Page 41 of Static/Cling

“Yes.”

“And you’re putting it in my shirt.”

“Yes.”

Bjorn looked over to where Kassian was scrubbing at the back of his neck and scrolling through what looked like a supplies list. “That must have taken him most of that night.”

“I expect so. I probably should have done this a long time ago. If he’d known I would take so long, maybe he wouldn’t have let it keep him up.”

Bjorn curled a lip. “Can’t just let me hate him, can you?”

Leif grinned without looking up. “You know I don’t make you do anything.”

“No. You don’t.” He kicked Leif under their desk, a bit of a spark passing between them despite the rubber-soled boots Bjorn wore.

Leif grinned a bit wider. “Zap me harder, baby,” he whispered.

“Dude. We’re at work!”

Leif snickered.

“Rude,” Bjorn muttered, squirming in his seat, because yeah, Leif had a filthy grin and wasn’t afraid to use it.

CHAPTER 6

THE PLAN

Bjorn spent the rest of the day reading. If they were going to go find and retrieve this list of names, he had to know every protocol he could jam into his skull before they set foot on the road.

“We’ll drive,” Sal said, tapping at their keyboard. “I’ll rent a van for passenger and cargo room.”

“You can’t just rent under SPAM,” Kassian said.

“I’m not. I’m using April’s name.”

“What is her last name?” Roger asked, but Sal appeared too focused on what they were doing to have heard the question, and it went unanswered.

“It’s a ninety-minute or so drive,” Kassian said after a bit. “So if we leave around six thirty tomorrow morning, we should have time for breakfast before we have to start breaking heads.”

“Who said anything about breaking heads?” Sal asked. “You’re going to go in and ask for the file, then walk out with it, and drive away. Easy-peasy.”

“How’s that?” Kassian frowned at them.

“I have an ID for you that’ll get you in and out before they even figure out it’s fake. There’s a new admiral or general or something reporting there soon. He’s not well known, so I usedhis name, but your picture. You just get in and out before he reports for duty in two days, and by the time they realize what’s happened, they’ll have no way to trace us back here.”

“What if someone realizes he’s not this guy?” Bjorn asked.

“Oh. You care?” Kassian’s tone might have been cutting if Bjorn hadn’t seen that split second behind the razor curtain earlier.

“I care,” he said, managing to keep his tone mild. “If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s always have a backup plan. You never know when something you expect to work doesn’t and you have to improvise. So we make ten plans, and maybe one or two of them cobbled together work.”

“Kind of pessimistic, isn’t it?” Roger asked.

“It’s practical. You have no idea how many innocuous things have hidden electronics in them. No. Idea.”

“Really?”

Bjorn grunted and dropped his feet from where he’d propped them on their desk so he could reach a Magic 8 Ball sitting in the middle of the surface. Leif always carried it around with him, and he’d placed it in the centre of their shared workspace.

---