“Chop!” I said as my fist hammered repeatedly on Tom´s skull while trying my best to ignore the itch on my skin. I didn't hit him too hard though as I didn’t want to clean up the resulting mess and didn’t want to replace him at this point. It still had to hurt by quite a bit because he was incredibly dizzy after I stopped a minute later. “That’s for making me go into a brothel.”

“It has everything we could want.” He said while laying his head on the table. Once more, I scanned the room for anything interesting, but except the table and the few chairs, there was nothing. Well, except …

“A cockroach is eating a rat in the corner.” Neatly caged off from the rest of the room, there was a cockroach sized like Tom´s foot. It happily munched on the corpse of a rat which was already dead for a few days. It was honestly disgusting to look at, especially as it turned around, tapping the feelers against the little fence with a rat leg sticking out of its mouth.

“That´s Felix pet.” Who does such a thing? Already weirded out by the person who I didn’t even know, I sat down next to Tom and pulled the finance book he was reading over to me. He protested a bit, but one fist bump on his head was enough to shut him up.

The ten thousand gold coins were spent rather well. It was the money Mary could gather before Tom left for the royal capital which was nearly all of her fortune. It was by no means a small amount, and Tom surprised me by quite a bit. He bought seven brothels all over the city, three of those in the red light district. All of them were high-class brothels catering to the nobles and generated quite a bit of revenue, which was fine, I guess. He reinvested the revenue directly into the brothels, raising the payment of the whores and advertising the brothels, although I suspected that most would go over mouth propaganda in this line of business.

Currently, he was apparently in talks with a few more procurers to buy up their business. All of them were located on this street. He was probably betting on some kind of specialization of the single brothels to attract all kinds of customers.

Only twenty-five per cent of our current revenue and money was used for something else. He noted this under team expenditure which was raised two times since it first appeared a few days after he arrived here.

“What do you think?” He asked, probably hoping to get praised.

“Surprisingly, you didn’t mess up.” For the most part, I ignored the one hundred gold of weekly expenditure he didn’t break down further. “And, what kind of messed up information did the whores collect?”

Gathering intel was the single reason we decided to buy brothels. No other kind of job made it this easy to visit nobles and listen, or even steal information. Naturally, each whore needed to be trained properly for this task, otherwise, our cover would be blown soon.

“A whole bunch of it. You cannot imagine how much nobles like to brag. Wait a second … I know you like to read.” He stood up, walked over to a wall and pulled a brick out of it. He grabbed through the small slit and retrieved paper after paper from a cleverly hidden storage. After he finished, he placed around five hundred papers right in front of me and I nodded in approval. As I went through them quickly, I noticed they were written by around thirty different persons, but most were still written by Tom, probably because the others couldn’t write.

“Do you have something to carry this back? I´ll go through them later.” I said as I rather wanted to read the finance book.

“Miss Eberhart, the woman at the counter should have a backpack for you.” I nodded once more and turned to the next page. I took my time to go through everything he spent money on and I surprisingly couldn’t find anything worse than the one hundred weekly gold coins he embezzled so brazenly.

“So … the team you build up … are they any good?” I asked out of curiosity.

“Is anything satisfactory in your eyes?” I frowned slightly but had to agree that nearly every human I met so far was … lacking.

“Yeah … I am.” I stated bluntly.

“How unexpected. We will have a meeting in a few minutes, you can stay if you want.” I stuck my nose back into the finance book, inspecting everything with great interest. If his calculations were correct, we would be bankrupt after Tom made the last deals with the brothel owners on this street. It didn’t matter much though, I already knew this would happen and because our running costs were already covered, we didn’t have to worry. After I finished reading the last page, I slid the book over to Tom and grabbed the other papers. I didn’t come far though as the first team member already entered the room.

A bit more interested in the contents of the first piece of paper, I just ignored said person and kept reading. He wasn’t interested in greeting us anyway as he sat down in silence on the opposite side of the table. The not so talkative person wore completely black clothing and a cloth over his mouth. His sense of fashion was … practical. Unlike me, his clothing didn’t look clean and was patched over in several places. At least he didn’t smell bad, which was definitely a plus point. As I shortly looked over the papers in front of my face, he raised an eyebrow and looked towards Tom questionably. Tom stayed silent though and thus, we waited for the second person to arrive.

He arrived shortly afterwards and before I even looked at him, it was already clear he was slightly on the heavy side. The wooden stairs creaked under his weight and he was already wheezing before he even opened the upper door. The most definitely overweight person turned out to be not as fat as I suspected him to be. Instead, he carried a large heavy back on his shoulders. He panted heavily as he placed the bag on the table and then simply slumped down as well.

“Shit … that´s heavy.” He said, only to be greeted by utter silence. For a few seconds, nobody said anything until he spoke up again.

“Don’t you think we are taking this secrecy a bit too far? Come on, there is no need to be so grumpy. Just talk!” He looked towards his right to the person clad in black, then towards Tom and me as I inspected him while holding the papers in front of me.

“And who is this boy … girl … Tom?” As Tom didn’t react at all, he turned back to me while I was already fuming with anger. Unhappily, I laid the papers on the table and stared back at him. “Is this some kind of joke, Tom? Why is a little girl here?” Little … first I was a boy, and now I was little. I closed my eyes, pushed myself back to tilt the chair backwards and simply chose to ignore him to the best of my abilities.

“Hello, are you deaf?” Deaf … I wished I was.

“Felix, it is better if you shut up now.” Tom interjected. At least Felix kept his mouth close as the next person was already on his way. He entered the room in a rather flashy way … He threw a grenade inside.

I could only look at it for a single second before I noticed the white, thick smoke coming out of the round handmade object.   

“For fucks sake! Not again!” Shouted the man who thought I was a boy. Annoyed, I picked up the papers again and held them close to my face to see through the smoke that was rapidly spreading in the room. The others already began to choke on it while I simply stayed silent and watched everything amused.

I soon heard someone walking down the stairs while breathing through a thick fabric which seemed to help him somewhat. By far, this was the best entrance to a group meeting I could ever imagine … well except blowing up the whole place. That would be even better.

In any case, the last team member soon sat down on the only empty chair and laughed into his cloth as the others were coughing their souls out of their bodies. The smoke didn’t hold long though and soon, fine white particles settled everywhere. Annoyed, I shook them off my shoulders. Surprisingly though, the strange substance was completely odourless and probably not very toxic as the others looked perfectly fine.

“Jack, if you ever do this again, I swear your home will fall victim to a sinkhole!” Felix shouted the moment he caught his breath. Both Jack, the person who threw the smoke bomb and I were amused by the situation, the others … not so much. They kept haggling for several minutes until the one with the heavy bag, Felix, apparently had enough and simply stopped talking. Jack, on the other hand, was now free to wander his gaze towards me as I continued to read the papers.

“And who is this little girl?” He asked, slightly amused by Toms following facepalm. “And why is she wearing mourning clothing as if she was just at a funeral?” He asked.

“Oh, no, I wasn’t at a funeral, although I´m willing to change that fact.” I said haughtily. Jack laughed loudly and even Felix couldn’t help but smirk.

“And, who is she?” He asked once again while I stuck my nose back into the papers. Tom understood the wink and took over from me.

“She is good enough to be here, that’s all you need to know.” Felix spat on the table and pointed at me.

“She is a spoiled noble girl who seeks a thrilling adventure. I´m not working with her, no matter what.” My clothing was a bit too good to be anything less than a noble or a rich girl in general. As such, it wasn’t that hard to figure out what group I belonged to.

“This spoiled little brat is paying you.” I said drily to disarm the situation.

“Fuck this shit, I´m out. I am not going to work for some noble girl who can’t do shit.” Felix stood up, quite angrily and shoved the chair backwards. I sighed, closed my eyes and recalled everything I noticed about him from the scent, to his hands. I swiftly opened the bag he was carrying and eyed the rocks in it. It was basalt, one of the harder rocks on this planet.

“You are here to inform Tom that digging the tunnels is taking longer than expected. You are the miner of the group, but you don’t use pickaxes, don’t you?” I pointed towards his perfectly fine hands. “You use magic.”

“Tom could have told you that.” He stated, but at least he was willing to listen.

“Sure … you have a child, your wife likes roses and you work as a teacher at a less prestigious school. Do you want to know more?” I asked and picked up the papers again, seemingly bored.

“… how?” He asked, utterly surprised by my observations.

“Uff … there is chalk underneath your fingers and ink on them. As far as I know, only teachers use both these days regularly. You are wearing a four to six-year-old wedding ring, you are bound to have at least one child.”

“… had. He died of the stix fever.” A treatable disease, although it was very costly to do so. I could already pierce together why he wasn’t willing to put up with me.

“… I am sorry to hear that.” I said slowly.

“… I worked at my lord’s mansion before, taught his kids for several years … and then my son fell ill. I begged my lord to lend me money for the treatment, but he refused. I swore myself to never make the same mistake again, I´m not following your orders.” I never wanted to hear his life story though …

“You don’t have to. In the first place, I have better things to do than to command you around and if I ever want something from you, feel free to question my motives all you want. Does that solve the issue between us?” I stated.

“For now …” He said, still a bit grumpy.

“Great, what about the others? Jack? You? Any worries there?” I asked into the round.

“Luke is deaf and mute. I don’t have any problems.” Jack, formerly known as Mr. Smoke Bomb, said.

“Is that so? What is he good for then?” He apparently read my lips as he started to write on the table, covered in this white stuff.

‘Murder. No problems here.’

So he was the assassin of the group.

“What do you think?” Tom asked, slightly leaning over to me.

“You have an arsonist, a mole and a deaf assassin … it´s alright.” He smiled brightly like a little kid who was just praised. His reaction was kind of cute though …

“Is there anything else, Tom?” I asked, eager to have a bit of fun during the rest of the night.

“Not as far as I am concerned.” He answered swiftly.

“Great, Felix, you have done some digging in the past, haven’t you? Is there any tunnel underneath the noble wall?” I asked, hoping to solve the problem of getting back into the noble district undetected.

“There is ... if you give me a map, I can mark both entrances for you.” I grinned, pulled my neckline away from my skin and retrieved the map that I squeezed in between the fabric and my skin earlier. The lack of large pockets on dresses made me do very strange things …

In any case, Tom watched me the whole time as I did so, while the others immediately averted their gaze like they were supposed to. Only Tom lacked the decency. I shortly wondered where he got that from until I realized it was probably from me.

After Felix marked the entries on the map, I folded it again and put it on top of the other papers.

“I seriously need to go to bed … have fun!” I said, stood up with the papers in my hand and left without waiting for any replies. I already chose to let Tom stay in charge as I had other things to do that were maybe even more important.