of the next cart along flicked through a notebook as though nothing was out of place.

When Claire emerged, she was carrying a rope. It was looped around her shoulder in tight coils, a thick knot tied in the end.

“Feeling lucky?” she murmured.

I shook my head and tried to catch up with her as she wisped across the open space. The guards were currently scouring the other side of a cart, but they would round the corner soon enough and see the two of us toodle-pipping across the courtyard.

Please don’t look. Please don’t look.

We made it into a small burrow of greystone bricks, sandwiched between a turret which blocked us from view of the guards, and a long parapet running the other way.

Both walls were at least sixty feet tall. Claire’s rope might’ve been half that length, unless she whipped an extra length out of her inventory and tied it on.

Instead, she was tying it to herself. A simple knot around her waist.

She threw me the other side. “Hurry. Tie yourself on.”

I held the frayed end in one hand and held my slack jaw with the other, just in case it fell all the way off.

“You can’t be serious!” I loud-whispered. “We’re both gonna fall to our deaths!”

She chuckled. “Relax. Both our Strength stats are decent. Our characters don’t weigh much more than our normal human bodies, except the additional armour, so you’ll be as light as a feather. Tie yourself on, now.”

There was a low yelp and a crunch as some kind of commotion started over at the carts. It sounded like the driver woke up and fell from his seat onto the sharp rocks. A second yelp and an indignant shout of some garbled threat basically confirmed my suspicions.

“Now, Ollie. Tie on.”

I yanked the rope around my waist, tying it off a few times in ways that definitely weren’t secure. My knowledge of knots didn’t extend far past a granny knot and tying my shoelaces, but Claire gave me a nod of approval, nonetheless.

“Alright, I’ll climb a little bit higher, cos I’m heavier. If you’re going to fall, yell out — I won’t be able to see you.”

I nodded. My hands were already sweaty, which was the opposite of what I needed. The greystone was reasonably grippy, showing some of the small sponge-like dots I associated with volcanic rock. It helped that with a decent Strength stat, I was basically capable of infinite pull-ups and chin-ups, so I had faith in my grip strength.

Claire scurried up the wall, reaching high with her hands then walking up with her feet like a particularly steep staircase. I liked her technique a lot more than my own plan, which was to basically just haul myself up the wall with pure brute strength.

When the rope came close to taut, I started my ascent. Claire slowed down, leaving a bit of slack so that I wouldn’t be pulling her down, nor her pulling me up. For a girl who was blind up until a few weeks ago, she had this thing down pat.

I, on the other hand, had room for improvement. I managed to find myself spread-eagled across the wall, each limb in its own precarious position. Both my hands felt so unstable that I didn’t want to move them, but my terrible posture meant I couldn’t look down to see where my feet should go.

“Um, Claire?” I called.

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She paused and looked down at me. I noticed her first take a look at the parked carts below us, her eyes widening at something. There was no time to worry about that kind of thing.

“You donkey, this isn’t even hard! Get your right hand and move it up a brick. See? There! Now get going! They’ve seen us!”

I latched onto a brick that I’d looked over in my panic. It gave my shaking arms a temporary break, short-lived because I looked over my shoulder and saw the gathering crowd below us. Very soon, the guards would wonder why all their cart drivers were standing around inspecting the Armoury’s outer walls.

“We gotta go, Claire, we gotta go!”

She glanced back at me and made a face that suggested she knew that already.

I threw caution to the winds, clambering up the wall and shortening the distance between Claire and me.

That was a mistake.

About a body-length from Claire’s shoes, I slapped my hand over the top of the rock with a suspicious crack down the middle. After however many hundreds of years of holding on, it finally gave away under the pressure and additional weight.

I was falling.

If the rope went taut with my body falling at this speed, there was no way Claire could stay attached to her holds. Gravity had become our enemy, and it was going for the killshot on both of us.

[Dash]

As a last-ditch effort, I squirmed in the air so that my chest was angled at the wall, then activated the skill. My momentum immediately cancelled, then I was jerked back the other way and splattered against the wall like a wad of wet toilet paper.

But this wad of TP was holding fast.

Claire was nearly at the top. She had felt the weight of the rope lessening as I raced up to meet her and had stopped to chastise me. She saw the whole thing.

“You are a frickin lunatic, Ollie.” Then her eyes locked on to something below us and she instinctively reached a free hand around to her bow. As it was unequipped, she had to wait.

“Hurry. Guards coming. Aaaand they have bows.”

The mention of bows was enough to pull me from my fear-induced paralysis. It was all well and good to be shot at when I had sufficient cover and a reasonable way of moving out of the way, but this was not such a pleasant situation. Part of me wondered why we didn’t just overpower the guards and run straight through the middle of the Armoury. It might have even attracted less attention.

I made it high enough that Claire was able to climb ahead and vault over the side. She glanced left and right, then started hauling me up the wall. It made my job significantly easier, like abseiling but in reverse.

“Get your tubby butt over here,” she said, untying the rope from both of us while I flopped to the ramparts and kissed the cool rock. We wouldn’t have long before an unlucky guard or two were tasked with taking down the intruders.

By then, I hoped to be gone.

I got to my feet and scanned the inside of the Armoury. There was no wonder it wasn’t a roofed-in building — the amount of smoke and soot flying up from various contraptions would’ve choked all the workers in minutes.

It was shaped like a trapezoid, separated into three distinct triangles. Wide, paved roads bordered each section, with two or three smaller alleys — still two carts across — slicing straight lines down each triangle. The area to our left was the most heavily guarded, and the least responsible for the thick plumes of black smoke. A long line of carts went in, and an equally long line came out.

“Looks like storage,” Claire said. She was seeing the same things I saw and had come to the same conclusion.

“Looks like a bitch to get into,” I replied.

“Yeah.”

She tied a loop in the rope and secured it around a section of the wall. The rest was tossed over, making it no more than halfway to the ground.

“You’re not seriously going to make me do that again, right?”

She motioned for me to follow her, then started running along the ramparts.

“No, but they’ll think that’s where we’ve gone. We’re hopping onto that roof over there.”

Where she pointed, a church stood tall amongst the sea of boring housing around it. One of its three spires poked just above the height of the parapets, urging us to tempt fate.

“Oh god. This is way more high-octane than I needed.”

Claire grunted and kept running.

Once we were coming into range, I looked behind us for any tails. There were guards coming up the stairs who would see us very soon, but for now they were watching their feet. Ahead, a similar situation was occurring.

It was now or never. The spire was going to be slippery and probably very close to breaking and—

We leapt. Claire aimed higher, ensuring that she made the distance, whereas I was hoping to hit something with a bit of stability.

I whacked into the roof, grabbing the spire in a bear-hug. Finding my footing was completely impossible, and I immediately started sliding, my chin bumping on each tile. It was like a giant fireman’s pole with a propensity for trying to knock out the people using it.

Claire was suffering the same treatment, but sliding at a slightly slower pace. A cursory look below suggested the embarrassment would be over soon.

All I could do was hold on tight.

“Wh-wh-wh-where should-d-d-d we go-o-o?” I groaned, my chest hitting a patch of crappy tiles.

Claire continued clawing her way down with about as much grace as me. “Any-y-y-where with some co-o-o-ver!”

My feet finally found the main surface of the church roof. Despite sitting at a forty-five-degree angle, it was like walking on flat ground compared to most of the last ten minutes.

I spotted a burrow of houses that looked even scrappier than the rest, then beelined for them. Claire finished her rugged descent and chased after me. We dropped down into the shadows, taking a breath and wincing at the shouts of nearby soldiers. From the sounds of it, they’d taken the bait.

“They’ll be over here soon. We gotta move.”

Given a moment of respite, we were able to locate a run-down shack that would serve as a temporary base to lie low in. Whoever deserted it had taken most of their belongings, but not all. Two wooden chairs faced a fireplace, and a brown couch that I think used to be red leaned against the wall. A bundle of firewood sat in a corner; the former owners apparently unfazed by the various critters that had nested there.

“Prime real estate,” Claire breathed.

The silence around us was infectious, and I cringed at each squeak in the floorboards. I tentatively perched on the couch, waiting to fall through the tattered leather.

“Can I get the fire going? It’s cold in here. And we’ll blend in with everywhere else.”

Claire nodded. “Sure. Sounds cosy. It’ll set the mood.”

I frowned while picking up an armful of kindling and a few small branches to start things off.

“What mood needs to be set?”

“Whichever one will help us get into one of those carts.”