Page 16 of Icarus

Crime

The stew settled in Icarus’s stomach like it was ready to come right back out. It hadn’t even been a full seventy-two hours since he’d left that place.

He felt cursed. Shaky.

Icarus had opened his mouth six or seven times to tell his father about what had happened the last time he was in that house, but the words never came out.

This was a bigger emergency than his fear. This could cost them their livelihood, bring an investigation to their home, and land them in prison far more quickly, efficiently, and permanently than even the situation with Mr. Black could.

With Mr. Black, they were just stealing from a guy. This, on the other hand, would be stealing from a private collection, a cultural artifact preservation site, and the country’s government all in one, while also separately violating international law. Plus, if they somehow managed to wriggle out of those charges, Angus could never work as a restoration artist ever again. Icarus wasn’t selfish enough to bring a second layer to his father’s terror by adding his own, so he swallowed it.

He would have to be the quietest and quickest he’d ever been. Using the most dangerous door, at the most dangerous time.

Icarus looked across the table at his father and thought about Akeem’s offer.

Tough

There was a diner across the street from the Black mansion. Their coffee was good. A little burned, but Icarus liked a lot of sugar in his coffee anyway.

He could almost see the back entrance of the Black house from the booth he was sitting in. The house was surrounded by thick trees blocking most of the neighborhood light and the noise from the highway. There were a few nice houses this far out—rich people definitely liked the acreage—but Mr. Black’s was the biggest.

The street was quiet and clear. Icarus needed the extra time to gather his nerve.

The sculpture was small. Small enough to fit under his black jacket in an inside pocket. It was wood and not even particularly valuable compared to some of the rest of the pieces they’d worked on. A 1960’s abstract piece, with a crack from heat damage.

Icarus ran his fingers over the shape of it from outside his coat. People had been banned from entering countries over a little thing like this.

“You need one last refill, dear?” the waitress asked. She looked tired; it was almost 2 a.m. “It’s almost closing time.”

Icarus shook his head and stood up to leave. “No, thank you.” He put a few bills on the table and headed to work.

Crack

The alarm was on. He could tell from the whine that had taken him years to notice. Icarus grit his teeth in irritation for a moment, then tilted his head back and took a calming breath. He could do this.

He took out his fabric-covered hammer and set about removing the back door from its hinges. Doing that was easier than most people with homes to protect would like to know. But it was loud, and that made it a liability. Icarus hated liabilities.

He pulled the door open a few inches and slithered through the crack, pressing it gently closed.

The house was quiet, but felt alive. Noticeably inhabited. He could hear the TV upstairs and laughter near it, hushed as mouse chatter.

Icarus flattened himself against the wall and slid along it toward the basement door. There was a thump a few floors above him, and his heart slammed in his chest.

He paused, waiting in the silence. After a minute of nothing, he flew across the rest of the hallway and quickly typed in the code for the storage room. The door opened with a soft hiss, and Icarus darted inside, closing it behind him. The room was about forty feet long and twenty feet wide with two aisles of shelves perpendicular to the door.

Unlike last time, when he could use his headlight camera to take pictures as slowly as he wanted, he was aiming for speed. So he turned the ceiling light on and sprinted down the first aisle.

Mr. Black’s collection was organized like a library. The least valuable items were unwrapped and at the front of the storage unit. The most valuable were wrapped, in storage boxes or in the vault.

They were further organized by region, but in an unofficial way that made it hard to navigate. The sculpture was in the third row, on a shelf near the ground. It was next to a few other wood pieces Mr. Black clearly didn’t value much. All of them unwrapped and covered in a fine layer of dust.

Icarus sighed. He pulled out a mask and tucked the straps over his ears. He picked up the original sculpture and placed it in his jacket pocket, making sure not to scrape any of the particulates off the surface of the shelf where it had rested. He took out the small container of fuller’s earth that they used—rarely—to replicate dust. Placing the piece the museum had sent his father on the ground, Icarus crouched over it and gently tapped a kabuki makeup brush in the fuller’s earth. He brushed his thumb over the bristles, sending a fine mist over the figurine from above. Glancing every so often at the remaining objects on the shelf, he matched the particle density as best he could.

Then he took two holding needles and pinned the figurine on either side. Using tension and steady strength, he lifted the statue off the ground, held fast between his two pins, to gingerly replace it on the shelf.

He could feel the sweat beading at his temples as he lowered the sculpture back into the circle of clean metal where the original piece had sat. Though he could feel his arms shaking, the base perfectly filled the circle without scraping or smudging the perimeter. Icarus pulled the needles slowly away from each side, leaving only pinprick-size dots where the sculpture had been handled. The adrenaline drained from Icarus in a dizzying wash and he let out a breath of relief.

He took a moment to study the figurine he was stealing. The forgery the museum had given them was worse work than Angus would have done himself. The real version was slightly lighter in color—they wouldn’t have made this mistake and Icarus idly wished that they’d had time to make a better one. But that didn’t matter nearly as much as making sure that it hadn’t looked as though anything in this room had been touched.