Dress Rehearsal and Small Catastrophes
They treated every heist like a show because, to them, it was. The loot was the climax, but the rehearsal was the part that kept them alive — and entertained. The hideout smelled of solder, coffee, and the faint metallic tang that always clung to Elara when she'd been near something not meant for mortal hands. Morning light slanted through patched curtains and illuminated dust motes like a polite standing ovation.
Elara moved through the room with the easy choreography of someone who had been performing since before she could be scandalous. She wore a thrift-shop blazer today because it made her look like a bored curator and bored curators got people to underestimate them. The mask sat on the workbench, cloth-lined and humming just quietly enough to be noticed by anyone who listened too closely. She touched it once and then pretended she hadn't. She never pretended well.
Jess was already in the middle of the chaos, knees on a table, her laptop open, a half-eaten pastry at her elbow. Her hair was an earnest mess — the kind of mess that meant she had been up all night making improbable things behave. She was talking more with her hands than usual, as if the code in her head needed punctuation.
"Noctis wants the entry to be under four minutes," she said without looking up. "He says the new thermal sweep has a ninety-second refresh window. Also, if you're going to sing at the guards, do it in a key that won't shatter the humidity sensors."
Elara pretended to be affronted. "Excuse me. I sing in D minor, the most theatrical of keys. It's moody, it's succulent, it makes people confess love to statues."
Jess snorted. "People will confess anything when you throw glitter and a persuasive suggestion at their ears." She jabbed some lines into the keyboard. "By the way, we'll need the roof drones looped. I patched the nearest grid but there's a firmware update that might look like a—" She made a face. "—like someone trying to rewrite their entire existence. I don't want Homeland to get confused."
Raven slouched by the window in wolf-form, fur still normal gray, tongue lolling. He was enormous when he relaxed, the kind of presence that ate space and then apologized. He watched Elara like a curator watching their favorite exhibit. When she looked his way he wagged a slow, solemn wag of a tail, which had the effect of making Elara's chest fold soft for two beats—an occupational hazard.
Noctis, who preferred the quieter corners where he could brood over logistics and popcorn metaphors, stood by the map wall. He had a cup of tea gone cold and that particular look: calm, preternaturally patient, dangerous if you let him be bored. He tapped a camera icon and the route overlay blinked.
"Roof to skylight, silent entry, south corridor to main gallery," Noctis recited. "Exit route B is a little messy due to scaffolding, but I've looped a decoy parade through Sector Five. Jess will have the feed mimic crowd noise to override mic triggers. I have also scheduled Owl," —he pointed to a tiny drone pinned like a butterfly on the map— "to rustle a banner at precisely 02:07."
Elara admired that level of planning. She loved watching Noctis triangulate chaos into choreography. "And if a god shows up and is bored?" she asked, smirking.
"Noctis's eyebrow" —Elara would have happily called it an abstract weapon — "went up," she narrated to no one who needed narrating. "He nodded. 'We don't invite bored gods,' he said, which is the witch's way of promising to be interesting in polite company."
They ran scenarios like a theater troupe running acts. Each one was both rehearsal and joke:
• Scenario One — The Obvious Raid: They moved through the motions. Jess looped feeds, Raven padded the blind spots, Noctis untangled alarm logic like a surgeon demonstrating compassion for circuits. Elara rode the wave of it, cards between fingers, practice lines soft on her tongue. The drill went clean. They grinned at each other. "That was boring," Jess said, delightedly.
• Scenario Two — The Pantry Explosion: Because someone had to test what would happen if a guard's lunch exploded. The team pretended to be horrified but made mental notes. It turned into a slapstick of spilled soup and Jess swearing elegantly at splatters that appeared where they oughtn't have. Elara improvised a pratfall and landed on a crate of props like she was born to a stage. Raven barked with such perfect comedic timing that Noctis choked on his tea. They laughed until their faces hurt.
• Scenario Three — The One with the Curious Child: Elara insisted they practice the human element—a child who'd wandered into a gallery at midnight during a heist. She staged it, played the part of the timid clerk and then the embarrassed thief when the pretend child recognized her. They worked through responses: distract with a magic trick, hand over a false treasure, teach a small lesson about staying in bed at night. Jess improvised a lullaby that made Raven fall asleep mid-guard, and Elara felt something like warmth in her ribs, an ember she lied to herself about.
• Scenario Four — The Divine Interruptions: This was Noctis's favorite. He loved modeling terrible things that might happen when a local god took offense. They practiced ritual-neutralizing gestures (Jess's fingers were poetry for dissolving holy stutters), Noctis recited sacrificial-sounding nonsense to distract the gods, and Elara sarcastically performed a one-woman play called Apologize, Please, Don't Kill Us Today. It was equal parts bluster and prayer. They all left the rehearsal with that tight, bright energy of people who had cheated death for fun and practice.
They ran the roll call more than once. For Elara the announcement was a ritual—part hype, part taunt. She practiced the cadence, the inflection that made people do things they swore they wouldn't do. Jess timed the audience reaction buttons on her laptop—crowd gasps, dazed applause, the right amount of fury. Elara tried a few variations, some theatrical, some sultry, one that sounded suspiciously like a pirate's apology, and everyone laughed because rehearsal meant they could be foolish without consequence.
Between drills they fussed over gear. Elara's suit — the stage suit she kept folded in a box — was not just fabric. It was woven to catch light like a galaxy, a trick of threads and tiny reflective runes that made her look otherworldly when she moved. She laid it out flat on a table and ran a hand over it, feeling the cool whisper of starlit fabric. It was cocky and stupid and perfect.
Jess had sewn small modifications: hidden pockets perfectly sized for cards, a throat-scarf that became a smoke-sleeve, seams that rippered open so a cape could billow on cue. Noctis added a subtle plate at the shoulders to stop a particularly vicious grappling, and Raven — polite to leather and superstition — insisted on a collar charm that smelled faintly like night-blooming jasmine and old libraries.
"You're turning it into a dress," Elara teased when Jess fussed.
"It's armor that looks fabulous," Jess countered, needle between teeth like a conquistador. "Fashion isn't frivolous— it's distraction in textile form."
They ran the "if-then" drills until the scenarios felt like family tales: if a camera pinged, Jess countered with a decoy; if a priest chanted, Noctis handed them a pamphlet on the history of dancing; if a demon winked at the wrong time, Raven would start dancing in the middle of the floor until the demon either joined or left out of sheer confusion. Their improvisations were brilliant because they were ridiculous. Ridiculousness was their currency.
Mid-afternoon they staged the escape routes. Elara liked this part best. She loved the ballet of leaving: the little theatrics that tipped the world's face from intense to absurd. They had a system:
Lights go blue.
Elara makes a public announcement—roll call with a flourish.
Jess triggers the visual loop and scrambles internal feeds.
Raven melts into shadow, trailing phantom pawprints.
Noctis handles crowd management—three polite lies and a diversion.
Elara takes the prize and steps into the exit like an encore.
They practiced the step where Elara would remove a single glove as the final flourish and, for reasons that became lore, kept tripping on it. The glove went flying across the room and hit the lamp. It started a chain-reaction of minor property damage that would, in any normal world, have resulted in insurance claims and sighs. In their world it became a joke about her impeccable timing.
After four hours of rehearsing collapse and rescue, they collapsed onto the floor in a heap of knitwear and sarcasm. Jess had brewed coffee that tasted like victory and too much sugar. Noctis adjusted his scarf with the calm precision of someone who believed in order. Raven nosed a cushion and exhaled, which in a big dog means he was ready for either sleep or scandal.
They traded stories—small certainties about what would be waiting for them if the heist went according to plan. There were bets: who would be first to drop a card, whether a guard would faint (Jess put money on no), what the ridiculous headline would be (Elara wanted "Eclipse Buys City New Moon").
Between jokes, Elara could see the edges of something she never let herself name. In the noise and the rehearsal, the way Jess fussed and Noctis arranged, the way Raven kept looking at her like he could read the weather on her skin, Elara felt the rare, dangerous comfort people call home. It gave the world a soft shape she could stand inside rather than stand on.
Even in delight, the Mask hummed under the lamp's light. Elara kept glancing at it, like someone caught during a guilty pleasure. It was an artifact of impossible provenance: lacquered porcelain with veins of silver like lightning trapped mid-thought. When she set it aside to tie a lace or adjust a seam she felt the small tug of an old tide.
She should have been proud of it. The Mask had given her a public, spectacular identity. It had crowned her in legend and made her remarkably effective at getting what she wanted. But as the afternoon waned and the laughter softened into the unforced quiet people only get once they trust each other, Elara's hand found the Mask and lingered.
She picked it up gently, as if it were brittle glass or a playing card one cannot read. Holding it that way the way the metal caught light made constellations on her palm. Her gloves were off; the skin of her fingers was small and warm and just human enough to make the porcelain seem like an odd, jealous lover.
Elara admired the craftsmanship. She thought of all the nights she'd pulled it over her face and become the sharp-voiced eclipse of feeds and whispered legends. She thought about the applause, the ridiculous headlines, the petty vengeances that made officials go colorless. She thought about how it felt to vanish behind that grin and to let the mask do the world's remembering for her.
And then, without the mask, she let her shoulders drop for the slightest beat. The laughter in the room became muffled, background music. The mask pressed like a memory in her hand; she set it on her lap and looked at it as if it were a complicated animal she had once loved. Her smile to the room stayed performative, bright enough the way actors wear light to hide stitches. But when she looked at the Mask her smile thinned, and a distant, private note threaded through it—something small and melancholy.
It was not sorrow in the grand way; it was the softer, older kind. The kind that sometimes woke her in the small hours when the world was quiet and the cards would not speak to her the way they did in daylight. That smile held a thousand tiny admissions: of tiredness, of gullibility, of the loneliness that comes when your face becomes your profession and your profession eats ordinary things like laundry lists and coughs.
They called rehearsal over and the team went about their rituals—checking gadgets, resting, packing their costumes. Elara wrapped the suit in a cloth like one folds a flag and set it where she could touch it as if to reassure herself it was still real. She tucked the Mask back into its velvet and set the box on the shelf with a care that said she would rather cradle it than let it cradle her.
Before they left the hideout to climb the city and put on the show, Jess came to the table. She touched the box without looking like a small blessing. "You sure you don't want me to keep this between runs? You're starting to hoard mythology."
Elara laughed, a sound like a bell that wanted sympathy. "No. I need the audience. I thrive on the embarrassment of bureaucrats." She paused, and for a breath she let a little truth slip like a dropped coin. "Sometimes I wish I could take it off and not be noticed. No headlines. No gods. Just… quiet."
Jess's hand tightened on the box. She didn't say the things most people might; she knew Elara's silence was not an invitation for platitudes. Instead she said what she did best: practical, stubborn, warm. "Then we'll be quiet after. We'll be loud during. You can have both if you want."
Elara's mouth twitched, the hideout's stage-light grin returning, but softer. "Audiences that return home with soup. My favorite kind." She rose and slid the Mask into her bag, its weight comforting and dangerous in equal measure.
As the team filed out toward the roof to begin the night's rehearsal performance—Noctis checking his watch, Jess double-checking her loops, Raven already half-shifted into an attentive shadow—Elara lingered at the doorway a beat longer than she had any reason to. The sun was lowering, and the city's silhouette sharpened like teeth against fading gold.
She looked at the Mask one more time before she slipped it on, and somewhere between the lacquer and the breath it took to affix the strap, she offered the reader a small, unadorned thought. I like an audience, she might have said to the city and to the world. I do. But sometimes the applause is the last thing I want to hear before I sleep.
Then she slid into Eclipse.
A fool's game, a brilliant show, and a softened heart under porcelain. They went out to steal a small piece of the night — and Elara, in her galaxy-suit and all her ridiculous charm, carried the Mask in its pocket like a secret the world did not yet know how to keep for her.