She already had something of a stash going. Mattica got down on her knees beside the futon and felt around beneath it until her fingers brushed against the scuffed leather of the army surplus duffle bag she had pilfered from the cargo bay of an old airship. At present it contained some of the more coherent books from Corvendo's shelves in one of the compound break rooms, a case of phiris picks from the garage that Matt didn't know were still in production, and two keys. She wasn't sure what they unlocked, but she was hoping at least one of them would work on the storage room where Corvendo had locked her stuff. This was just a start, of course. It wasn't like her services were being adequately paid for, and she was looking for a little more compensation.
Corvendo occasionally had her order tools and other equipment for the garage. Most of what came in was a second-rate knock-off of a familiar brand, but some had been useful enough to make her take notice. These she had stored away in drawers and cabinets where their absence wouldn't be immediately picked up on. As if she were all that worried about prosecution in Pellel, where there wasn't so much a police force as there was armed guards.
Mattica slept in a small office off one of the main workshops, in which a small cargo craft currently resided. An equipment cache lay thirty feet across the shop that no one ever remembered to lock (at Matt probably could have picked it if they had), and she slung the duffle bag over her shoulder, easily finding her way across the garage in the dark.
Somewhere in the building another drinking party had commenced, and faint shouts and laughter drifted over the workshop. She hoped Corvendo was with them. In the morning, talking to Conlan would be ten times wore with a hangover. Then again, Conlan was paying the big bucks to get her home. Corvendo might just throw another party - which almost made her want to escape anyway just to spite him.
She opened the door to the cache silently, slipping inside and closing the door and window blinds before switching on the room's single bare bulb. Revealed to her: four heavy tool chests, two ceiling-high cabinets, and a line of drawers embedded under the work counter. Most of the contents would be rusty, or else just the same four wrenches and three screwdrivers, maybe with different colored grips. Things went missing in the garage daily, only to turn up right after a replacement was purchased (another cue to Mattica that sweeping the place would be easy, even though she was relatively green when it came to theft). Matt knew where all the good stuff was kept, though.
She dropped the duffle bag and crouched beside one of the tool chests, prying open the bottom drawer. When she accounted events to Camilla later on, she was definitely going to have to make it clear that she really wasn't "stealing" per se. Just . . . delivering some divine justice, like that mythical goddess that rewarded undue good fortune with a devastating storm.
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