Page 4 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

He slipped out first. Indira followed a minute later after pocketing her spoon like this was prison and not midtown Manhattan.

I had just bitten into the second half of my sandwich when my phone lit up again.

Moira: Need you in copy room three

Moira: Now please

I looked at my sandwich, then at the door. “This is fine,” I told the closet.

The closet, having seen things, withheld judgment.

By the time I got to the copy room, Moira was standing over a stack of family court filings and a bunch of pages in disarray, her patience visibly depleted.

“Tell me something good,” she said the second she saw me.

I set my sandwich on the counter and tucked my phone into my back pocket. “What are you trying to make it do?”

“Collate these. It keeps putting page six behind page two.”

“It can do that. I found the manual.” I tapped through the advanced settings menu, selected the right sequence, and fed in the originals. The machine whirred, then began producing neat, properly collated sets.

Moira watched the first set emerge in the correct order. She narrowed her eyes. “You read the manual?”

I shrugged. “It’s only seventeen pages.”

Her expression changed in stages: suspicion, disbelief, then offense on behalf of everyone who had suffered before me.

“You read seventeen pages about a printer.” Moira put a hand over her heart. “Never let this place break you.”

“Working on it.”

She made a sound that might have been a laugh, then glanced toward the door when voices drifted in. Her team supervisor was with one of the partners, and they were speaking in that clipped, low register people used when talking about money, risk, or high-profile clients.

I kept my hands moving over the copies, but my attention sharpened.

“We have to be careful,” the partner said. “There’s a lot of prestige attached, yes, but dragons are mercurial.”

Moira’s supervisor answered, “Wouldn’t you be, if there were only a hundred or so of your kind left?”

The partner grunted.

I kept my face blank and my ears open.

Everyone knew the broad strokes. The Winged War had happened two hundred and fifty years ago. Dragon shifters and phoenix shifters nearly wiped each other off the map in a conflict that had long since curdled into legend and museum exhibits. Olden Folk were part of the world, sure, but dragons existed in that strange category of being publicly known and still mythical enough that people lowered their voices when they talked about them.

The voices moved on.

Moira exhaled. “Well.”

I handed her the first completed set. “That sounded expensive.”

She narrowed her eyes again, though not unkindly. “Don’t get curious.”

“Curiosity is my only marketable trait.”

“That and whatever dark art lets you operate office equipment.” She gathered the copies. “Finish those, then go home before someone else remembers you exist.”

I opened my mouth to make some noble statement about dedication and ambition, but my stomach chose that exact moment to make a sound so dramatic it could’ve been dubbed into a cartoon.