The power off, and the lock on the back door patently prodded open, they entered and started looking around. Kes went to the kitchen while Tresit looked around the rest of the house. The kitchen didn’t yield any treasures this time though, just some plates and a cooking pan with a few morsels of food carelessly left uneaten. Kes was going to scrape them up with her fingers to eat when she heard a loud, sharp noise and went rushing from the room to find Tresit.

She found him by a storeroom door, knife in hand. ”I’m sorry…” He said, looking scared and ashamed of himself.

He’d used his knife to force the lock on the storeroom door and it must not have given as easily as the back door had and made that loud noise when it broke. ”Never mind, we have to go – now.” She took his hand and pulled him along behind.

”But…” He was protesting, looking back. The storeroom had been rich, but Kes wasn’t about to risk someone coming into the house to investigate the noise – even the seconds it would take to grab something from inside were too much of a menace for her to take a chance on.

”We can’t stay. It’s too much of a risk.” Kes whispered.

He was silent and followed along without protest at her words. Still, Kes couldn’t sense anyone dangerously close just yet, so she decided to at least take the time to cover their tracks. If she could help it, she didn’t want to leave a trace that might lead the wrong someone to connect what they were doing to Tresit’s previous thefts. She had no way of knowing if anyone here might know or suspect where Anara’s family was and come looking for Tresit there if they wanted retribution. They hurried down the back alley behind the house, reconnecting the power and hastily burying the cable again. As they’d done that, Kes had sensed two people coming their way, her and Tresit leaving just in time to miss an old man and a boy coming up the house’s front door.

”If they don’t own the house, they’ll probably take what we were going to steal.” Tresit told her jadedly as they ducked into an alleyway a short distance away.

That should have been surprising, but it wasn’t. Whether or not it was true in this case, by this point, Kes wouldn’t have put much past the people who lived in the city – the men anyway. She supposed she’d become partly jaded too.

”It’s okay. Come on, we’ll just go find another house.” Kes told him, purposefully avoiding addressing what had happened. She didn’t want to embarrass him by telling him to be more careful, or even that it wasn’t his fault or that he couldn’t have known the door would react that way, and besides… she knew very well he would be more careful. Of course he would.

In the house she found next, Tresit’s trick with the power line repeated, they found no locked storeroom – no anything, at least at first. Kes could smell the hint of water in the air though, so she knew it was there somewhere. She was going to give up and move on to the next house nevertheless, when Tresit found the secret door in the floor and opened it. It wasn’t even locked – the owner apparently relying on the hidden location to protect his supplies.

Kes smiled and congratulated her companion on his success, secretly glad he’d been the one to find it – she was sure it would do his already wounded self-confidence a lot more good than anything she could have said in the way of comfort.

They loaded themselves up with as much food and water as they could safely carry without it slowing them down too much, and left.

————–

to be continued