Kes’s smile stayed right where it was. ”I’m honored.” She told him.

”…Good.” Was all he said back.

She felt a little like laughing, but stubbornly kept herself from doing it. She was sure Tresit would be offended – especially if she told him how cute he was being about all this. Instead she refocused herself on being watchful. They were getting closer to the city perimeter now.

They weren’t going in the long way around like they had to fetch her supplies, they were taking a more direct route. It gave them better cover, in fact – though where they were entering was closer to the mines – and so more densely populated and with no abandoned buildings. On their previous sojourn, she’d asked Tresit about why there were any abandoned buildings at all, and he hadn’t known. He’d asked Anara about it when they got back though, and Kes had heard the answer too – the mines had been moved four times over the years, when it was more profitable to do so. That part of the city where Kes had first entered that had the abandoned buildings, that was too far from where the mines were now and also not close to the space port, so people had moved to be closer to where they worked and left the buildings abandoned.

Once inside the city, they made their way cautiously through the streets and alleyways, Kes always in the lead, using her telepathic senses to warn them of when someone approached. It was a big advantage, but one Kes wasn’t over-eager to rely too heavily on. She still guided them by the least conspicuous routs she could find and kept to the shadows as much as possible.

Luck was with them, and, before long, she found a house that looked comparatively well-off where no one was home.

As it turned out, Tresit knew a way to bypass the locked doors by finding the place where power fed into the house and then digging down in the dirt with his knife until he found the power cable. Once he had the cable, it was a simple matter to uncouple it and cut of power to the house. With the power out, using a little effort, the door could be forced with a knife. They’d planned to do this on their walk towards the city, Tresit having offered it as an option, and Kes concluding that it was safer than targeting a home where people were still present as she’d had to do last time. Tresit had been caught doing this before because he hadn’t had a reliable way to tell if someone was inside or not, and his luck had run out when he’d picked the wrong house. With Kes’s ability to detect whether anyone was there or not, she thought they might just have a relatively safe method of thieving worked out between them. Which she was very relieved about, for obvious reasons.