I sweep back my sleek shoulder-length hair into a ponytail at the nape of my neck, making sure to tie it securely with my elastic. I carefully arrange my lock-picking kit, two pairs of latex gloves, and the GPS tracking device that my sister Cora insisted on me bringing into a flexible satchel. After inserting the miniscule earpiece into my ear and combing a camera-ridden headband over my tresses, I am prepared to depart.
Cora is waiting for me in the van when I arrive – her rapid breathing is warning me of her desire to back out of the deal before it has even begun. I can relate. Taking her fragile hand in my rough ones, I reassure her that our lives will greatly benefit from the task at hand if only we both participate to our fullest abilities; I need her to be my eyes, and she needs me to be her hands.
At last, her breathing slows, and she steps hard on the gas pedal in a flurry of determination. I sit back in my seat, relieved. Cora’s good conscious could have ruined our chance tonight.
The museum is only twenty minutes away, but Cora will need to park the van outside of the perimeter in order to hack into the advanced security system and feed the cameras a loop. This, if all goes to plan, will take an hour, two if we are unlucky. Cameras are tricky pieces of technology; in the event of our success, the system will need to be one hundred percent under the control of my genius sister. This means that she will be able to guide me through the vaults with only the security cameras as her eyes, while whatever guard is in the museum at the time sees only a continuous loop of seemingly tranquil displays.
I trust my natural-born sharpness of the senses to carry us to victory just as much as I trust Cora to lead me blindly throughout the twisted corridors of the Smithsonian – which is more than one would imagine. After all, I couldn’t proceed in this risky game without Cora’s sight. I’ve been fully blind in both of my eyes since I was born.

After we park in an empty lot behind a coffee shop that has been closed since ten, Cora goes to work on the computer set up in back. I hear her slender fingers flying over the wafer-thin keyboard, filling up the confined space with rapid clicking. I go to work on my clothes as I wait, clumsily throwing on what I assume are dark pants and shirt.

Thirty minutes pass; now an hour; an hour and a half. I begin to grow anxious from the tension that Cora radiates: her typing grows faster, her breath quicker, her body noticeably shakier; however, the endless typing stops as soon as I nearly burst from anxiety.

“Emma,” she breathes in her sweet little voice. “It’s ready.”

My heart races in my chest. It is finally time to steal Lewis and Clark’s compass. When traded in, it would pull our lives out of the crisis that my sister and I suffocated in daily. It was daring. It was risky. But it was worth it. Every second of it.

Two years ago, when I was sixteen and Cora was fourteen, a family friend named Claire revealed herself to be a gang leader and kidnapped our parents. Her goal was to use my keen ability to interpret sounds and smells and Cora’s technological genius to steal the compass that she thought to be rightfully hers. After all, her family tree traced directly back to Clark and his first wife, Julia. Both pride and an outrageous amount of greed led her to believe that America’s heirloom belonged in her hands.

However, Claire decided that she wouldn’t undergo task by herself. So, naturally, her solution was to kidnap the parents of two talented girls and bribe them to steal the object that she so desired in return for their mother and father. Any sense of rebellion would be reflected on our parents. It seems stupid to trust such an important task with a blind girl, but I guess she wanted to keep it in the family. Attract less attention from others. How kind. And so, here we are, two teenagers about to steal one of the country’s most valued symbols.

I take my cane from the van and begin to rap it along the frozen walk on my way to the museum. I plan to drop the cane once I get to the door of the museum so that the tapping won’t reveal me. The bone-chilling night air seeps through my clothing, sending shivers up my spine. I feel as if the night’s icy fingers are warning me to turn back; however, I proceed down the sidewalk with more determination than ever, my conscience silenced by the prospect of greeting my parents the following day. Maybe even tonight, if I’m lucky.

Just as we planned, I crouch in what Cora tells me is the thick darkness of a bush twenty feet away from the back entrance to the museum. I feel scratchy leaves snagging in my ponytail, and the ground is cold and hard beneath my knees.

“In thirty seconds,” Cora crackles to me through my earpiece, “the alarm will be set off in both the southwest and northwest wings. The guards should betray their positions, and you will walk straight forward until I say stop. Be careful: there is grass along the path I will guide you along, so shuffle your feet so that you don’t trip. Quietly, though. Very quietly.”

“Okay,” I manage to croak in response. I know that setting off only two alarms to send an entire troop of night officers away seems to be wishful thinking, but I don’t question my sister about it. She knows how to do this. I fear that the guards by the door will hear me; therefore, I refrain from speaking from then on. Every snap of a twig sounds like an officer at my back; every gust of wind through the trees sounds like a whisper of warning. I sit tight for thirty seconds until I hear the wailing of the alarm and the thundering of the guards’ footsteps as they race away. Amazed, I stand at Cora’s command.

Walking without my cane or my guide dog is like throwing myself deliberately in danger. I keep my head inclined toward the ground so that Cora can alert me of bumps, rocks, and what not. My lungs feel restricted, my face (freckled, from what my mother told me) is drenched in sweat. Finally, after what seems like a millennium, Cora has guided me to the door. I hear the alarms go off again in a separate wing, and I crouch in haste on the ground.

I learned how to pick a lock from a woman that Claire hired to teach me. The tools are easy for me to recognize because each jagged edge feels unique to my touch. The locks here are complex: I struggle for a full three minutes. Likely I’m so unsuccessful because my hands are shaking so violently.

“Emma, you need to speed up!” comes Cora’s earnest voice from inside my ears.

“I’m trying,” I say through clenched teeth. The overwhelming stench of pine trees is making me nauseated, and I drop my tired arms from the lock in exasperation.

“Emma!” Cora screeches in my ear, causing me to jump in surprise and, in turn, send one of the lock-picking tools to the ground in a clatter that made us both wince. I grope around on the freezing concrete with it only my latex gloves for preventing my fingerprints from being identified as a barrier. My fingers dance over the rough pavement in earnest. Loosing one of the tools would definitely not make this task any easier. I feel a lock of hair brush against my forehead and tuck it away with my left hand while continuing my search with the right.

“Angle the camera down, Emma, I can’t see!” yelps Cora. I oblige. The tool must have skidded under a crevice or something somewhere, as after a minute neither of us can seem to recover it. Time is ticking by, and still the door remains locked tight. Cora must have been able to tell that I was panicking.

“Emma, listen to me,” she chimed in. “Compose yourself. The lock kit is to your immediate left.”

I find it and take a deep breath to steady myself. The edges of the tools feel like knives under my shaking fingers. Memories of classes from Claire’s friend Kira, whom she didn’t hire to steal because she knew that Cora wouldn’t work with her like she does with me, come rushing back into my mind. Selecting two tools with a similar feel as the lock, as Kira had taught me to do, I gently push them in, the larger one on the top, the smaller and thinner one on the bottom. Moving the tools in unison, I twist them deeper into the crevice. Cora’s heavy breathing is as loud as a thunderstorm in my already ringing ear.

The lock clicks. My sigh of relief is lost in the slow creak of the opening door, and I stand on quaking legs to enter the enclosure. The comforting lull of my little sister’s voice commences – I am soon shuffling as blindly as ever throughout the vortex of the Smithsonian with my fate resting in the fragile hands of my baby sister.

Five minutes pass in a whirlwind of scuffling feet and the aroma of stale air from an enclosed space. The alarms from the west wing had long since died out, but Cora says that the guards are investigating deeper into the odd disturbance. Her voice calms me, and I walk on.

“Stop,” she says. I do as she says. “To your right is a glass case. Touch it.”

“Wait,” I whisper. “What about the lasers-”

“I’ve already taken care of it,” she says.
I touch the case after replacing my gloves with the second pair. Smooth glass flows underneath my fingers.

“The lock is behind the case. It’s very small. Very complex.”

She waits until I smooth my searching fingers over the tiny face of the lock after I jam myself behind the case.

“Now pick it.”

I sigh. “Obviously, Cora.”

“I just thought you’d want a step-by-step-“

“Shhh. Let me focus.”

She quiets down as I open my kit again and feel around for the two smallest blades toward the bottom of the bag. Kira told me just a month ago that tiny locks require much more precision than the bigger ones, and I remember her guiding my hands into the key holes of the smallest lock she had to offer. I wonder if she’ll get arrested if we do. I place the tools into the hole and begin to jiggle the lock. Then Cora’s voice breaks through.

“Hide, Emma, someone’s coming!” she screeches.
Footsteps start to scuffle some forty or so feet away. They grow increasingly louder as my heart begins to hammer again. The display case of the compass is the only shelter I have to offer me protection from this mysterious trespasser that even Cora has failed to announce until now. And she calls herself a genius.

“Cora,” I barely breathe from my cramped position under the compass. She answers me in a shaking voice.

“I’m so sorry, Emma, I didn’t even see him until now! He must have fed a loop to all receivers of the camera feedback, including the van!”

“What?” breathe back at her. I am confused. Why would a security guard feed a loop from the system? Then it hits me. This isn’t a security guard. It’s another burglar.

His feet patter along the smooth floors, and I can’t control the throbbing in my chest as my heart races. My breathing is loud: echo-loud. I’m prone to panic attacks, and one is coming on. He could hear me, I could tell, as the footsteps shuddered to a halt in front of me. I am going to be shot by this man who hears my breath, Cora is going to rot in prison, and my parents were going to die at Claire’s merciless hand. I feel a pang of regret, followed by the vague wish that my death will be relatively painless. This is the end.

Or is it? In one last attempt to save myself the shame of getting murdered as a thief in a museum, I creep forward until I can sense the man’s legs next to my face. He smells strongly of chemicals, probably some new criminal technology I have yet to uncover. I lunge.

I don’t know how I do it. Maybe the adrenaline from my current situation propels me to success. Perhaps it is the martial arts class that Kira gave me under Claire’s strict orders. Likely it is both that allow me to knock over the man by snagging his legs and pressure-pointing him into unconsciousness. I hear voices yelling over the commotion from where I am, and a struggle to recover the lock again.

In less than twenty seconds the case is open, and I have the treasured compass tucked away in my satchel. Cora tells me to run as fast as I can, so I fling my arms out in front of me and feel my way out, half-walking, half-jogging, fearful of smacking headfirst into a wall.

Flying down the sleek halls, I only run into walls twice - not bad for a lack of sight. The impact leaves deep bruises, but I can’t feel anything except the weight of the stolen artifact in my bag.

Time slows down, and the cold night air slaps my face in slow motion. I continue to flee from the alarms and yells that erupt from inside of the museum, leaving my cane in a bush and trusting only luck to bring me to my sister. They will never catch us, however, as I hurdle myself into the van and Cora screeches away as fast as a car that size will fly to Claire’s place.

What I did was wrong. I know it. Cora knows it. Even Claire and Kira know it. However, Cora and I are willing to ignore the newspapers and wanted signs for the thief who robbed the Smithsonian. How, you may ask? Well, all crimes seem so much smaller from the perspective of two little girls allowing themselves to be lost for the first time in two years in the warmth of their parents’ arms.