by Elise Kova
The moment the bellhop was past the threshold, Wayne closed the door and turned off his watch, Jo doing the same after a few more minutes at the computer. She glanced at her watch and winced. She’d used way more time than she’d intended. But as long as she only took one shot at this—which was all she was gearing up to need—she should be fine.
When Jo turned to look at Wayne, he was leaning heavily against the door, lost in thought. The silence felt heavy, so Jo broke it as carefully as she could. “You’re sure he won’t tell anybody?”
Wayne shook his head. “He can’t. He lost the bet.”
“So that’s your magic then?”
“Superficially, yes,” Wayne replied, but he still wasn’t looking at her. “I have to say something that I’m betting on and money has to be involved.”
“Your nickel?”
“Any money.”
Jo thought about this for a second. “So that’s what you used on me.”
At that, Wayne finally glanced in her direction. He arched his eyebrows, noting her calm tone and demeanor. “I thought you’d be more upset.”
Jo just shrugged. “What would that get me now?”
The odd thoughtfulness finally seemed to bleed out of Wayne’s features, his shoulders shaking with a quiet laugh. “You’ve really got your head on straight, doll.” He paused, mulling something over, and then added, “Is it really worth that much cabbage?”
Jo frowned, caught off guard by the question. “What?”
“My nickel.”
“I don’t know of any currency called cabbage.”
“Cash, dame,” Wayne sighed, but he was smiling.
“It is a few hundred years old.” Jo shrugged. She leaned back on her hands. “My mother was obsessed with old America, the way it was before the war. She kept an old coin collection, so when you said nickel, it jarred my memory.”
“I see.” Wayne didn’t press further, and Jo found herself relieved he didn’t. She wasn’t sure why she’d offered the personal anecdote, but it hurt a lot more than expected.
And that hurt was exactly what she needed to get back on track; no better distraction than a good coding session.
“I’ve done everything I can here,” she said, getting to her feet with a stretch.
Wayne looked down at the computer set up and raised an eyebrow. “So, what next?
“Now we actually break into a bank.”
Chapter 18
Catacomb Heist
THE LOCATION OF the Black Bank was one of the best and worst kept secrets in the hacking community. It was common knowledge that the Black Bank’s servers were somewhere in the catacombs. But where, exactly? That was a lot more difficult to drudge up information on. By the time Jo had managed to pin down the most likely location (leveraging her past research with Yuusuke), she was down to only three hours of actual time left.
Which was fine. If everything went smoothly, then she would be in and out within the hour. Yuu would have all the routes laid out for him like a lit-up aerospace runway, and Jo would head back to the Society with two whole hours to spare. Simple, right?
Now, it was just a matter of getting inside.
The most likely location was, unsurprisingly, hidden deep underneath Paris. It was the perfect cover—the ideal location, large enough to house any necessary tech, cold enough for high-speed processing (though they’d no doubt invested a lot of money in some sort of system that could handle the moisture), and buried away where only the reckless urban explorer could find it. As she scanned digital mapping and shared posts on the back pages of cataphiles (self-professed catacomb explorers), leading them to what was most likely the closest entrance, Jo couldn’t help her excitement.
This was the goal that she had lost her life for. It had been a task she couldn’t accomplish as a mortal, but was now attainable in her new “not quite dead” state. Jo swallowed, balling her fists and stepping off the main street her and Wayne had been walking down. Even if she couldn’t do this herself, she’d see Yuusuke accomplish it.
She glanced at Wayne, making sure he was still in tow. He gave her a short nod of determination. Jo responded in kind with a single thought: good man.
They walked down off the side street, through a narrow passage between two buildings, down an alley, and into a small side courtyard that looked all but forgotten by time.
Jo made a noise of disgust at a narrow iron door, diagonally set into the stone between the ground and the wall of a building before them. It had wept rusty tears that now ran like rivulets of dried blood in the stone around it. But it wasn’t the condition of the portal that had her frustrated; it was a hefty padlock securing the doors closed. Electronic locks she could do, but old school was a bit out of her wheelhouse.
“Let’s break in,” Wayne said nonchalantly, as if talking about the weather.
“Oh, lovely idea, except for—oh, darn—I seemed to have missed the Society’s introductory class on lock picking along with every other non-existent introductory class,” Jo responded in kind.
“You can open it.” He leaned against the opposite wall, hands in his pockets.
“Do we need to review? I’m a hacker, not a locksmith.” Jo pointed to the mechanical lock. “I know you’re from the dark ages, so I’ll break it down: This is not digital.”
“You sure get feisty when you’re on a mission.” He whistled. “Look, doll, I’ve watched you work for days. I’ve seen—and felt—your magic when you were hunched over your setup in the penthouse.”
She had felt it too, if only just a vague whisper of it somewhere in the back of her mind. But that was still just hacking, her magic making it easier, maybe, but not doing it for her completely.
“I think your magic is much more than just digital,” Wayne went on, as if recognizing her resolve wavering. “Why don’t you take a look, and try?”
Yuusuke’s life depended on them getting inside, which meant she owed it to him to take every opportunity presented to her. Even if she didn’t exactly believe it was possible.
Jo squared off against the door. She put her feet shoulder-width apart and her hands on her hips. She took a deep breath, and invited the power to fill her veins. She felt a trickle of sensation at the back of her mind, just like at the hotel.
“Open sesame!” Jo threw her hands up.
The door did nothing, but Wayne doubled over in laughter.
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” he said, gasping for air.
“No shit.” What did he think would happen? They didn’t have time for this and he was cracking jokes?
“Try again, for real this time,” he encouraged, probably after seeing the lack of amusement on her face.
Jo turned back to the door and stared at it, letting her mind run away from her.
Truth was, she wanted to open it. She wanted to figure out all this magic business sooner over later and just do it. She wanted to harness its power to help her friend. But Wayne was being as helpful in assisting with the learning process as a cold soldering iron to a stripped wire. Maybe he was trying to get her to figure it out on her own; maybe he was trying to teach her by not teaching her; but now wasn’t the time for lessons. Now was supposed to be the time to act.
Jo swallowed back her annoyance and summoned every ounce of determination to do just that.
She looked at the padlock. She didn’t know the first thing about lock-picking. But the longer she looked, the more it seemed to unravel before her. Of course, nothing physically changed about it. To her eyes though, it was as if the structure began to be rebuilt in straight lines and practical knowledge, like blueprints coming to life in the void.
“I have an idea. . .” she uttered, much to her own surprise.
Jo tapped her watch and looked around the small clearing they were standing in. There wasn’t much to work with. She needed something heavy, something—like that piece of piping that had sprung loose from the gutter system.
It’ll do, a disembodied voice assured her t
he moment Jo had it in her hands.
Jo worked her way back to the door, but her eyes didn’t fall on the lock. Instead, they drifted over to the hinges on the side. She was calm, abnormally so. It was as if she wasn’t clocked into reality; everything around her had gone hushed.
At least until the loud bang of the pipe meeting the door echoed off every wall—twice, in quick succession.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Jo frantically tapped her watch, dropping the pipe with a clamor in the process to disappear before anyone could look to investigate. A window opened above them, one man hanging out. He must have assumed it was just the pipe coming loose, because he returned inside with a shrug. He didn’t even see that one hinge had been struck in just the right way for the old bolts to pop loose from the mortar. Or that the other had its pin broken clear through.
“Well done.” Wayne pushed on his watch once they were sure no one else was coming. The muscles of his back strained against his shirt as he pulled off the door—much more muscle than Jo had previously given the man credit for. He set the iron to the side and pulled out of time. “Couldn’t pick something lighter?” he huffed, and wiped his palms on his trousers.
Jo ignored his griping and remained focused on the pipe. “Well done? I literally smashed my way in.”
“You knew how to break the hinges,” he pointed out.
“Anyone would’ve tried to smash it. Anyone could’ve.”
“Anyone would’ve gone for the lock, not the hinges. What’s more, doll, is that it took you just two perfect strikes. You knew it would break. You knew just where to hit it and with how much force.” He paused, actually giving Jo a chance to counter, but she didn’t, couldn’t. Truth was, she had known, in that weird back-of-the-mind-tickling-sensation sort of way from before.
“So, what. . . my magic is breaking things?” she huffed. “What a great power.”
“It is, actually.” Wayne’s words gave her pause as Jo hovered at the entrance. Dank air wafted up from the open darkness beneath her. “The Society was in dire need of someone with your skills, I’d say. The ability to crack any code, break through any lock, digital and non-digital. Eslar was right. Sounds like an asset to me.”
“I guess we’ll see when—if—it’s ever used for a wish.”
“You’re still bent about that?” Wayne stuffed his hands into his pockets, clearly trying to assess how deep her bitterness ran.
Jo didn’t bury the lede. “Yes and no,” she confessed. “I get it, Snow wants me to learn my magic and become comfortable before I’m placed in the line of fire. Walk before you run, and all that. It’s not like I haven’t had to prove myself before.” Jo looked down into the darkness. “But that’s just it. My whole life I’ve been proving myself. Just when I thought I’d finally cracked through, I died.”
She glanced over at him. Wayne hadn’t moved, and his face was surprisingly expressionless. For the first time, she was left wondering what he might be thinking.
“I don’t know if you can understand. . . But I’ve always been working toward something—for my mother, Yuusuke, for myself. To now be the bottom rung and have nothing to do? It’s a bitter bill.”
Wayne rubbed his chin thoughtfully and said, finally, “Good thing you didn’t have anything to do.” Jo raised her eyebrows and Wayne motioned toward the darkness. “If you were on the wish you wouldn’t be able to help your friend.”
Jo narrowed her eyes at him. “Damn your logic, sir.”
Wayne looked down at her, head cocked to the side. A rogue piece of hair had escaped its usual slicked-back perfection and hung with the movement. He leaned forward. “I know, I’m heinous, aren’t I?”
Jo was glad he stepped away promptly, or she may have objected to the idea.
“Now, let’s get to that Black Bank.”
She faced off against the opening to the catacombs and ignored her insides firing with such ferocity that she was surprised she hadn’t short-circuited yet. “Will we be able to see?” Jo asked uncertainly.
“Remember, we’re not human anymore, not quite.” Wayne placed an encouraging hand at the small of her back. “We need no feast and fear no famine. We are the embracers of dreams and the vagrants of sleep. And we—”
“We fear no hour, for none shall be our last,” Jo uttered.
From the corners of her eyes, Jo could see Wayne staring at her. “How did you know that?” he asked, barely more than a whisper.
“Something I remembered my grandmother reading to me when I was little,” Jo confessed.
Behold, the giver of wishes, Abuelita had read from an old, dusty tome, her voice worn with age and tinged in an accent that meant family and home. She remembered her eyes, crinkling at the corners as she glanced up from the page. They are the changer of worlds, mijita, and you are destined for greatness because you are of their blood.
“About what?”
“I think it was about you.” The details of the book and the passages within were still vague, ethereal, on the tip of her tongue but not quite enough to get a taste. But she did know that much. She looked up at Wayne, feeling a heavy weight settling over her shoulders. “Well. . . us, I guess.”
Jo looked forward once more and stepped into the darkness before he could ask further. Old habits died hard, and somewhere Jo waited for her father to scold her for “buying into all this magic nonsense.”
She strode into the maze of stone, a hand running along the wall, fingers streaking lines in the dampness. Wayne was beside her, but wasn’t touching her. He hovered, a warm presence in the chilling blackness that somehow her eyes did not struggle to pierce.
She knew exactly where to go, the careful map of the catacombs that she’d memorized hovering in the forefront of her mind. It led her with ease, deeper and deeper inside. Eventually, Jo felt a buzz in the air around her—a thrumming that was both familiar and unusual in the ancient and gloomy atmosphere.
It was the distinct feeling of electric current, noticeable in the otherwise void blackness. Or, perhaps it was her magic, or being outside time, that made it so prominent.
“Through here.” She motioned for Wayne to follow, confidence leading her down one more tunnel and towards a heavy-looking door. Wayne wasted no time turning on his watch, allowing her to save more of her minutes for what was to come. Jo gave him a nod as he heaved the lock, disengaged the carefully insulated door, and pushed it open.
The Black Bank’s mainframe was expectedly massive, towers of server racks lining the perimeter of a room that was suddenly all too modern for its surroundings. All the bells and whistles had obviously gone into this set up, and she had no doubt that there were protections, even from the inside. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t up for the task.
Jo went to one of the two monitors on either side of the room, simple command centers no doubt used for little more than diagnostics. The first did not have a USB port, but the second did. Turning on her time and taking a seat, Jo plugged in her drive and began uploading. The moment her codes were uploaded, the scripts began working.
She could pull out of time, likely should pull out of time. It was mostly automated from here. But Jo couldn’t bring herself to tap her watch, not when she was this close. If something went wrong, just the slightest line of code out of place, she wanted to be ready.
But so far, so good. The script ran like a dream and Jo watched as it began to attach itself to the underbelly of the Black Bank. It was a little worm under the rug, put in a place where only Yuusuke was likely to find it—and he wouldn’t even realize he had.
By the time she felt content in her job—probably only a few more tweaks here and there to make sure the virus killed itself on activation—she still had an hour left.
“Looks like your time is up, dollface,” Wayne said, aiming for casual but missing the mark. When she looked over her shoulder at him, he was peeking past the door and back out into the tunnels, a look of concern on his face.
“I’m not done yet,” Jo snapped, suddenly feelin
g as though everything she had done wouldn’t be enough. She only had this one chance, this one accumulation of time to spend. If she didn’t get the right amount of encryptions uploaded, if she didn’t open enough back doors, then her wish would mean nothing. Yuusuke would wind up right back where they’d started. . . ended.
“Jo, someone’s coming,” Wayne hissed back, voice a bit worried. He turned on his watch, she noticed, his posture going stiff.
Willing herself to calm, to focus, Jo took a breath, letting the information she’d gathered and the data she’d collected all pull into organized files within her mind. Internally, she looked over everything she’d done, envisioned everything that would be waiting for Yuusuke when he finally got this far. And then, with a burst of something vivid, a sensation that she could only describe as magical, she saw three, four, no, five different spots within her foundation that, if left alone, would bring the whole thing down.
Quickly, Jo began working to fix the issues. How was it that she hadn’t noticed them before? Stupid, stupid, stupid!
“Jo!” Wayne shouted her name, making her jump, but even as she whipped around to see what was going on, her fingers never stopped their frantic typing. Which was amazing, really, considering the way her whole body went tense at the sight of a man hurrying into the room.
“Two minutes!” Jo shouted, wincing when Wayne cursed in response.
“Hey! You two!” A voice demanded in French at her back. “Hands up!”
What followed was the sound of an obvious struggle, Jo doing her best to block it out and focus on the final threads she had to sew together. The sound of a fist connecting with what was either a jaw or a cheekbone brought a few seconds of silence, and Wayne was suddenly at her shoulder, panting.
