The planning took six weeks.
Esigie approached it the way he approached everything methodically, obsessively, with the conviction that the difference between success and catastrophe was the quality of the preparation. In Lagos, the best cons weren't the ones with the cleverest tricks. They were the ones where the groundwork was so thorough that the trick barely needed to work.
He built the plan in layers, each one contingent on the one below it, each one tested and verified before the next was constructed.
* * *
Layer one: the route.
From the servants' quarters to the third floor of the main house. The direct path through the ground floor, up the central staircase, down the third-floor corridor was impossible. The staircase was within Osaro's quarters' line of sight, and the butler's sleep schedule was irregular. Osawe's intelligence confirmed: Osaro slept in two-hour blocks, waking between them to check the main house's corridors by aura perception alone. A Peak Level 6 could sense movement within twenty meters without leaving his bed.
The alternative route: the eastern wing. The library occupied the ground floor. Above it, on the second floor, was a storage room rarely accessed, used for seasonal furniture and old linens. Above that, on the third floor, was the corridor leading to the Count's study. The eastern wing had its own narrow service staircase a spiral of stone steps built for servants who carried supplies between floors. It was not guarded. It was not sealed. It was simply not used, because the servants who used it were long dead and the Count's reduced household had consolidated traffic through the central staircase.
Esigie had discovered the service staircase three years ago, during his mapping of the compound. He'd filed it. Waited. Now it was relevant.
From the library, he could access the service staircase through a door behind the easternmost bookshelf. From the staircase, two flights up to the third floor. From the landing, a short corridor to the Count's study door.
Total distance: approximately forty meters. Estimated transit time: four minutes. Four minutes of being somewhere he was absolutely forbidden to be.
* * *
Layer two: the timing.
Night. Deep night the third hour past midnight, when the compound's activity was at its absolute minimum. The garrison guard rotation placed soldiers at the main gate and the wall towers. No interior patrols at this hour the compound's internal security relied on Osaro's aura perception and the assumption that slaves did not move at night.
Osaro's sleep cycles: Osawe had tracked them over six months. The butler's two-hour blocks meant windows of approximately one hundred and ten minutes between his waking checks. The check itself lasted five to eight minutes a passive aura scan from his quarters, covering the main house's central spaces.
Critical detail: Osaro's scan covered the central staircase and the main corridors. Osawe's source Efe had confirmed that Osaro did not extend his scan to the eastern wing's service staircase. The wing was considered peripheral storage, library, no one of consequence.
Window: one hundred and ten minutes. More than enough. If everything went right.
* * *
Layer three: the seal.
This was the gamble. Everything else the route, the timing, the guard avoidance was preparation. The seal was the moment of truth.
Esigie had practiced aura suppression for two months. At Shroud Intermediate, he had enough control over his channels to compress his aura into his core pulling it inward, reducing his external signature to a whisper. Then lower. Then lower still. Until his aura perception turned inward, monitoring his own output registered nothing.
Zero external aura. A dead zone where a person used to be.
But suppressing aura didn't suppress mana. The second river still flowed cool, smooth, circulating through its own channels in its own patterns. When the aura went silent, the mana became more prominent. Not louder more present. As if the removal of one signal clarified the other.
The question: would the seal detect mana?
He had no way to test it without approaching the door. And approaching the door was the operation itself.
He would go in blind.
* * *
Layer four: the extraction.
He couldn't take the books. Physical removal would be detected Obanosa might not notice the seal being untriggered, but he would notice a missing volume. The extraction had to be non-physical.
Scanning. The same technique he'd used in the main library holding a book, running his eyes across the pages, letting his memory record every word and symbol. But faster. In the main library, he'd had the luxury of Idemudia's naps forty-minute windows for leisurely reading. In the Count's study, he'd have minutes. Maybe less.
The mana helped. At Spark Intermediate, his mana-enhanced perception could process visual information at roughly triple normal speed. A page that took three seconds to memorize normally took one second with mana engaged. A book of two hundred pages could be scanned in three to four minutes.
Time budget: four books, maximum. Three complete scans plus buffer for unexpected delays. He'd choose them in advance Osawe had obtained a partial catalogue of the Count's study through Efe's observations, and Esigie had identified the four highest-priority targets.
One: a magic theory text advanced, covering topics beyond the introductory primers. Two: a mana circulation manual the practical complement to the theory. Three: a text on spell construction and structured visualization. Four: the synchronization text. Dual-Energy Interactions in Unified Systems a title Efe had glimpsed on the Count's desk. The holy grail.
Four books. Fifteen to twenty minutes of scanning. Plus four minutes transit each way. Plus margin for the unexpected.
Total operation time: thirty minutes.
He had a one-hundred-and-ten-minute window.
The math worked. On paper.
* * *
I told Osawe. Not Aighon Aighon would have insisted on coming, and Aighon in a stealth operation was like a drum in a library. Osawe alone.
He listened. He asked seven questions precise, surgical, each one targeting a specific vulnerability in the plan. I answered all seven. He asked an eighth. I couldn't answer it.
'What if the seal detects mana?'
'Then I'm caught.'
'And if you're caught?'
'Then everything ends.'
Osawe looked at me in the dark. His eyes were sharp as knives. He was running his own calculations not my plan's calculations, but the meta-calculation. The one that measured the value of the information against the value of the person going to get it.
'I should go instead,' he said.
'No.'
'My aura is lower than yours. Easier to suppress. And I'm faster in tight spaces.'
'You can't scan books. You don't have mana-enhanced recall. You'd need to physically open every page and memorize manually it would take hours, not minutes.'
He knew I was right. He didn't like it. For the first time in our partnership, Osawe the schemer, the wire, the boy who calculated everything looked at me with an expression that had nothing to do with calculation.
Fear. For me.
'Be careful,' he said. Two words. From Osawe, they carried the weight of a blood oath.
'I'll be Lagos careful,' I said.
He almost smiled.