Malkum had six days left on the contract, and he still did not know when the tyrant king ate breakfast. He sat in the back of a dim tea shop in Lacuna's fifth district and counted the names of dead men in his head. Twenty-two assassins in nine years. Every one of them had walked into the palace on guesswork, and every one of them had come out in a sack. Malkum meant to be the twenty-third name or the last. The contract paid enough to buy a small country, but that was not why he took it. His sister had been one of the king's early examples, hung from the bridge on the river road when Malkum was fourteen. He had trained for eleven years to earn the right to try. He would not waste that training by charging blind at a man behind three rings of guards. Jolt Jinx slid into the chair across from him and set a wire cage on the table. Inside sat a rabbit with a coat the color of fresh blood, ears up, eyes bright. "Palace kitchen buys one every week," she said. "Same breeder, same day, same courier. The king eats it Thursday nights. Alone. In the west solarium, ninth bell." Malkum looked at the rabbit. The rabbit looked back. "You're sure," he said. Jolt Jinx pushed a folded paper across the table: three weeks of delivery slips, a courier's route, a servant's name, a floor plan of the solarium with one window circled. "I followed the cage, not the king," she said. "Nobody watches the food going in." Malkum folded the paper into his coat. He paid the tea bill, lifted the cage, and walked out into the street with Thursday four days away and a route into the palace resting under one hand.

Malkum kept the rabbit alive for two days in a crate under his bed. He watched it eat, watched it sleep, and thought about the kitchen inspection. Jolt Jinx had drawn the layout for him on a napkin. Every crate opened at the gate. Every sack emptied. Every courier patted down twice, once at the outer door and once at the pantry. A blade the size of his thumb would be found. Going in bare-handed meant the first guard in the solarium would kill him before he crossed the tile. He needed a weapon that would pass a hand search and a table search, and he had three days to find one. He met Jolt Jinx on a low roof above the courier route. She sat with her boots over the edge and her three jars lined up beside her. Malkum said what he needed. She did not answer for a while. Then she picked up the middle jar, the one she never named to anyone, and set it in his hand. "Not the powder," she said. "The rabbit." He waited. "Feed it for a day. One pinch in the water. It stays in the meat. Cooked, raw, doesn't matter. Whoever eats it stops breathing inside a minute." Malkum looked at the jar. He looked at the crate wire under his coat, at the bright red animal turning its ear toward his voice. "You'd give this up," he said. Jolt Jinx shrugged. "He hung your sister. Bring the jar back if there's any left." She did not look at him when she said it. She stood up and walked to the far edge of the roof and stayed there until he climbed down. He went home and mixed one pinch into the water dish. The rabbit drank. By the next morning it ate normally and showed nothing. On Thursday the courier came at the fourth bell and Malkum handed over the cage at the service lane. The guard at the kitchen gate opened the door, checked the animal's teeth and coat, weighed it, and waved the courier through. Malkum watched from a stall across the lane until the kitchen door shut. He had no blade on him. He had no poison on him. Everything he needed was already inside the palace, breathing, waiting for the ninth bell. He walked back to his room and sat on the bed with his hands empty. The contract had five days left. The weapon was in place. Now he had to get himself into the solarium to watch the king eat, because a dead king behind a locked door was still a job unfinished, and no one had ever come out of that room alive either.