Page 7 of A Touch of Treachery
The thieves stepped into the elevator.Still clutching the mop, I abandoned all pretense of stealth and rushed forward, but I was too slow, and the door closed before I was halfway down the corridor.
I didn’t have time to wait for another elevator, so I hurried over to a door in the corner topped by a sign that readEmergency Exit Only.Even Section 47 had to follow fire and safety codes, so I knew the door led down to the Vault.
I slapped my hand up against the card reader embedded in the wall and reached out with my galvanism.In an instant, I could feel the current running through the reader, and I twisted the electricity around and around like I was turning a key in a lock.In a way, that was exactly what I was doing.
Beep!
The light on the reader turned green, and the door buzzed open.Still holding the mop, I yanked the door open the rest of the way and stepped through to the other side.A light clicked on above my head, revealing a concrete staircase.I pulled the door shut behind me and hurried forward.
I had to reach the Vault—and Charlotte—before the thieves did.
Isprinteddownthestairs, my footsteps banging out a loud, frantic rhythm that rattled off the walls like I was beating a drum in the enclosed space.
“Charlotte?”I called out.“Charlotte?”
Once again, the only response I got was the crackle of static in my earbud.Comms were still down.
Thirty seconds later, I reached a metal door at the bottom of the stairs.It too was locked with a keycard reader, but a surge of my galvanism took care of that.
The door buzzed open.I hooked my fingers around the frame, cracked it open a little wider, and peered through to the other side.
A dark gray marble corridor stretched out in front of me.In the distance, the soft echoes of footsteps sounded, along with the faint murmur of voices.The thieves had beaten me here, which meant they could already be creeping up on Charlotte.
I stepped into the corridor.I’d had a gun hidden among the cleaning supplies in the janitor’s cart, and I’d foolishly left it behind in my rush.But that was okay.As a cleaner, I had been trained to kill with whatever I could get my hands on, and the mop I was currently holding would make an excellent weapon, as would the pocket watch with its long, attached silver chain in the front flap of my coveralls.And I could always use my galvanism to take down an enemy by stopping the electrical charge that powered their heart.
I quickened my pace, keeping my steps soft and silent.I reached the end of the corridor and peeked around the corner.The next corridor was much longer, with thick metal doors set into the walls like lockers in a school.
The three thieves were about halfway down the corridor, clustered around a door that was wider than most of the others.To my surprise, Charlotte was nowhere in sight.
The woman who’d been pretending to be a gardener looked at the man who’d been masquerading as a waiter.Small name tags on their clothes marked her as Bonnie and him as Woody.
“Are yousurethis is the right locker?”Bonnie asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” Woody replied, then gestured at the fake businessman.“Hey, Arnold, hand me the codebreaker.”
Arnold reached into a flap on the side of his briefcase and pulled out a device that looked like a small black phone.Woody plucked a cord out of his pants pocket and used it to attach the codebreaker to the keypad on the wall beside the locker door.He hit some buttons, and a series of numbers flashed on the device, the six-digit combinations zipping by too fast to follow.
“You’re sure the evidence is stored inthislocker?”Bonnie repeated her earlier question.“Because we don’t have time for you to be wrong.”
“Yes,” Woody muttered, his gaze on the codebreaker.“The manifest said all the German evidence is stored inthislocker.”
My ears pricked up.German evidence?They had to be talking about the Tannenbaum mission where Charlotte and I had stopped a group of mercenaries from stealing the Nutcracker Ruby.The valuable ring belonged to Elsa Eisen, who had used her ancestral castle as a storage facility for paramortal criminals to hide their ill-gotten goods.Elsa’s brother, Peter, had foolishly embezzled money from Henrika Hyde, a longtime Eisen family client, and Henrika had retaliated by killing Peter and trying to steal the Nutcracker Ruby from Elsa.
I frowned.Elsa had been allowed to keep the ring as part of the deal she’d made to secretly feed information on her clients to Section 47, and the Nutcracker Ruby was safely locked away in the depths of Tannenbaum Castle.If the thieves had a manifest of the locker’s contents, then they knew the ring wasn’t here.So what were they after?The only other thing Charlotte and I had found at the castle that was truly valuable had been ...
The Redburn explosive.
Henrika Hyde had created dozens of nasty weapons over the years.Poisons that targeted specific individuals and bloodlines, chemicals that would freeze people’s lungs seconds after being inhaled, even drugs that would give regular people short-lived paramortal powers and melt their insides at the same time.But Redburn was perhaps the deadliest, most powerful formula Henrika had ever concocted, and it was designed to kill even the strongest paramortal.
Something I had discovered the hard way on the Blacksea mission.
My chest tightened, my heart squeezed, and my gut twisted with a sickening wrench.The dim underground corridor vanished, replaced by a bright, sunny beach on an island off the coast of Australia.I blinked, and suddenly, I was standing in the sand, feeling the loose grit shift under my boots.In the distance, one bomb after another blew up in slow motion, each explosion a little closer, louder, and more violent than the last.
Fire, heat, force, and fury rolled toward me in an unstoppable red-orange wave.Dimly, I could hear Graham Walker, my best friend and fellow Section cleaner, yelling at me to run, get back, get down.I flinched as Graham crashed into me, driving my body deep down into the sand and shielding me as best he could.The powerful explosions blasted over us both, the intense, burning heat searing off one layer of my skin after another and scorching all the way down into my bones—
Beep.
The codebreaker finished its work, shattering my memory.The beach vanished, and the corridor snapped back into focus, although cold sweat beaded on my forehead, and my heart pounded in my too-tight chest.
