Page 82 of Coldwire
“We’ll go fast. Night is young.”
“We have twenty minutes at best before the surveillance network has gathered enough data to determine they can’t match us to registered civilians.” I face forward again. The van has eased off the ramp. Miz applies pressure on the brakes, slowing for the pedestrian streets. “If they’ve noted our presence before we enter the facility, we won’t have the time to search for your file. They’ll have police waiting. We should be saving that twenty-minute mark to use after the break-in, for when we’re leaving. Then it won’t matter if they’re coming to arrest us because we’ll be fleeing the city anyway.”
I shake a mask out of the box in my lap and snap it hard onto my ears. Its synthetic material seals down, clamping onto my nose and mouth.
Nik, meanwhile, hasn’t put his on yet. When I look into the rearview mirror, his brow is furrowed. I get the feeling he wants to tell me off for being right. It makes the task a lot harder when we have a set number of minutes we can be walking freely in Threto.
“Let me think it over for a second,” Nik mutters. “I accept fault in this, okay? Threto closes down around this time every year when the weather gets warmer and people start leaving their apartments. I should have known better.”
“No use self-flagellating now,” I say sagely. “There’s—”
On the right side of the pedestrian road, an entire row of buildings suddenly goes dark. My attention snaps to my window, searching up and down the rest of the block to see if their electricity was also cut. All dark.
“Did we do this?” Nik demands.
“No, just a coincidence,” Miz replies. She hesitates, then turns the corner, rumbling onto the next road. “It’s not uncommon when closures are announced. Power reroutes if everyone is ordering a bunch of stuff at once. We need to make a decision now. Eyes will be on this block when the lights come back on.”
My face is still pressed to the window as I stare at the buildings. They’realien shapes in the night. Overgrown obelisks, planted in the sidewalk. Slender fingers, reaching through the clouds.
The idea forms.
“Hey,” I say.
Nik leans forward. “Yes?”
“I’ve always wondered how you got away so fast after the statue bombing in Vermillion Bay.”
Nik gets out of his seat. He hauls up one of his bags at the back of the van, strapping it tightly to himself. The Vermillion Bay, situated on the west coast, is Atahua’s third-most populous urban area. The people there nickname it The Million. Yet, somehow, in his escape, Nik wasn’t sighted by a single witness.
“I don’t think now is the time for an explainer.”
“Nik Grant,” I say, much more forcefully. “How did you get away so fast?”
He stops, a second bag hovering in his grip. His head stays ducked slightly, needing to minimize his height to avoid hitting the ceiling of the van. “By zip line,” he answers. “There was a harness waiting one floor below. While the capture unit there thought I’d jumped for the ground, I’d swung to the next building and taken an exit route through the inside. They couldn’t have responded in time.” Nik straps the second bag onto himself, then pauses. “I’m sure you already knew that, though. With all your footage watching.”
I did. It was a smart maneuver. It was something he planned with extensive consideration before launching that bomb at the marble statue of Atahua’s first president.
“Didn’t you want a plan to avoid wasting our minutes on the street?” I ask. “Do you still have that zip line?”
22LIA
Rayna and Hailey are jet-lagged, which I don’t exactly understand when they didn’t even take a plane here. Still, they could barely keep their eyes open when we rejoined them in the lounge, after we declared the retrieval mission a success and thanked them for their contribution.
I offered them a nap in our hotel room, and now they’re knocked out so deeply that I could call a demolition crew and neither would stir.
“Look what you did,” Kieren says, his arms folded across his chest.
“What was I going to do?” I retort. “Wave them off and send them on their way?”
“Yes.”
Despite his tough talk, Kieren keeps his voice lowered, not wanting to wake them. He’s showered again, cleaning off the grime of burglary in the time it took Hailey and Rayna to conk out. His wet hair drips along the side of his neck. I don’t know why he seems morally opposed to drying off properly before he steps out.
“Should we go somewhere quiet and call Kam?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I point up. “I’m pretty sure the floors above us are event spaces. Should we try?”
Kieren signals for me to lead the way. We close the door behind usquietly, and I head for the stairwell rather than the elevator, figuring we’ll probably have an easier time testing which of the floors are vacant. The fifth floor is another part of the hotel. On the sixth, I can already hear chatter through the heavy white door, and I keep walking. The seventh floor is quieter, so I pull the door and poke my head in, but there are waitstaff present, laying out white tables and setting out shrimp cocktails.
