Beyond Ninth Mountain, Silent Peak

Siyu was cutting a sleeve at closing time when a client asked her to dress a dead man for a meeting that had not happened yet. She could read a person's rank, lie, and secret nature from cloth alone, and that made her the city’s most wanted tailor and its easiest target. When she was sent into the sealed safehouses, she brought her own tools, her borrowed boots, and a helmet stamped with a commander’s seal. The first signs of danger hit where she least expected them, in a kitchen store room by the family graveyard, where only she could see a figure waiting in the dark. Her hands shook once, just once, and that crack in her calm told the people around her she was still human.