They treated reconnaissance like rehearsal: dramatic, thorough, and ith far too much tendency to devolve into improv.
Elara liked recon because it was the prelude to a poem she enjoyed writing in the margins. Scouts were the part of a heist where the world felt negotiable; you could touch edges, prod the seams, and find out whether the tapestry would hold or unravel. She liked it because it meant she could be clever twice—once on the map and once on stage.
It was raining the morning they decided to go properly over the church.
Not the picturesque drizzle that rented poetic postcards, but a steady, bureaucratic rain that made umbrellas fold like resigned flags and gave the city a civically apologetic scent. The stones of the church darkened and the stained glass blurred into watercolor saints. Rain made people hurry and it made gods grumpy; it also made security guards grumpy and, importantly, predictable.
Elara narrated the day out loud enough that the sky might have heard her—part habit, part permission. "They'll be fewer tourists, fewer idle cameras pointed at the reliquary. Rain is my friend when I want privacy, provided I remember my shoes." She tied the scarf at her throat with the finesse of someone who had practiced comfort as an aesthetic.
The team assembled like a band agreeing on a setlist. Jess slid into the van hunched over a laptop like a priest at a secret altar. Noctis arrived with a map he had folded in the perfect number of origami creases to suggest prayer rather than obsession. Reven showed up with boots that had seen the consequences of logic and ordered the world into better behavior. Mara came last, winded and wearing the look of someone rehearsing nonchalance; she'd bought pastries because she considered bribes to be a civic duty.
Raven padded at Elara's heels, gray as an honest night. Today he stayed visible by design: an anchor of normality in a project that required public invisibility. When she slipped a finger through his fur he gave a small, wolfish snort and leaned into the contact like someone who measured affection by pressure.
They staged their approach two lanes over beneath a row of sycamores, a small, soggy theater where umbrellas and squirrels constituted the audience. Noctis spread the map and pointed at lines like a man reading a poem backwards. The church's blueprints—no, the church's memory—had been coaxed out of municipal archives and Jess's late-night bribes. The reliquary sat near the transept, its glass case visible from two common angles, its security feeds layered with redundant cheer: motion sensors, thermal grids, a pair of volunteer altar boys with suspiciously dull eyes, and an old priest who liked to take his rounds in a cane that sounded like punctuation.
"We'll approach from the southeast," Noctis said, voice even. "Access via the gardener's gate, crawl along the service corridor behind the choir stalls, and use the bell room as our extraction anchor. Jess will loop the CCTV for twelve minutes. We have fourteen, in case of unscheduled sirens or incompetent pigeons."
Mara tapped her foot against the curb. "You're trying to make the heist sound like a boardroom memo."
"Noctis prefers clarity to romance," Elara said. "He is the unsentimental thing that keeps my dramatic instincts from gambling the city to bankruptcy."
Reven grunted. "Keep the speeches light on the cobbles. My boots are tired of being poetic."
They moved like a practical cloud—no masks yet, because scouting didn't benefit from being theatrical. The church sat in its historic patience, gargoyles arranging their faces like bored commentators. The first act of scouting is always listening, and the team folded themselves into the city's quieter noises: rain, the distant bark of market sellers, the mechanical sigh of a recycling bin.
Jess planted three tiny devices—little salt-cellars of electronics—by the gardener's gate and grinned like a child with a chemistry set. "They're sniffers," she explained. "Thermal ghosts, happily pretending to be security. They'll tell me if a dog climbs the fence or a guard paces like a metronome. They're subtle. You won't notice them unless you are a very attentive moth." She shoved a soaked strand of hair behind her ear and looked proud.
Elara admired Jess's ability to make spying look like domestic engineering. "You are an angel of underhanded help," she said. "Angels are allowed to be messy."
Mara's job was human factors—watching the people who watched people. She leaned on the low wall and observed: a mailman timing his break, a nun who crossed the square at a specific cadence, a security guard who wore a wedding band that never left his hand. Mara catalogued mannerisms the way others collected postcards: casually, with an eye for pattern. She spoke in soft notes. "Guy in the hat," she whispered, indicating a ushers-looking fellow, "goes to the northeast corner at 11:20. He's bored and loves crossword puzzles. If we can distract him with a crossword-sized crisis, he'll happily solve his way out of suspicion."
Reven's job was obvious and beloved by him: keep everyone between you and the consequences. He made mental notes, hardened paths with his stare. His presence translated to a comfortable blueprint: if something required immediate physical rectitude, he could be relied upon to provide it, thoroughly and with impressive grammar.
They walked perimeter and interior, with Jess's gadgets murmuring and Noctis annunciating contingencies in that calm way he had. They catalogued cameras by make and sleepiness, marked the placement of motion sensors on the map like someone arranging postage stamps, and identified the best timing windows between the priest's afternoon rosary (ten minutes) and the choir's rehearsals (twenty-seven, if counted precisely).
It went smoothly until the first comic disaster.
They had to pass under a low archway where a beginner cleaning crew had left a ladder. Elara, ever a lover of grand entrances that didn't belong in reconnaissance, thundered under the arch with a flourish meant to maintain morale.
Her foot caught the first rung.
Time, for Elara, is usually an accomplice. Tonight it was an impatient bystander. She executed what she would later describe (and everyone would later reenact at parties) as "the elegant devastation": a pirouette pivot that might once have been rehearsed as a stage exit, mutated into a graceless tumble that sent a market flyer fluttering like a tragic confetti.
Mara laughed, genuinely and without malice, which was a dangerous and delightful thing. "Bravo," she said. "Landed like a plan with only one leg."
Elara rose, cheeks slightly damp with rain and embarrassment, and made a small bow. Raven, who had been checking for rats, gave a theatrical bark that sounded suspiciously like applause.
They paused at a cafe for pastry recompense—comedic misery requires pastry—and reviewed their notes. This was their rhythm: a disaster, a pastry, an adjustment. Noctis, who maintained a pure relationship with punctuality, used the moment to tidy the map edges and scold them for theatrics with the patience of a cathedral bell.
"Also," Jess said, mouth full of almond croissant, "we need to account for the choir kids. They move like a single organism with sticky fingers. Sticky fingers attract curiosity; curiosity attracts religion back into the equation."
They tested windows, measured gaps, and walked the route Noctis had drawn on paper until it felt like muscle memory. They practiced silent signals—two taps left meant reposition, three taps right meant retreat; a thumb rub meant "deck ready." Elara found delight in the tiny codex they wrote with fingers and glances. It felt domestic in a way that made the rest of the world suspiciously fond of them.
The second comic misfire came when Jess tried to demonstrate her new smoke-loop, a device meant to confuse thermal sensors without causing pyrotechnics. She'd coded it in the van while balancing a coffee and humming a pop song.
In the service corridor behind the kitchen, she activated the device with a flourish. It began to exhale the very essence of theatrical fog—soft, cool, and entirely fragrant with failure.
The fog smelled not of artful smoke but of burnt toast and poorly considered chiffon. The thermal grid, designed by anxious human engineers, flared in discourse and then sighed in deference. A tiny sprinkler system woke, blessed the corridor with water, and the fog, confused and nonplussed, decided it was a bath. The sprinklers created a microdrama of wet code and sopping electronics.
"Jess!" Noctis hissed, lunging for the device with an efficiency that suggested he would have preferred a less soggy catastrophe.
She waved him off with a tray of damp pride. "It needed a baptism," she said. "It's spiritually renewed now. Also, I will buy new modules."
Reven, who had been standing guard, slipped on the wet floor and performed an unintentionally perfect pratfall that would later be described in the hideout as "Reven's grace." He rolled to his feet like an angry oak and demanded the others produce towels. He was indignant, covered in cold church water, and slightly more theatrical than a man usually has the right to be.
The third misstep—less comic, more instructive—arrived in the bell tower. They threaded a narrow stair that smelled of damp rope and old pledges. Noctis warned them about acoustics: chimes travel and sound will be a hundred times louder than your whisper. They ascended in silence but for the occasional creak.
At the top, under the bell's patient curve, they found an elderly verger—someone who kept the bells for reasons of piety and habit—tending to the ropes. He was older than a restyled legend and very suspicious of people who climbed bell towers without a polite introduction.
Elara, who possessed the rare talent of being both theatrical and quick with compassionate lies, smiled. "We're here on a sound check," she said, which was the sort of sentence both plausible and shady enough to momentarily disarm.
The verger squinted. "Sound checks are usually in writing."
Mara fluffed an apology and produced a small stack of forged volunteer badges from her pocket with a flourish that would be described in later black markets as "Mara's charm." The verger inspected them like stamps, then shrugged, more interested in a good story than in bureaucracy. He allowed them to test the ropes, sighing the way old men sigh at children who need to learn how bells are older than scandal.
They practiced their extraction here—what would happen when the bell tolled, how they'd time the echo to cover their footfalls. It was a precise choreography where music made a useful noise and, for a moment, the bell sounded like the city agreeing to be complicit.
When they finished, Noctis tucked a small, neat list into his pocket, the kind of list that reads like a map to angels and a threat to complacent planners. He looked at each of them, eyes steady, and it was like receiving a benediction in the language of logistics.
"Everything accounted for," he said. "Except the human variable."
"That's our best asset," Elara replied. "Unpredictability with good shoes."
Jess had one last test: a quick probe into the reliquary's glass case. They needed to know whether it was vacuum-sealed, whether it had pressure sensors, and whether the word Echo on its plaque was merely decorative.
Jess set two small microphones—one sympathetic to glass tensions and one that liked to gossip about vibrations—next to the reliquary while Noctis distracted a passing acolyte with a long-winded, mildly philosophical question about the ethics of bell ringing.
The microphones told them what they wanted: the glass had a faint micro-vibration, a pulse every few minutes like a suspended heart. It wasn't a pressure sensor exactly; it was a listening instrument. The reliquary seemed to be paying attention to the room, cataloguing noises and returning them with small, reverent intervals. Elara felt a flicker—the name Echo again like a small current around her.
"That thing listens," she murmured. "It's not just housed. It's aware."
"Noctis?" Jess asked.
He lowered his brow—his weather-control face—and nodded. "It records. The plating is layered with an acoustic lattice. If you make a noise with a signature, it answers in kind."
Elara's grin sharpened with a mix of greed and professional curiosity. "So we'll need a signature." She said it as if proposing a new flavor. "Something subtle. Something that sounds like us and not like the world."
Mara, who had been idly observing, suggested, "A song? A laugh? A pastry dropped loudly like someone who has no dignity at nine in the morning?"
Elara liked the pastry idea more than she should. "A laugh," she decided. "A laugh because it's complicated—music and human and messy."
They practiced laughing. It was, in execution, far less dignified than in rehearsal. Elara's laugh was a practiced instrument; Jess's was an efficient spark; Mara's laughter made the church feel safer; Reven's laugh was a surprise, a mountain cracking into a smile. Raven responded with a low, wolfish chuff that sounded like delighted thunder.
When they replayed the recorded signature near the glass, the reliquary hummed delightedly and the glass pulsed—an answering ripple that made the hairs on their arms raise.
They celebrated with a quiet high-five that left Jess's palm a little damp. Then they made their exit, not by heroics but carefully: Noctis timed their departure to the gardener's lunch break, Jess pulled the feeds into a curated bubble of calm, and Reven did what Reven did best—walked like an enclosure.
Back at the van, soaked but unbowed, they tallied achievements and catalogued failures. They made notes about ladders, sprinkler sensitivities, the choir children's uncanny sense of timing, and the bell man's affection for misplaced volunteers. They sat in a drama of heat and electronics and ate cold pastries like a band who had rehearsed their misfortune into a ritual.
Elara sat with her hoodie up, hair tied back, and felt something like contentment ease its weight across her chest. The church had been observed. The Echo had been coaxed into a conversation. They had made mistakes and laughed through them; they had sacrificed dignity for data and pastries for distraction.
Before they left, Mara nudged Elara and said, quietly, "You were… different today. Tying your hair. Smiling like that."
Elara looked down at her hands, still dusted with the church's stone and prayer. "Less hiding is expensive," she said. "But it's cheaper than living on the rumors of who you are."
Mara's hand found hers—brief, warm. "We'll make a good noise," she said. "And when you steal things, we'll eat cake after."
Elara grinned into the rain and the promise of unwise pastries. "Deal."
They drove away with laughter leaking out of the van like contraband. The church receded—stone, glass, humming secret—and the city swallowed the sound of them like a rumor being folded into conversation. For Elara, the day had been practice not only for a heist but for the small, complicated work of being seen without being devoured.
She kept the memory of the reliquary's pulse in the pocket of her mind the way one keeps a lucky coin: worn, meaningful, and ready for the time when you might have to call back an echo and see if it answers you with more than a reflection.