Radeon began the ascent with his hands empty and his mind already elsewhere.

The dried tree that served as a door did what it always did. It shifted when no eyes were on it.

It changed its angle. He stepped out into the cellar beneath his pavilion.

Radeon paused long enough to listen for footsteps. None. Above, the pavilion creaked with the mountain wind.

Someone was watching all the same. Fay stood on the porch of her own villa, eyes fixed toward the pavilion.

Her heart still had not settled from the earlier sin she had committed.

Radeon had been reading her long enough to see the shape of it.

The hunger to give what she had, the want to make amends, tangled in her body's desire.

She was young. Nineteen. That was young even for mortals, and for the life Radeon was building, youth was a flammable thing.

He did not ponder her thoughts any further. He stepped out.

Fay startled like a rabbit hearing a bowstring. Her eyes widened, then narrowed, confusion chasing fear.

She had watched him go down the mountain earlier. She had watched the direction his shadow took. So how was he here?

Radeon answered without answering. His body hardened, shrank, and turned into a smooth wooden ball.

No seams. No face. No breath. Just a plain thing that belonged in a child's pocket or under a table leg. He let gravity do the rest.

He rolled down the slope, bumping over roots and stone, picking up speed, the mountain wind turning into a low whistle across his polished surface.

At the bend where carts gathered, he wedged himself against the inside of a carriage wheel, snug as a pebble lodged by chance.

Five ghostly shadows slipped after him, keeping distance.

The next mission was not hospitality. It was investigation. Syndicates. Cartels.

The kind of enemies that did not knock on the gate. They sent knives, spies, and contracts.

For Radeon and his five wraith peers, it was the same. What's more, they shared the same belief.

Stealing was still the best way to gather cultivation resources.

Radeon made himself smaller. A stray marble. A bit of trash. Something no one bothered to notice twice.

When a young girl passed close with a pouch swinging at her hip, Radeon hopped.

The cloth brushed his surface. Warm. Smelling faintly of dried fruit and perfume.

He settled into the pouch among copper coins and a hairpin, and stayed still while the world jostled around him.

The girl climbed into a carriage. Wheels groaned. A driver clicked his tongue. The ride began.

Time passed in a sway of motion and muffled voices. When the carriage slowed, the pouch shifted, and Radeon felt the change in air.

Different smells now. Stake. Smoke. Oil. People packed tighter.

Silvertoll Summits Gates.

Radeon did not wait for the girl to step down. He rolled free, slipped along the edge of the carriage seat, and dropped to the ground without a sound.

Dirt caught him and spun him once. He let himself roll.

Stalls lined the street, but their calls lacked hunger today. The new city on their very mountain was stealing coin and attention, pulling traffic away like a river diverted.

City guards stood with forced smiles, watching too many empty hands pass by.

Then shouting flared from a shop front.

"Oi! Oi! Where d'you think you're off to? You take the Silvertoll Summits for a pile of cow muck and mud, do you? Bring your wares here. I'll even knock a bit off the price for you."

Radeon felt Calyx notice the voice through the system link. A small spark of recognition.

Stale. One of the names that sat in target forty-seven's web of peers. A man with a clear memory, and still no one ever bothered to keep his name.

Radeon eased closer. Stale's head snapped to the side. His eyes scanned the street, shoulders tensing.

Instinct flared, then faltered when it found nothing obvious to blame.

He frowned, annoyed at himself, and turned back to his shouting.

Radeon was already on him. He slapped himself onto the back of Stale's leather boots where mud and wear hid him, then crawled up the man's robe as the he stepped inside.

The floorboards thumped. Radeon tucked himself into shadow and fold, close enough to feel the heat of the man's skin through fabric.

Safe. Hidden. Listening. The link tightened.

The six of them began to move as one mind split into roles.

Calyx took charge of locating treasures and ledgers, the things that turned suspicion into proof.

Oisin and Elsin were tasked with finding and killing any diviner, and with verifying each identity.

Maeron and Ewan held the array work, ready to destroy, modify, or erect formations to seal exits and blind watchers.

Radeon kept the center. He would call the shots. He would be the eyes and ears on every front.

He would decide when to take, when to vanish, and when to leave nothing behind but a story too frightening to repeat aloud.

They did not leak a single wisp of qi. Not a shimmer. Not a breath of it.

They moved on habit and long practice, the way old thieves moved.

Radeon rolled himself beneath a low cabinet where dust lay thick and undisturbed.

Wood pressed close on all sides, smelling of old varnish.

He opened the hollow of his wooden form and drew the five ghosts into it, swallowing them into shadow so their next art would have no witness.

Inside that cramped dark, the five warped down to their smallest shapes. Silverfish. Pale little things made for cracks and corners, made to be ignored.

They did not speak. They did not signal with qi. They relied on the system Radeon had forged, and on the faith that tied them to him like invisible wire.

Radeon stayed still under the cabinet while the silverfish poured out and climbed.

They skittered up legs of furniture and along seams in the wall. They rode boot heels when they had to, slipped off when the boots stopped.

Errand boys in insect skin, running routes no servant would dare, mapping the structure from inside its own blind spots.

An hour passed. The shop above breathed with the rhythm of trade. Coins clinked. A man laughed too loud.

Someone argued over weights and purity, then lowered their voice when a different set of footsteps crossed the floorboards.

Radeon listened to all of it through the hush of his hiding place. He took them in with his crystallized brain, sorting them the way a butcher sorted cuts.

Doorways. Locks. Hidden latches. Where the guards liked to stand when bored. Which corner a man glanced at when he lied.

After an hour the silverfish regathered at the same spot. Radeon took their memories, compiled the whole into a single picture, then pushed it back into each of their minds.

He added his own observations too, the small habits of syndicate members that gave away rank and role.

Who spoke first. Who waited. Who never turned their back to a certain wall.

The silverfish adjusted at once, their routes shifting into a higher tier of efficiency.

The five wraiths ran the new paths Radeon needed confirmed, then traced them again from different angles.

The process repeated, over and over, until the whole structure lay mapped in their minds, as if the six of them had built it themselves.

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