The sun wasn't up yet when Levi's eyes opened.
He lay still for a moment, cataloguing — the hotel room ceiling, the sound of the capital outside, Zarraz's slow breathing from the other bed. The plan settled back into place in the order he'd reviewed it before sleeping: interviews at eight, get inside, learn the layout, find the ambassador. One day.
He got up quietly and went to the girls' room.
Sylvia was already dressed. Priscilla was reading through her résumé over a cappuccino, mouthing the work history to herself. Room service had delivered — pancakes, waffles, bacon, the particular abundance that Levi and Sylvia defaulted to before anything that required energy.
"Ready?" Sylvia asked.
"As much as I can be," said Levi. "You?"
"I've helped Chef Jeff in his kitchen. I know how to prep ingredients." She picked up her fork. "How hard can it be."
"Famous last words," said Priscilla, without looking up from the résumé.
They ate quickly and split up at the lobby — separate cars, separate arrival times, nothing that looked coordinated. The palace was twenty minutes away. The morning was overcast and cool. Levi watched the grid streets go past the window and thought about the guard post positions he'd clocked the day before.
✦ ✦ ✦
The palace gate guards pointed guns at Sylvia before she'd finished saying good morning, which was apparently standard procedure rather than personal.
The butler — introduced simply as Mr Zané, with the air of someone for whom a single name was sufficient — led her through the entrance hall and into a formal sitting room. He was precise, unhurried, and looked at her résumé with the attention of someone checking his own work rather than someone else's credentials.
"Four years at the Levatian Decadents," he said. "Kitchen assistant. You would have been, what — sixteen when you started?"
"Seventeen," said Sylvia, doing arithmetic on the fabricated timeline. "I started young."
"Enhancement magic," he said. "Interesting application in a kitchen context."
"Speed and precision," Sylvia said. "Useful for prep work."
He looked at her for a moment — the assessment of someone who had interviewed many people and was used to catching the ones who weren't what they said they were. Sylvia held his gaze with the easy directness of someone who had been sparring with legendary class MKs in training for two months and had recalibrated accordingly.
"CHEF ARIA," he said.
The chef who appeared was young, quick-moving, with the focused energy of someone who had a feast to prepare and seventeen things in her head simultaneously. She looked at Sylvia with the same rapid assessment as the butler, except hers was calculating kitchen utility rather than identity.
"New kitchen assistant?" she said to Zané.
"Starting immediately. The Emperor has guests this evening."
"Obviously he does." Aria grabbed Sylvia's wrist. "Come on, I'll explain while we move—"
The kitchen hit Sylvia like a physical force — the heat, the noise, the smell of twenty dishes in various stages of preparation, the specific controlled chaos of a professional kitchen operating at capacity. She stopped in the doorway for exactly one second, taking it in.
Aria snapped her fingers in front of her face. "Stay present, Margret. I need you here, not wherever you just went."
"Sorry," said Sylvia. "I'm here."
"Good. The Emperor's guests arrive at six. We have eight hours. You're on prep—"
Sylvia was already moving to the prep station. She'd heard the rest of it before from Chef Jeff, in a different kitchen, with different stakes.
✦ ✦ ✦
Priscilla's interview lasted four minutes.
Mr Zané looked at her résumé, looked at her, asked two questions, and called for Mrs Glaive. Priscilla had prepared for a longer interrogation and had several answers ready that she didn't end up needing.
Mrs Glaive was the head maid — middle-aged, methodical, with the particular composure of someone who had spent years ensuring that very large spaces contained no visible dust and had developed a specific relationship with standards as a result. She walked Priscilla through the palace at a pace that suggested the tour was a formality and the work was the point.
"Twenty-six rooms," she said, moving. "Five maids including yourself. Each room cleaned daily — floors, surfaces, fixtures. The Empress does not tolerate dust. The Emperor does not tolerate inefficiency. I do not tolerate excuses."
"Yes, madam," said Priscilla.
"Six rooms are restricted. The Emperor's bedroom. His children's rooms. My own room. The Empress's personal chamber. The door of each room is labelled. If you are found inside any of these rooms, you will be detained and questioned." She looked at Priscilla with the direct quality of someone who had said this to every new maid and meant it to every one of them. "Is that understood?"
"Completely," said Priscilla.
She filed the six room locations as Mrs Glaive named them. The children's rooms were on the third floor east wing. The Emperor's bedroom was adjacent to the main staircase on the second floor. The Empress's chamber was at the end of the second floor west corridor. The butler's room was ground floor, near the service entrance.
She was cataloguing the palace's interior architecture before she'd been given a mop.
✦ ✦ ✦
The garden was the first thing that gave Levi pause.
It extended from the palace's east wing in a way that didn't announce itself — you came through a gate in the wall and suddenly there was more space than the exterior had suggested possible, arranged with the deliberate intention of someone who understood that a garden was a statement as much as a space. Shaped hedges. Patterned flower beds. At the far end, a row of large wedge topiaries that had been trimmed into — Levi looked more carefully — nothing in particular, recently. Recently untrimmed, still holding their rough shapes from the last person's work.
The butler handed him a katana.
Levi looked at it.
"The previous royal gardener used sword artistry," Zané said. "The Emperor expects the same standard. If your skills are sufficient, you're hired. If not—" He gestured at the gate they'd come through.
"Understood," said Levi.
He unsheathed the katana. Felt the balance of it — lighter than his daggers, longer reach, a different centre of gravity that required a brief adjustment. He walked to the first wedge topiary and stood in front of it. Let the sword artistry thinking settle into place: what was the shape inside the rough form? What did the material want to become?
"Elite Gardener style—" he started, then stopped. He looked at the topiaries for a moment. Then he grinned. "Animal Kingdom."
The cuts were fast and precise, the katana following the lines he'd already traced in his mind before moving. He worked through the topiaries in sequence — a lion here, a hawk mid-flight, something that was either a running wolf or an extremely committed dog, he'd call it a wolf — the sword artistry translating directly from combat movement into a completely different application. The same principles: read the target, find the line, commit to the cut.
He stepped back. The butler was silent for a moment.
"The hedges," Zané said.
Levi looked at the long hedge walls. He thought about patterns. Waves were obvious, spirals were expected—
"Elite Gardener style: Composer's Groove," he said, and moved.
What emerged from the hedge walls was a flowing, irregular pattern — the shapes of music notation translated into topiary, bar lines and curved phrases running the length of the hedge like a score written in green. He hadn't planned it exactly; it had arrived during the cuts the way good ideas arrived during combat.
The butler clapped once — a single, precise clap.
"You are hired," he said. "Effective immediately. Welcome to the Emperor's palace, Steve. You are now the royal gardener."
"Royal gardener," Levi said.
"The title comes with the position."
"Right." Levi looked at his new domain — the animal topiaries, the musical hedges, the rest of the garden waiting for him. "Where are the tools?"
—
By midday, all three of them were inside.
Levi didn't know this for certain — they had no way to communicate during the workday without raising suspicion — but he felt it as a quality in the afternoon, the particular sense of a plan that had moved past its uncertain stage into its operational one.
The garden was quiet. He worked through it methodically, maintaining what had been maintained before, adding where the previous gardener had left gaps. He kept a mental map of what he could see from each position — the east wing windows, the service entrance, the path from the kitchen to the formal dining room. He was building a picture of the palace's circulation patterns without appearing to do anything but tend a garden.
His mother, he thought, would have approved of this approach.
He went back to trimming and let the afternoon pass.