"Hurry up, Cass," the girl whispered from atop the wall, "Five seconds until the night watch is back! It's now or never!"
The boy touched the bag full of all their belongings on his hip and glanced back at the dilapidated, drafty old house once more before launching himself over the wall after the girl. Grabbing her hand, the two ran away from the only life that they had ever known. Cassian led her into the forest, to their new future, to her death.
"Don't go," he said, stopping in a moonlit clearing, "Stay here!"
The girl didn't hear him. She ran right past him, her hand slipping out of his as if it had never been there. He tried to follow, but his feet had sunk into the soil and he couldn't move them.
"Wait," he cried out, but she had already been swallowed by the encroaching forest.
In her place, a wolf as tall as him slinked out from in between the trees, its teeth bared in a bloodthirsty smile. Its silver fur glistened in the moonlight as it leapt at him, knocking him flat on his back. He could feel its hot breath against his neck as he gazed into its unfathomable gold-flecked eyes and struggled to breath. Spots swam in his vision as the shape of a bird landed on the wolf's head and peered at him.
"Get up," it cawed.
"Breathe," it mocked.
"Get up, Cassian!"
Suddenly, Cassian sat up, the last vestiges of the dream quickly fleeing from his mind as he violently coughed water from his lungs.
"Woah, now," said a voice as Cassian felt hands pushing him back down and rolling him to his side, "Stay like that for a moment."
Cassian spent what felt like an eternity coughing up all the water in his body and then some. When the coughing fit had subsided, he realized the man that had been helping him was none other than Inspector Cadoret. The man was dripping wet and had lost his shoes and jacket somewhere along the way. He was looking at Cassian with concern.
"Feeling better?"
Weakly, Cassian nodded his head, and asked hoarsely, "What happened?"
"You drowned."
No, shit, thought Cassian. The spark of anger made Cassian struggle to sit up again, but it was quickly drowned in another bout of violent coughing. When this second round had subsided, he tried to make sense of his surroundings.
He and the inspector were on the sandy shore of a massive lake, the water still lapping at their ankles. Cassian could barely make out the outline of a forested shore on the other side of the lake through the glittering morning haze. Behind them, the black sand shore disappeared into a thick, green forest, and the cliff they had fallen down rose high above the lake to their left. The city they had just been in was nowhere to be seen.
"What the hell?" he wondered aloud.
"Language," the inspector admonished.
Rolling his eyes, Cassian corrected himself, "Where are we?"
"Your guess is as good as mine," the inspector said, shrugging.
"What happened?"
"Not sure."
Then what use are you?! Taking a deep breath to calm himself, Cassian frowned, trying to understand the situation. He had just been running through the city. He'd broken through a door that should have led into the kitchen or staff quarters of a mid-city apartment building, but somehow instead led to a cliff some eighty-odd feet above a massive lake in the middle of the wilderness.
Had that door always been there? Cassian wondered. He didn't remember seeing it before in the month he'd been staying in that building, which was odd. He was usually so careful about mapping the surroundings of his bases in case he ever had to leave unseen or in a hurry. Furthermore, he was rather confident in his ability to run from the police through the streets of the city. Why had he gone through the door in the first place?
Glancing at the inspector who was rather calmly wringing the water out of his shirt, Cassian frowned. Leaning forward, he said, "You seem awfully calm. Are you sure you don't know anything about what happened?"
The inspector paused and gazed at him for a moment. The inspector's steely-gray eyes had a way of making him feel as if all his secrets were being stripped bare. Cassian looked away first, climbing to his feet and brushing the sand off of his dripping wet clothes. On second thought, there was little chance the inspector had anything to do with their predicament. While Cassian prided himself on his cons and ability to make fools of the police, he didn't think they would create some elaborate dimensional-door scheme just to catch him. Finally, blessedly, the inspector broke the silence and said, "There's no use in panicking."
Taking off his vest and wringing it out, Cassian asked, "What are we supposed to do, then?"
"When you're ready, we'll head back up the cliff and see if we can find that door we ran through."
It was sound logic. As the pair fell silent, Cassian listened to the distant sound of wildlife from the forest and the gentle lapping of the lake on the shore. Under different circumstances, this could have been a prime vacation spot.
Lily would have loved it here.
At the intrusion of the painful thought, Cassian scowled and chased it away. Putting his damp vest back on, Cassian searched for the necklace. Patting all of his pockets, he found nothing.
"Di- " he began, looking over at the inspector, but cut himself off as he met the man's gaze.
"Looking for this?" the inspector asked with a slight smirk, holding up the ruby necklace, "I'm keeping it." His eyes bored into Cassian's, daring him to object.
"Ah, okay then," said Cassian glibly. There would be plenty of time to take the necklace back later. He needed to work with the inspector until they got out of whatever this was. Glancing up at the cliff face, he asked, "Any idea how to get up there?"
"We're walking," the inspector said as he marched into the forest, his bare feet squelching in the sand.
Cassian took a deep, calming breath before following. He only had to endure the man until they got back to the city. Then it would be back to the old game of cat-and-mouse, sly taunts in the newspaper, and sneaking in and out of all the different places he wasn't supposed to be in. In the meantime, he stepped carefully and dutifully in the inspector's footsteps. He had lost one shoe in the fall and decided to leave his other one and both his wet socks behind on the shore.
Halfway up the grueling forest slop, he was cursing that decision. His feet had lost the callouses he'd formed in childhood from running around the streets barefoot, and he had no practice[b] avoiding the fallen sticks and loose rocks abundant in the forest floor. The vegetation was thick, and all the plants seemed to be doing their best to trap him in place. Thorny vines snagged his clothes, knobby roots grabbed his ankles, and sharp rocks pierced his feet. He was trailing behind the inspector, who somehow seemed to know exactly how to walk to miss every sharp edge. He'd have given just about anything to feel something soft and cool against his feet.
At that moment, his foot landed on something particularly sharp, and Cassian hopped forward on the other foot, muttering a curse under his breath as he almost fell into the brush.
The inspector sighed and turned around, saying, "What are you doing?"
In a smooth motion, Cassian stood back up, continuing up the slope until he was level with the inspector. Ignoring the shooting pain in the bottom of his foot, Cassian said, "Nothing. Are we almost there yet?"
The inspector raised his eyebrows slightly, but didn't comment any further. He glanced at the tree tops before saying, "Yes, probably."
"How do you know?"
"The ground is evening out," he said briefly before continuing up the slope.
Feeling stupid, Cassian trudged after him, curses flying in his mind. He consoled himself with the thoughts of all the heists he could pull off right under the inspector's nose when they got back to the city. He'd make sure to specifically call him out, if only to see that smug, indifferent face even slightly inconvenienced. This time, he stayed close on the inspector's heels, focusing on matching his footsteps exactly.
Not long after, the trees began to thin out and the wind had picked up. They had reached the top of the cliff.
Standing just a few feet from the edge and shielding his eyes from the sun, Cassian gazed out over the landscape, and his breath caught in his throat. The sun hung overhead in an impossibly blue sky, scudded with clouds. They had been too preoccupied to notice before, but there was another sun, having barely cleared the horizon. The bright green forest they had trekked through spread in all directions, disappearing into gray, hazy mountains to his right. Squinting, Cassian could barely make out a snow-covered forest on the cliffs lining the other side of the lake. The lake's edges tapered inward to points on each end, where they disappeared into the green forest.
The two men were silent for a moment, with only the sound of the wind whistling past their ears between them. Finally, Cassian let out a breath he didn't know he had been holding and said, "What the hell is all this?"
Instead of answering his question, the inspector said, "The door isn't here."
Looking around, Cassian saw that the inspector was right. The top of the cliff was only bare rock, the trees having stopped several feet down the slope. Thinking back to the moment's just before he'd fallen off of the cliff, Cassian tried to remember what his surroundings looked like. He'd been blinded by the sun, but he was sure that the ground had been smooth and flat, not like the rough, rocky terrain around the top of the bluff.
"I'm not sure we fell from here," he ventured, "It wasn't far from the edge of the cliff and it was smooth and flat."
The inspector nodded. "Perhaps we didn't fall from the top," he said as he inched closer to the edge of the cliff. He laid down on his stomach, and leaned his head and shoulders over the edge.
Cassian briefly thought of attempting to grab the necklace from the man's pocket while he was preoccupied, but quickly thought better of it. They were in an unknown situation at the moment, and, although he hated to admit it, the inspector seemed better suited to getting them out of it. Not to mention, he'd saved Cassian's life earlier. He would wait until they were safe before attempting the theft on more even ground.
After a minute of looking, the inspector said, "I can't see anything from here." He began pushing himself back away from the edge.
At that moment, a voice sounded behind Cassian, and he felt the cold touch of steel on his neck. "Don't move and put your hands behind your back," said the voice, guttural and snarling.
Ice chilled Cassian's veins and he froze, not even daring to breathe. He hadn't even heard anything until the blade was at his neck. The inspector continued his motion of scooting backward until he was stable enough to turn his head to look at their assailants. Then, he froze as well, eyes wide and slightly scrunched up to look behind him. Somehow, seeing the inspector, who had seemed so infallible before, in such a compromising position, gave Cassian the strength to say, "Well, which do you want me to do? Because I can't very well do both at the same time."
The inspector's eyes snapped up to meet Cassian's, trying to tell him something that he just couldn't understand. Odd snorts and grunts sounded behind him, as the voice snarled once more, "Hands behind your back." There was a brief moment of stifled growls, then, "And then don't move."