Here are the first couple paragraphs of the novella I’m working on. You can’t tell yet but it’s going to be a FUN! HEIST! so help me god. 

Mornings, Maya stood on the muddy banks of the steaming river and fit her feet into the prints of the novitiate who’d bathed before her. Her newest Conservator, though unmoved by their vigilant proximity to her nudity, her sleep, her defecation, nevertheless always turned their hooded head when she settled her heels into the hollows made by another’s bare soles, as if for this act alone they believed Maya deserved privacy. It was the closest she ever came to touching another human being, the closest she’d come since she’d slit the boy’s throat, ten years ago.

Her time in the Conservatory had worked an unexpected alchemy on the memory of the murder: when she’d first arrived she’d been a child, barely twelve, and images of the boy’s panic-blown eyes, so wet and alive in his moment of death, had jolted her awake nearly every night, and the soft music of the brook that ran past her window was almost intolerable, an echoed gurgle of his opened throat. Back then it had been a nightmare, but all these years later the memory had taken on a terrible tenderness. His skin soft beneath her fingertips, the delicate tremble of his heart in the vein beneath his jaw, his head cradled in her lap. A huge feeling, like eating the sun. At her sentencing they’d called her a monster, which she didn’t think was true then, but maybe it had become true. Only a monster would look back on murder with a pain akin to longing.