The chemist's house doesn't look any different from the others along this empty avenue. A single wooden door, beige brickwork, double windows with square inlets, and an open cornice along the roof. At night seagulls nest within the building's many pockets, and I can see some now, silhouetted wings against the hazy starlight. A shallow front step leads up to the foyer, branching left into a laboratory—with bottles and beakers pressed against the windows—and right into a sitting room—where an ornate grandfather clock ticks away. It's almost midnight.

In a sense, this unassuming house has been the focus of the last month-and-a-half. An attractor working with something like gravity, slowly but inevitably drawing Levin, Elidia, and I closer to our second assassination. No, sorry: our first robbery. Assassination only if necessary.

I pull my oversized cloak tighter, feeling the fleece lining between my fingertips. It’s July now, the beating heart of summer, and yet today was cloudy, overcast, and the night is becoming cold. I stitched extra fabric into a makeshift hood so that the cloak serves to hide both my body and my visage. Anonymity is deeply etched within my name; again I've coated my face in charcoal, paranoid that I will be recognized by roving or friendly eyes.

Tock. Tock. We can hear the grandfather clock within the alley.

"Alright. Enter only after you hear glass breaking." I turned from one of the kids that Levin was training to the other. "And you, stay alert." Both of these lads had been my playmates at St. Alodia's; but that time is becoming more and more distant now, like a life that someone else lived, and I can't see either boy as anything but a chess piece. A disposable pawn.

Leaving my underlings behind I separate myself from the alley wall, gliding onto the empty street while the gray cloak flaps about my legs. A seagull sees my coming, and squawks haughtily to its neighbors within their artificial colony. Up close I can see the imperfections of the chemist's house: the weather-worn bricks, chipped at the corners, and a meter-long crease along the left wall face, perhaps caused by seasons of fluctuating temperatures. I hurry to the sitting room window.

Strange as it may seem, breaking into the house is really the part of night about which I am most uncertain. Once we enter everything should run smoothly. But I really have no idea how to take that first step...should I learn how to pick a lock—do people still do that? Or is it only from picture books? Regardless, attempted break in has very few risks associated. If we are caught inside the house, we're trespassers—but if we're caught trying to enter, we haven't actually committed a crime yet. And if we can't find a way in tonight, we'll just return for a second visit.

That said, it's not like I don't have a plan.

The sitting room window is latched on the inside, with a small steel lip between glass pane and its metallic casing. I extract a half-meter lever from the inside of my cloak; the tool has a flat end, which slots perfectly beneath the window's metal overhang. "Here's to hoping for shoddy craftsmanship," I mumble under my breath, taking one last glance along the road. The garrulous seagulls are crying above as the grandfather clock ticks within.

Tock. Tock.

"Huuuuhhhh"

With a sharp exhale, I apply my body weight against the thick wooden lever, watching to see if the latch snaps.

The chemist's house has drawn me in completely. This is my chance to get closer, to become enveloped within its beige walls, and discover its potions, kopecks, recipes, and books. Dragan. I feel as though my name is calling out to me from within the house, from a shadowed room I cannot see nor have ever entered, where the chemist himself sleeps fitfully.

"Grraa…ahhh...shhh"

The latch grinds to a breaking point, and then snaps. The window lays open before me.

Isn't is strange how little we know about the people around us? Even the people we interact with everyday? Take Anna and Mr. Alexander for example. I don't know why their trading company is called Alexander and Sons, or whether those implied progeny ever existed. Throughout the many summer afternoons I've spent studying with Anna—sneaking looks at her narrow freckled face—she's never once mentioned friends, or other family, or suggested venturing outside the unopened ivy-covered door. Among the many trinkets, pamphlets, pages, and records lying around their store counter or covering the surrounding shelves, I've never once seen memoranda of Anna's mother, of Mr. Alexander's wife.

Connections are everything.

And what about my closest companions? Levin, like me, has no memory of his parents; they were slaves, apparently, and lived their short lives unnamed. Perhaps they were taken by the same fatal fever that led to my own orphanage, and were similarly burned outside the city, cremated to prevent the disease's infiltration among Samark's noble families. Elidia is different: she knows her parent's names. But she keeps the information locked away—never revealing her origins to either myself or Levin—clamming up whenever either of us try to ask, while silently rearranging her ashen hair across her scarred right cheek.

Knowledge is everything.

Some of the most important people to me are people I don’t know at all. Hermes and the priest (Yakov, Mr. Alexander called him) together gave me a name. But what more could I say about Hermes, besides describing his boyish face and recalling his dandy clothes, and what more could I say about Yakov, besides recognizing his height and remembering his death? It would be a lie to call them strangers. To me, right now, they are people I hold dear...whose life and death has become linked to my own. Just like the two lads Levin has trained to fight, and whom I will now teach to steal. We are connected—perhaps intimately—but we know nothing about each other.

Understanding this world is everything.

Maybe I am still being childish, but that is what I have come to believe.

I want to know more about Samark.

So far Levin, Elidia, and I have been little more than puppets. First we were fools of the church, as they guided us unsuspecting towards the yoke of slavery. Then we were a tool for Hermes, caught up in something that we don't understand. And now I'm dependent on Mr. Alexander, a movable piece within his and Anna's schemes. Somehow we need to break the trend. Or more to the point: somehow I need to break the trend, to guide Elidia and Levin forward.

I tell you all of this not because I know how to solve our problems. I don't. But I do know that our first step to freedom lies in the chemist's house. In tonight's heist.

Once through the window I unlock the front door, creaking it open slightly in case we need a quicker escape. Away from the windows the house is pitch black. I try to move lightly, stepping with the balls of my feet, and eventually decide to remove my leather boots entirely. Tock. Tock. The grandfather clock seems louder now, as I prick up my ears to try and detect the chemist's snores. His bedroom door should be nearby; I sneak with my hands held out before me, feeling my way between the rough hallway walls. My cloak trails along the floorboards.

Within the bedroom I find the chemist asleep on his side, his bearded face illuminated by flecked lights filtering through the half-open curtains. The covers are a mess—he's rolled over through the early night—but now his face is turned away from mine, a roman nose pointed towards the incoming light. This is where my name wants me to be; I feel an odd sense of belonging in the strange man's house. But I suppose everyone and no-one is a stranger.

*Crash*

I smash an empty wine bottle against the back of his unprotected skull.

After that, everything ran like clockwork.

I checked the chemist's pulse. Tock. Tock. His blood flowed to the beat of the house, still alive but certainly out cold. Good. I didn't know whether the blow would kill him, but I'd rather not perform my second assassination here; it would draw too much attention to the robbery, and too much suspicion to my name. I walk back down the hall to put on my boots.

"Should I start?" The smaller of the two boys had entered after the bottle broke, and now he stares at me, my face completely hidden by the darkness, the cloak, and the charcoal.

I guess that we have about an hour...maybe? "Yes. Get at much as we can carry. Go quickly." I sit down on a wooden wicker chair to think for a second, to calm down.

My leadership strategy is brilliant, if you'll permit my self-indulgence. Actually, it's something I picked up from Anna's business lessons. The lads are responsible for paying me a flat fee when we leave the chemist's house: I set the price at five thousand kopecks, or jewels of twice that value. It's a lot, certainly, but not beyond of the amount of money I expect the chemist to have. And here's where the motivation really comes in—the two can keep any kopecks they find past the agreed upon price. When I was nameless, I killed for nothing.

I forcefully slow down my breathing. Fine. Everything is fine.

The chemist's lab shines like beetle scales in the moonlight, as each different glass bottle, beaker, and flask reflects off the others and into the multicolored liquids they contain. When I step on the floorboards one of the wooden tables shakes, causing the glasses atop it to softly tinkle. The bookshelf is on the back wall. Before it I see a few apparati that I can name—a triangular crucible, a porcelain mortar and pestle (with some granules crushed inside), and a large black crochan—together with many instruments that I do not recognize.

I need to steal books for Elidia. Three, four maybe is all I can carry. But along the wall are more than fifty: all leather bound, with identically embossed spines and large silver titles. The chemist must be an orderly man. Fortunately, Elidia had scoured these shelves the week before during a daytime visit, and provided me with a succinct list.

"Let's see...here's Flamel's Flora and their Uses, and...yes, Modern Chemistry by Proust…" Heavy, that one. "And finally...Recipes for Health and Sanguine Blood, written by Dante." I shoved each successive title into my cloak, causing it to bulge awkwardly around my waist.

Tock. Tock. I leave the beetle bottles behind and return to the entryway, signaling the larger boy outside who was serving as our lookout. He rushed beneath the seagulls and into the entrance.

"I have what I need. Case the house with the other kid, I'll stand watch here." My voice comes out raspy and growling. I can't let either of the lads know who I am; that I'm barely a year older than them, or that we used to play together under Father Victor's sporadic care. Separation. Now I'm an assassin, and they're my first acolytes. They're the only pawns Elidia, Levin, and I have to leverage.

Leaning against the front door I again pull the fleece-lined cloak close to my body, trapping in the remaining warmth and stolen books. While I watch the two boys race between rooms, whispering directions back and forth, as they search for some secret stash or buried collection. It's true what Hermes said: unnamed can do anything. My name drew me into the house, down the corridor, and around the chemist's exposed form. But now my name is telling me to be gone, repelling me from the vulnerable house and out into the cloudy night. Tock. Tock. I can't think clearly any longer; or perhaps it's that I lack the required imagination, that now I increasingly see things from a single named viewpoint. I fiddle with a dagger strapped to my chest. I listen to the sounds of the passing night: the boys rummaging, the clock ticking, the seagulls occasionally squabbling for territory. I wonder if the chemist will live, or if my attack has caused some irreparable damage. I wait as patiently as I am able.

And then I decide we should wait no longer.

"Let's go. It's time to get away from this house."

Tock. Tock. The grandfather clock slowly unwinds in the sitting room, fading away as we sweep back along the empty avenue.