Her lips pressed against his own, and his whole body felt as though he were on fire. Em shifted slightly, stepping onto her toes, her body pressing him back into the brick wall of the alley. Subconsciously, Gunnar clutched his hands around her waist and pulled her against him, shivering as her tongue brushed against his own.

Their kiss in Dravingdel’s library had been hot in a dangerous and unexpected sort of way, as they were both in danger of being found out for the assassins they were. But he hadn’t known how Em felt about him, nor how he felt about her, in truth.

But this was different.

Passionate.

If there was any doubt that there was a spark between them before, that was shattered now.

Gunnar’s back pressed against the wall, and Em’s fingers meandered up his neck and tangled in his wavy hair.

His hand slipped beneath the back of her shirt brushing against bare skin.

“Ey! This en’t a damn whorehouse!”

Gunnar and Em both jolted, then chuckled at the sight of the disgruntled kobolds a short distance away. For a moment, Gunnar had completely forgotten they were there.

“Well,” Em said on a sigh, as she pulled away from him, “I was worried after the first kiss. But my suspicions were definitely confirmed.”

“About what?” Gunnar asked, suddenly self-conscious.

“Something’s definitely off about kisses in this world.”

“Off?” Gunnar had personally thought it was amazingly realistic. Honestly one of the best kisses he’d experienced in recent memory. Not that his love life had been especially riveting prior to his imprisonment.

Em shrugged and grinned up at him. “It’s almost too good. I think they’re trying to distract us.”

She patted his cheek, her fingers lingering fleetingly on his skin, letting her claws brush against him ever so slightly.

“Go on, get a room!” shouted another kobold.

Half a dozen of them glowered with dark beady eyes from their barrel fire.

“All right, all right,” Em said.

“You’re half mast, by the way,” called another kobold, pointing at Gunnar as they turned to leave.

He glanced down, blushed, and quickly shifted his cloak to cover his front completely. “It’s, er, just a pleat. In the pants.”

The kobolds burst out in laughter.

“Hey, my man wakes up with a pleat every morning,” said another kobold in a very gravelly voice for a woman. “Best believe he don’t turn red like that, though. My man’s proud of what his daddy gave him!”

At this, another creature let out a loud grunty howl.

Gunnar felt like he was suddenly thrust back into a damn middle school locker room, which seemed about par for the course for this world.

“Forget about it,” Em said with a noticeable smirk. “It’s dark.”

“Our eyes evolved to see that in the dark just fine,” the kobold woman added for unnecessary clarity. “Cave folk, yeh know. Gotta repopulate somehow.”

The group howled with even more laughter, clearly thinking this was the quickest way to get rid of them.

And they were right.

Em grabbed his hand, and they hurried away, though she was grinning fiercely. “Yep, definitely trying to distract us.”

Thankfully, she said nothing more, and Gunnar hurried to keep up as they made their way toward the Mermaid.

***

It was nearly three o’clock when they reached the roof of Sykes’s old tenement building, where Gunnar had lived for his first few days in-game.

It hadn’t been easy. The streets surrounding the place were still remarkably eventful considering the fact the pubs had been closed for an hour. But they’d seized a window of opportunity—pun intended—and ascended one of the walls.

The small space between stones made it the hardest wall Gunnar had climbed yet, but thankfully the window sills offered rests along the way. Though they’d had one close call when a lamp suddenly ignited from within one of the rooms. They both rushed to keep climbing, but no one came to the window, and Gunnar was pretty sure he heard the dulcet tones of someone puking from within.

Now, they inspected the narrow rooftop.

“This is one of those row buildings, I think,” Gunnar said. “One giant roof connecting all the different buildings. It’s a sharp angle, but in the apartments below, there’s no vaulted ceiling, I remember that much. Which means there’s gotta be some sort of crawl space or storage or something.”

“The Mermaid’s at the other end of the block,” Em said, and pointed to the obviously taller roof at the end of the row.

“That’s the main dining hall. Part of this row building connects, though. Maybe the Mermaid used to be part of this completely, and then the main hall got built on later.”

Gunnar had to remind himself this was actually all the work of game developers, but damn, it was realistic. Like amateur architects had kept adding things on, unprepared for the growth and change of the city.

“If we can get inside this crawl space, there’s a chance we might be able to cross between different buildings along this whole row.”

“A chance?” Em asked.

“I think it’s our best shot, unless you’ve got something better.”

“Suddenly Cork’s fake plague idea sounds like it may have been our best shot.”

Gunner shook his head. “We just gotta find a vent or a trapdoor or something.”

“And if there isn’t one?”

“We adapt.”

“Maybe there’s a map around here with an X Marks the Spot?”

Gunnar rolled his eyes. “Let’s just look.”

They crouched as they scoured the roof, navigating around chimneys and loose stone shingles, and lots of random wires and scraps of wood. This wasn’t exactly the ritzy part of the city.

But much to his dismay, there didn’t seem to be any obvious entrance up top.

“Now, what?” Em asked.

Several plumes of smoke pirouetted into the night across the building, and without answering, Gunnar began inspecting the sources.

“We can’t go down a damn chimney, we’ll end up in someone’s room.”

“We’re not going down a chimney.” Gunnar checked several plumes of smoke before he found what he hoped to find. On the side of the building facing the alley, a rush of steam emitted from a grate a short ways down, and it smelled delicious.

He pointed to it, and Em scowled. “I don’t see how that’s better than a chimney. It still leads down into the lower part of the building.”

“Sure, through sheet metal piping. My guess is it vents from the bakery down on the bottom level. And judging by the quality of the roofing, I doubt it’s fixed very secure.”

The roof sloped, but as long as they kept on all fours, they were able to shimmy down to the vent. Sure enough, it was tacked down with a handful of flathead screws.

Gunnar produced Sheira’s dagger and carefully fit the blade into one of the screws. It was slow work, but he managed to get one loose enough to finish twisting out with his fingers.

Em cocked an eyebrow. “Alright, let’s do this.”

It took about ten minutes, but soon the two of them lifted the grate away and set it up on the rooftop and peered down into a pipe that stretched off into the darkness below. The last piece of pipe attached to the roof with a wide lip of sheet metal and a few more screws, but once these were removed the pipe jostled around in its hole just enough for Em to reach the bolt screws fitting the end piece to the rest of the pipe. There was a soft scrape as she extended her claws and the screws quickly gave. With a heave, they lifted the end piece of pipe out and set it with the grate, leaving a significant opening in the roof.

Gunnar cast Dark Sight and gazed down into a dusty attic space that stretched on and on down the building. Just as he’d hoped, while there were walls down below separating the individual establishments, the attic was as conjoined as the roof. One long tunnel.

Em shook her head. “Were you a burglar IRL?”

Gunnar smiled. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“You think we’re getting a mermaid out this way?”

“We’ll have to find another way out. Doesn’t matter if they figure out how we got in, after the fact. So long as they don’t catch us in the act.”

“Here goes nothing.” Em easily fit into the gap left between the roof and the stump of the pipe, which still rushed with steam.

Gunnar drew his stomach in as much as he could, though his chest still scraped against the edge of the roof painfully.

But he made it inside, and Em and Gunnar both managed to reach one of the rafter beams below. The beams were staggered every four or five feet apart all the way to the end of the block. For a Rogue, it was a veritable highway, with cross beams that could serve as solid hand holds.

Em leapt the distance to the next one, her claws digging into the wood of one of the cross beams. Gunnar followed a little less lithely, his hand nearly losing his grip as he landed. Em latched onto his arm and tried to help steady him, but pain shot through him.

“Claws!” he hissed. “Claws!”

“Ah, right, sorry about that.”

Gunnar cast a quick Word of Healing to repair the minor damage. “I’m not gonna fall. How about we both just handle ourselves, okay?”

Em nodded with a sly grin. “Whatever you say.”

With that, she took off, leaping from beam to beam.