The door creaked open a minute later, and the maid exited carrying a load of sheets to hang. She moved toward the wire while humming, her back turned as Aina slipped by her and into the mansion. No one was in the laundry room, but when she entered the next hall on the first floor of the mansion, a servant was walking toward her. He stopped in his tracks, brow furrowed in suspicion.

“Excuse me, miss, do you—”

Her dart met his throat before he finished the sentence. She pushed him into a pantry, then made her way to the third floor, keeping her footsteps light on the staircase. If she was quick, she could get the blueprints and be gone in ten minutes, so she would do her best to only incapacitate rather than kill anyone who saw her.

There were fewer guards now with both brothers away from the house, and so the little security she saw was easy to pass by hiding in the shadows and waiting until the path ahead cleared. When she reached the third floor, she breathed more easily.

Since Ryuu wasn’t here, there were no guards outside his room like there had been last time. The door opened with a creak. The room was the same as before, with granite flooring, the floor-to-ceiling windows, antique and lacquered furniture, and the chandelier that twinkled with golden light over the center of the room.

She searched a chest near the bookshelf for the key first, sifting through maps and drawings of buildings that Ryuu kept there. No luck. She moved to the nightstand near his bed. The first drawer contained only a notebook and pen, but the second drawer held a small set of gold keys, and next to it lay a photograph.

She picked it up, carefully as if it would fall apart in her fingers, then turned on the nearest lamp to get a closer look. The only photographs she’d ever seen before were printed in newspapers occasionally or on fake IDs she used like the ones for the cleaning company, but the technology was still new enough that it took her a moment to differentiate it from a painting.

There were no streaks of paint here, nor use of any colored pencil or charcoal. This was a real photograph, mostly yellowed, with the subjects of it captured in degradations of neutral colors. She immediately recognized the entrance hall of the mansion in the background. Four people stood staring into the camera, parents and two young boys.

Kouta was tall even as a child, his hair dark and long, his face narrower than his brother’s. He had one arm around Ryuu’s shoulders, and the two brothers leaned into each other with wide smiles. Ryuu was so young that, though she recognized his face, the happy expression he wore was foreign to her. His parents were still alive, and he hadn’t yet discovered the burdens life would hand him. He looked no older than four or five here, the same age she’d been at the time of the war when violence leaked into the Stacks. At least then, she’d still had her parents for a few years to shield her from the worst of it.