YA SF/F - to save her skin, a burglar must pretend to be a noblewoman (& not strangle her waltz teacher) Six of Crows x My Fair Lady

Port Casparus was sort of a dump, even by Shattersky standards, just a rocky nothing of an island floating in skies halfway to nowhere. Clustered around and under its airship port, the town clung like lichen to the stone, with streets in shaky zigzags up the cliff face, separated from the endless skies only by rope fences and common sense. The port’s location in the middle of a major shipping lane was the only reason anyone bothered with the place. That, and it was also a good place for crooks and smugglers to do their business.

A business Severine Thorne knew well.

Sev had always been a thief, her old man had made sure of that. She wasn’t his roof-runner anymore— she made a point of not belonging to anybody nowadays— but tonight, she was here for him. Or, more accurately, for his debts.

They’d already ruined his hands, now they were threatening his legs. No matter what she thought of the old bastard, or how much of this was his own damn fault, Sev couldn’t just let them break him.

So she’d taken the job: in and out of Webster Shipping and Trading Co.’s headquarters with the contents of the safe and their client list—the unofficial one— then up the docks and onto the next airship out of port before anyone knew she’d been there. All in all, nothing she hadn’t done countless times before.

Evening crept in, the last shafts of sunlight knifing up through the cloud sea far below her feet. Airships trundled through the lanes, sunset glinting red off their metal hulls. Slowly, they faded in the darkening sky, until only their signal lights and the blue glow of their reactors stood out against the night. Perched on a support strut above the lowest levels of the docks, above the rooftops of the skunkworks and grimy warehouses, Sev cased her mark.