The Heist at the Spring Festival

Nadia had picked a thousand pockets, and she had a rule for every one of them: never the last job you plan. Plan the last job and you get sentimental, and sentimental people get caught. So she had never planned a last job in her life — until tonight.

Tonight was different. Tonight she had a bus ticket folded into her shoe, a forged passport sewn into the lining of her jacket, and a younger brother in a clinic across the river whose bills had finally, quietly, broken her. One more good lift and she would have enough. One more, and she would walk out of this city forever and never put her fingers in another stranger's coat.

The Spring Festival was the perfect place to do it. The whole old quarter had filled with people — tens of thousands of them, packed shoulder to shoulder under a sky strung with paper lanterns that glowed red and gold above the crowd. Drums pounded somewhere near the river. The air was thick with the smell of frying dough and incense and spilled beer. A dragon made of silk and bamboo wound its way down the main avenue, and the whole street pressed in to watch it, every face turned up, every wallet and phone forgotten in the warm crush of bodies. For a pickpocket, it was less a festival than a harvest.