Chapter 1.16 - In which Percy attempts to undo his crimes

Percy

Month 11, Day 3, Tuesday 7:30 a.m.

“Stop,” Percy ordered. “You can’t steal from this store. This is Mr. Schubert’s livelihood! Do you know how expensive these things are?”

The thief laughed. When he saw Percy wasn’t smiling, he adjusted the strap of his large satchel over his shoulder and turned to face Percy fully. “Relax, kid. There’s enough for both of us. More than either of us could carry alone. You can have your Vashta 300 or whatever.”

“Vista 500,” Percy corrected automatically. He leaned over, bracing his hands on his knees and taking a couple of deep breaths to stave off his sudden dizziness.

Meanwhile, the thief continued to shovel the store’s products into his satchel until it bulged.

“I can’t let this happen,” Percy whispered to himself. Allowing the shop to be raided was morally wrong, but more than that, this whole situation was inevitably going to go horribly awry for Percy personally. Who would believe he was tricked? Maybe if he had stayed outside, but he was in the store, with the thief. The thief who, even if he was caught, would testify that Percy had wanted to come in and take advantage of the opportunity to steal things.

Percy could go to jail for aiding and abetting grand theft, even if he touched nothing.

Percy had no choice but to stop the man.

He straightened, drew in a huge breath, and screamed, “Thief, thief!”

The thief cursed, his face twisting into a hateful scowl. He hesitated between bringing his wrath down on Percy and escaping through the back door. The man chose the door, closing up the mouth of his satchel and tightening the strap.

Percy looked around for something to attack him with, but everything around him was incredibly expensive and often fragile. Percy’s eyes landed on a tripod stand, and he lunged for it, but the thief was already scurrying through the door.

In his careless lung for the tripod stand, Percy tripped over one of the negative cartridges spilled carelessly across the floor. He bumped into one of the half-empty shelves, and the impact somehow sent it wobbling and then tipping inevitably toward him.

Percy threw his shoulder against the shelf, stretching out his arms and one leg to try to catch the fragile lenses before they could hit the floor and shatter. With a heave, he righted the shelf, and then carefully balanced on one foot while his other three limbs pushed back the lenses from the edges. A few that were out of his reach plummeted to their deaths like wingless baby birds.

Clutching his bruised shoulder, Percy finally made it to the door and looked around frantically.

The thief was already all the way down the block, running with surprising speed despite the weight of his stolen goods.

A nearby woman, probably drawn by the commotion, pointed at Percy. “Thief!” she shrieked.

Percy almost threw up from anxiety. “No, it wasn’t me. I didn’t take anything, he’s the one who—” He gave up trying to explain himself in favor of chasing after the real thief, who was drawing even further ahead. Retrieving the stolen items was the only way out of this now.

Percy clenched his fists and sprinted forward, determined to catch the man. Whatever it took.

As if aware of Percy’s determination, circumstances immediately conspired to try to make him change his mind.

The thief turned a corner, and when Percy followed around that same corner, his trajectory just a little wider, Percy slipped in the puddle of some witch’s recalcitrant water elemental. Some thaumaturges preferred to use familiars to cast their magic instead of a standard celerium Conduit. The problem with familiars is that they had their own personalities, and sometimes they felt like having a tantrum in the street.

The witch, her elemental, and everyone nearby watched wide-eyed as Percy’s momentum took him right through the puddle. He tumbled into the street and rolled multiple times, every slightly raised stone conspiring to smash him somewhere delicate or important.

“Oh, my stars! Look what you’ve done, Puddle!” The witch shook a scolding finger in her familiar’s face before hurrying over to Percy to help him up. “Are you okay, child? I’m so sorry. I’m sure Puddle didn’t mean it. We were both surprised. You came around that corner so fast—”

Percy waved her off, ignoring the silently laughing form of the water elemental behind her back. He took a few limping steps and accelerated back into a sprint after the thief. The delay had allowed the man to draw even farther ahead, but Percy was faster, and not weighed down or made lopsided by a satchel of loot.

As Percy slowly closed the gap between them, the thief tipped over a couple of boxes of fruit as he passed.

Percy tried to jump over them, but his toes caught the edge of the second fruit box. He tried to tuck into a roll, but the box caught on his foot made that impossible. Instead, he took the brunt of his fall on his forearms to avoid smashing his face into the street. His weight broke the fruit box, and a couple of splinters the size of his pinky finger pierced the barrier of Percy’s pants and punctured his shin.

He felt one of them snap off against the bone. He squeezed his eyes tight, letting out a low groan through gritted teeth. One breath, and then two, and his body seemed to realize what had happened. Pain exploded through his leg, and he shuddered as his body tried to tell him that this was not the standard bruise or scrape, but that something was wrong.

But the thief was getting away. Ignoring the shouts of anger and concern, Percy climbed back to his feet and ran on, his stride now marred by a limp. The wood shards still embedded in his flesh didn’t stem the bleeding, but they didn’t stop him, either.

The thief had disappeared around a corner.

Percy rounded that same corner and was forced to slow. He couldn’t see the man’s back any more.

He looked around desperately, squinting past the cracks in the right lens of his glasses, but saw no one fleeing. For a moment, Percy’s stomach sank, but then he caught a glimpse of the thief in the crowd as the man took a paranoid peek over his shoulder.

The man met Percy’s gaze, made an exaggerated expression of exasperation, and began to run again, giving up on his attempt to blend in.

Again, Percy began to close the distance between them. Hope lightened Percy’s body as the man showed obvious signs of fear and fatigue.

The man’s running form grew even worse as he continually looked over his shoulder to gauge Percy’s distance. In a move of obvious desperation, he reached out and grabbed a woman who was walking beside two small children and carrying a wooden cage with a rooster.

She shrieked, the children screamed, and the thief use all of his strength to spin her around towards Percy.

Percy lost one of his shoes trying to stop. He felt some of the skin tear off the pad of his bare foot from the friction against the ground, but ignored it in favor of grabbing the teetering woman by the arms.

Rather than smash directly into her, he pushed himself one way and her the other, and they passed like two strangers who had decided to dance in the middle of the sidewalk. And then they both fell.

The chicken’s cage went flying, and when it hit the ground, the door unlatched, allowing the animal to struggle back to its feet and force its way out. Its dark eyes narrowed on Percy, and it lifted both wings like a goose, threatening him with its illusory size as it ran to stand protectively between him and the family of three.

It let out three ominous “boks,” but Percy didn’t speak chicken, and didn’t understand the warning. As he tried to climb back to his feet, the chicken saw his refusal to comply. It let out one more angry “bok” that sounded more like a screech, and attacked.

As chickens do, it went right for his face, its spurs and talons gouging into his cheek as it ripped at the roots of his curly hair with its beak and beat him about the head with surprisingly powerful wings.

Percy recoiled, trying to protect his head with his arms, fend the bird off, and desperately crawl away, all at the same time.

“Ripper! Leave him alone!” the woman he’d almost crashed into cried.

The bird complied reluctantly, but didn’t take its beady, gimlet stare off of Percy.

Panting and sobbing from pain and fear, Percy once again struggled to his feet. His face and arm felt as if they were on fire, and blood was running into his left eye and down his neck.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the woman gasped, holding her hands to her face. “Get back in your cage, Ripper!” she shouted, pointing.

The chicken walked slowly back to the cage, its head hanging low with shame, but throwing a few sneaky glares toward Percy.

“Mom!” one of the children wailed, tears pooling in her eyes as she looked at Percy. “Look what Ripper did!”

“You need a healer. Let me take you. I’ll pay—”

Percy waved his arm weakly at the woman and limped off after the thief, ignoring her attempts to call him back or apologize. Percy had to catch the man. If he failed, the injuries would mean nothing. Percy couldn’t go to jail. He just couldn’t. His mom would kill him. And Lysander would never let him live it down.

They would all be ruined by trying to pay back Mr. Schubert.

The Vista 500 was one of the more expensive items in the Photo Emporium, but it was three hundred gold. It took some people a whole year to earn that much. If Percy had wanted to, he could have paid to send himself to vocational school for a year with what he’d saved. And the thief hadn’t just stolen one thing. He’d stuffed an entire satchel with artifacts and add-ons.

Percy was still a minor, which meant Dad would probably take on the fine himself to keep Percy out of a labor camp. And if they couldn’t pay…

When he found the thief again, the man was bent over, panting with his hands on his knees. He actually screamed with frustration when he saw Percy. “Why!? Why won’t you stop?” he cried, gasping.

“Give me the camera obscuras,” Percy said simply, blinking the blood from his eye.

Percy was not surprised when the man turned and ran off again, his feet heavy with fatigue to the point that his steps shuffled against the ground.

Percy followed doggedly behind, without even the wherewithal to shout, “Thief!” Wearing only one shoe, missing some skin on his bare foot, and with the wounds in his shin and contusions everywhere else, Percy’s balance was somewhat poorer than usual.

He slipped on a wet patch, but this time, he didn’t fall. He tried not to think about what, exactly, was getting into the wound on his foot.

He followed the thief over a fence blocking off a back alley, over a small hill of ash, and through a labyrinth of drying clothes and bedding hung up on strings. He avoided a pile of broken glass, hurdled over a barking dog, and ducked under a thrown brick.

At some point, Percy realized that he had lost his glasses. Perhaps in the labyrinth of clothing. He knew it was no use turning back to look for them. He just had to make sure that he stayed close enough to the thief that the man couldn’t disappear into a blur of indistinguishable shapes.

The thief was heaving for air, his gasps a painful rasp that sounded as if they would devolve into lung-wracking coughs at any moment. Despite the fact that the man was uninjured and had somehow met no obstacles to his escape, unlike Percy had in his pursuit, the man had reached the point of desperation.

He stumbled into an alley, past a few more turns, and then past a latched gate leading into a courtyard area. “Help,” he called weakly. The satchel fell off of his trembling shoulder as he turned to face Percy. “Just stop,” he begged. “Just let me go, you freak.”

“What the hell!?” another man said, drawing Percy’s attention to the roof on the other side of the courtyard. The other man was standing above a ladder, probably acting as a lookout. “You led this kid straight to us!” he accused the thief.

The thief shook his head, white foam lining the corners of his lips. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t lose him. He’s crazy, Boris. I mean it. Something is wrong with him.”

Boris smacked his hand to his forehead. “And now he knows my name. He could report our base to the coppers. Hells, he could be wearing some kind of tracking artifact right now!”

Panting wearily, Percy wiped some of the blood from his face onto his sleeve, then looked from Boris, to the thief, to the satchel of stolen goods on the ground. Could he grab the satchel and make a run for it?

Maybe he would be able to escape from the thief, but Boris hadn’t been on a frantic chase halfway across the city. Unlike Percy, he was still fresh. And Boris wouldn’t be slowed down by the weight of the re-stolen goods.

“Myrddin, what did you do to the kid? Try to kill him?”

“It wasn’t me,” the thief protested weakly.

Boris began to climb down the ladder. “At the very least, we need to strip search the kid and keep him tied up until we can get out of here. Can’t have him snitching to the coppers. I would say we should rough him up a bit more so he knows to keep his mouth shut, but it looks like you already did that. Maybe a few days without food and water will soften him up.”

“Ah,” Percy said dumbly. Suddenly, he realized he had gotten himself into a very bad situation.

That might be an understatement.

If he didn’t escape, this day might make it onto the list of his top three lifetime worst.