Page 55 of Heart of Thieves

“I’ll use my tattoo and go noncorporeal,” I say, perhaps a bit too brightly. “Right, Enzo?”

“Uh . . . I guess so.”

Arden nods. “I think it’s brilliant.”

“You do?” Isla asks, wheeling around. “Because it sounds like a huge risk to me.”

“Not if she’s noncorporeal the whole time,” he points out. “He’s her father. She’s going to catch things we wouldn’t.”

“I trust you,” Enzo says, offering me a proud smile.

My gut lurches at the sound of my Unbreakable Lie repeated back to me. He shouldn’t trust me. Not anymore. None of them should.

“You and Arden,” Enzo continues, “get us all the intel you can on St. James. I’ll take Soren and Jade with me to Opalton tonight. Isla, you’re in charge of keeping watch at the Brig while we’re gone.”

“Fine, but I’d like the prince’s robe.” Isla plants her hands on her hips.

“You’ll have to fight Lola for it,” Enzo says, heading for the door, Jade and Soren scrambling after him. He tosses a wave back at me. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do while we’re gone.”

“So . . . I’m limited to making reckless decisions and eating my weight in sugar?”

He sticks his tongue out at me before disappearing into the hall.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

ENZO

I’m walking up the streets headed north toward Aethera’s Zenithic Temple by the time the downtown clock tower chimes ten. Soren, Jade, and I take the train to Opalton this evening, which means I only have a few hours to get as much information about Nocturne as possible before her game begins tomorrow night. The priest at my father’s parish said Lenora worked at the temple, so that’s where I’ll start. Surely, if Lenora is Nocturne, I’ll find something there.

The temple towers over me, a breathtaking structure fashioned entirely of polished voratium, sleek walls sloping up from the ground to a series of points sharp as teeth.

Pressing my hand to the door, I push into a spacious room lit by strategically placed skylights set in the shape of the sky’s most prominent constellations.

Most zenithic observances happen at night when the stars are visible, so the temple is quite empty at this hour but for a handful of worshippers in the corner kneeling before a statue of Odelia, the sun goddess. Priests mill about, speaking to one another in hushed tones, their dark robes swishing across the marble floor.

Keeping myself noncorporeal, I cross to the opposite side of the main hall and descend the staircase to the places barred from the public, like the vault deep in the earth that once housed the moonshard and the holy sanctums that surround it. I pass through the locked steel door at the bottom and into their Hall of Records.

It is full to bursting with bookshelves as far as the eye can see and lit only by wall lanterns that give off an eerie, otherworldly light. A room full of the church’s secrets—the sort my brother once held over many a priest’s head.

I’ve been here a thousand times. In my early days after the moon-shard’s curse took hold, I’d steal books about the zenithic gods to look for patterns that matched my powers. Later on, as my focus turned to tracking where Nic had used the moonshard, I scoured records of the prominent priests he had the power to blackmail or manipulate, looking for leads.

Today, I walk to the cabinets that contain all the information on the priests in Aethera, where they were trained in theology, where they work, what sorts of sermons they give, and the services they render to their congregants.

I search the Warthington Parish folders first for any sign of the priestess called Lenora—a surname, at the very least. When that does not yield any results, I turn to the temple’s vast section regarding its own dealings. I gather an armful of files and hoist them to a nearby desk, where I settle in for a long search.

After three hours, I still have not found any mention of Lenora, and my eyes are aching from the strain. Sighing, I stuff the files back into their places and turn to the temple schedule, which shows the shifts priests have worked all the way back fifty years.

I flip through. Several dozen entries have been scribbled out. I ean closer, trying to decipher what might have been written there.

There’s something that looks like an L at the beginning of one of the names, but the rest are all so thoroughly blackened I cannot make out anything else.

Could all the removed entries be Lenora? It makes sense that once she became Nocturne she would want to scrub her information from identifying records. I let the registrar’s notes fall back into the drawer and slide it shut, leaning my forehead against it.

It seems I’ve reached a dead end. All I’ve learned is that if Nocturne is Lenora, she was thorough.

Sighing, I turn to the section of books about voratium and moon-shards that the priests have confiscated over the years to keep their deception alive, the very place I first learned that a living conduit—a person altered by soullight to be able to channel a constant stream of power from the skies—could be the answer to my desperate predicament four years ago. The information I found here led me down a rabbit hole of research across Celestia to midwife records of a baby delivered in secret nearly two decades back. A baby purported to be born of a missing conduit mother and a gang lord father.

“Look what washed up from the Deep.” A voice behind me makes me jump.