by M. R. Forbes
She bit her lip and nodded. “Okay. I can do this.” She grabbed another chip from the plate Frank offered her. “Order me a burger and a soda.”
I looked at Shika, who immediately headed toward the phone. Myra circled past me. There was a hallway off the main living area that led to a few extra, opulent bedrooms. She led us down the corridor. I wasn’t surprised when she decided to settle in the large service kitchen. It was one of the only rooms that didn’t have any windows.
Frank put the chips on the counter beside her.
“How are you holding up, Frank?” she asked.
“I’m good. Check out my eye.” He pulled the lid down a little, so the wires were visible.
“Whoa,” Myra said. “Bring that down here.”
Frank knelt down to put his head at eye level with her. She reached out and examined the augmentation.
“That’s some expensive shit.”
“Yeah. Courtesy of Mr. T. Don’t worry. We got beat up a little bit the first time. We’re more prepared now.”
“I hope so.” She backed away and grabbed her bag, unzipping it and pulling out the portable kit. “What’s the address?”
I recited it to her a couple of times, so she had it committed to memory.
“I’ll take care of things here,” she said, pulling on the gloves. “Frank, will you hang with me?”
“Sure, kid. You took my nachos.”
They both laughed. I retreated from the room, heading back out into the main space. Shika was standing near the window, looking out.
“You’re a Guardian,” I said.
It was a statement, not a question. The Guardians were a corporate outfit. ghosts gone pro. Mercs available to the highest bidder. From what Danelle had told me, they were the best around, safe in their business because they were impeccable at what they did, and they played every side. It wasn’t unheard of for two Guardians hired by opposite Houses to meet in a fight, and for one to kill the other in the name of the job, even if they were best friends. I had figured out that’s what Shika was by her demeanor. Any ghost could be professional, but she had a look to her, an edge that I hadn’t seen before.
“Yes, I was,” she replied. “You’re very observant.”
“It helps me stay alive. Was?”
“I’m not with them anymore.”
“I don’t know that much about the outfit, but I always thought it was a lifetime assignment?”
“Not always. Mr. Tarakona bought me out of my contract.”
I could only imagine how much that cost. “Why?”
“I wanted to work for him exclusively. He wanted me to work for him. That can’t happen as part of the corp. Assignments are handed down and intentionally randomized.”
“Is Mr. Black using Guardians?”
“I would expect so.”
“What about the guards on the ground and the roof?”
“No. Regular ghosts. House Red’s stable.”
“Loyal.”
“Yes. Especially to you. They know what you did for Ms. Red. Both of them. And for their House.”
“When we make our run, are you coming along or staying here to watch Myra?”
“That is not for me to decide.”
“Which do you want to do?”
She smiled. It was the first time she had shown much expression at all. “Come along.”
“You’re sure she’s safe here?”
“Are you?”
I nodded. I knew the score. I would be an idiot not to want her with us. “Welcome aboard.”
She bowed formally, so I returned it. Mine was awkward. It was still good enough.
30
I knew that I would
We were all assembled around Myra two hours later. She had eaten her burger, drank her soda, and managed to peel back layers of misdirection and encryption to come up with a basic outline of exactly what we were up against.
The target was a relatively small tower near the southern edge of the city, a so-called “neutral zone” where the other Houses had set up shop. It was owned by a shell company of a shell company, a tree with a hundred branches that led back to Mr. Black at the root. Supposedly, it was an apartment complex for the ultra-rich.
Myra’s digging had confirmed that was a front. It was one of Black’s homes, one of his doorways, and it wasn’t going to be lightly defended.
Get in, find the door, get out. That’s what Tarakona had told me to do. Screw stealth. Screw preparation. We had a week. Six days now. Maybe less. There was no time to make anything pretty.
“There are two ways in,” Myra said, the blueprint of the building up on her screen. She turned her hands and it rotated around the diagram. “The front door, obviously. Then there’s a service entrance in the back, where they pick up trash and stuff.”
“We should go in that way,” Frank said. “The front will be guarded.”
“No,” Shika said. “That entrance will be more heavily protected. They will expect anyone wishing to break in will go that way.”
“I don’t like either of those approaches,” I said. “What about the roof?”
“You want to airlift in?” Shika asked, shaking her head. “You’ll be spotted long before you reach the building.”
“How? Everything else around it is bigger. Swoop around, drop onto the roof.”
I was playing it action-hero. To be honest, the idea of it scared the hell out of me, and was nothing I wanted to do. It still beat the pants off the alternative. Walking in the front door? Now that was crazy.
“It could work,” Shika said. “Except they’ll have users on the roof. That’s why the building is shorter. To keep it in range of the magical fields.”
“Good point,” I said.
“Hey Myra,” Frank said. “Can you zoom in over there.” He was pointing at a corner of the spec.
“Sure.”
“What do you see?” I asked.
“Hang on a second, boss.” He leaned in closer, putting his augmented eye to it. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“What?”
“There’s a few lines on this thing that were taken off.”
“It’s digital, how can you know that?”
“They didn’t do a perfect job. I can see the pixels. They’re uneven.”
“What do you think it means?”
He shrugged. “I’m not that good at reading these things. I had to a few times for work, before I was a thief I was in construction. But if you look here, that’s-“
“An underground tunnel,” Shika said. “For power and water.”
That piqued my interest. “Where does it lead?”
Myra traced along the route until the blueprint ended. “I’d have to pull up records, and I can’t read Japanese.”
“I’ll read it,” Shika said.
Myra went back into the Machine, reflecting what she was seeing to the screen. She found a map of the underground utilities, and traced it to the building.
“Here,” she said, pointing to a building a few blocks away. “There’s a service entrance. Mr. Black didn’t want anyone to know there was another way in.”
“He did a pretty good job of hiding it, too,” Frank said.
“That’s our move, then,” I said. “Myra, what else do you have?”
“Not too much. Some delivery receipts for groceries, electric bills, that sort of thing. I looked up some information on average cost of food and consumption and stuff like that. If I had to guess, there're about twenty people inside, give or take. I’m sure at least some of them are users, but I don’t know how many.”
“That’s more useful than you’re giving yourself credit for,” Frank said.
“Oh, I got one other thing.” She smiled then, clearly proud of herself. “1-4-5-3-2-1-3-1.”
“What is that the code to?” I asked.
The smile faded. “Okay, I’m not completely sure. I got a few beats into the security system before it got too tight for me to want to risk pushing. It works one o
f the locks in the place. A door? A safe? The toilet? I have no idea.”
“It might come in handy,” I said.
“That’s it. I wish I could have gotten more.”
“Nah, you did great,” Frank said. “Right, Baron?”
“You did. Keep trying with the security, see if you can get inside but don’t get caught. We’ll do the rest.”
It felt weird for me to say that. Really weird. It was way too positive for me.
I glanced at Frank, and then at Shika. A trogre and a Guardian. And my power was stronger than ever.
I didn’t want to think it because it had always been a jinx before.
I felt good about our chances.
31
Why did I ask?
Shika guided the trike through the foliage crowded streets, deftly whipping the long, narrow vehicle around obstacles human and otherwise. I sat in the back, my hand resting on the mask. I didn’t want to use the artifact. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the demon that had been there to threaten me, but had fled when I needed it the most.
Part of me wanted to take the mask and the dice and toss them out into the brush, never to be seen again.
The rest of me knew that I couldn’t, even if I had wanted to. The entity wasn’t lying when it said we had a deal. We did, and now I was stuck with the consequences.
“We’re getting close,” Shika said. I couldn’t see the way her tail was moving with Frank sitting in front of me. I could picture it swishing back and forth in an excited dance as we moved closer to our assault. I could imagine Frank was watching every little twitch.
“Myra, are you with us?” I asked, tapping the earpiece. She was going to try to break into the building’s systems, and I wanted to know if she succeeded.
“I’m here, Baron,” she replied.
“Good. We’re almost at the service entrance.”
“Okay.”
I breathed in, pulling the death magic to me, taking a huge gulp of it and holding it in my gut. I didn’t know what we were walking into. I wanted to be as ready as I could. The first few seconds would be critical.
“What should I do?” Frank asked, turning his head back to face me. I could see his skullcap was drenched with sweat. His palms were probably clammy too.
“Shoot any anything that isn’t Shika or me. Don’t get killed.”
“Okay, boss.”
He turned back around.
It wasn’t that I was so cool under the pressure. I was more than nervous. It was one thing to talk myself up as a foil to Mr. Black. It was another thing to be the foil. I didn’t want to die, and I wasn’t doing a damn thing to lessen the odds of that happening.
If there had been any other choices, maybe I would have been running in the opposite direction. Except choice was an illusion. If I had said no to Sandman in the first place, Death’s abduction of Prithi would have forced me to act. If not Death, then Tarakona would have come along and given me the job. If not Tarakona, I was willing to bet the demon would have screwed me into doing it. The truth was, I was a pawn to everything around me.
There was nothing to do but keep putting one foot in front of the other. I had been lucky so far, to the point that Jin had believed I couldn’t be killed.
I wished I believed that. Then I wouldn’t have been terrified.
The trike came to a stop in front of a small cement building with no windows and only one ordinary steel door. The heavy materials weren’t there to keep people out, they were there to keep the plants from finding seams and growing in, and other than the face the entire construction was wrapped tightly in vines and flowers. It was beautiful, all things considered.
We spilled out into the cleared space and approached the door. Shika tried to open it. Locked.
I started digging for my picks. Frank put his hand to the door and pushed. The lock twisted and broke under the force, and the door swung open.
“What?” he said in response to my look. “I thought we were in a hurry?”
I shrugged. Shika bypassed us and entered the building.
We followed behind her. It was a standard control room, empty for the moment, with a metal stairwell leading down towards the important stuff. Frank had to duck and squirm to get his bulk to the bottom, staying low to keep from scraping his head on the ten-foot diameter pipe.
We ran then, following thick bundles of cables and secondary metal pipes that carried water one way and waste the other. Frank was the weakest link, not due to lack of effort but because of his size. Coming across manhole covers as we crossed beneath the ground started to make me worry that he was going to get trapped down here, away from all of the action.
“I hope I can fit out the other end,” he said halfway through the sprint, thinking what I was thinking.
“Me too,” I replied.
We found out that he would a couple of minutes later. The steps up into Black’s building were similar to the ones we had gone down. Probably so they could use the tunnel as an evacuation route.
We paused at the back of another steel door. The odds were good that someone was guarding the other side.
Every instinct I had told me to pick the lock, take out the dice and roll them through as small a crack as I could make. It had always worked well for me in the past, and as I touched the dice, I could feel they were suddenly warm again.
The demon was hungry.
I let them go and motioned to Frank.
“Go ahead.”
He smiled, stepping up to the door and giving it a nice, hard shove. It swung open, revealing the guard as he began to turn to see what had just taken him by surprise.
His head moved six inches before Shika broke his neck.
“Whoa,” Frank said again.
I was already through the door, scanning the other side of the hallway. It was empty, and the guard hadn’t managed to get an alarm off.
“Myra, can you hear me,” I said.
“Yes,” she replied a second later.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m making progress. Slow progress.”
“Slow time is over. Forget subsystems, just try to get eyes on the facility.”
“Okay.”
I went to the left, down a long hallway. We were in the basement, so everything was pale white drywall or cement, as ordinary as could be. Nobody was supposed to know about that way in, leaving it lightly guarded.
“I’ll go first,” I said when we reached the stairs. “If anything happens, pick me up.”
Shika nodded. Frank drew one of the cannons from his hip.
I climbed the steps, reaching a heavy wood door. I did it my way this time, putting my hand to the lock, whispering the incantation and sending the death magic into it. The metal corroded within a few seconds. I pushed it open slowly, getting my eyes on another guard. He was leaned back against the wall, looking down at his phone. Definitely not a Guardian. Black would have flayed him to see the lack of discipline.
I had my hand on his wrist before he noticed me. I pulled him in, pushing the magic through him as he joined me on the stairs. Gangrene crawled in veins up his arm to his shoulder, from his shoulder to his neck, from his neck to his brain. I got my other hand on his mouth to keep him from screaming while his stem rotted to nothing.
I lowered the corpse gently, looking back at Shika and Frank. They both looked disturbed.
“Your grandfather couldn't do that, could he?” I asked.
She shook her head.
Childish games? His spirit hadn’t fled the body yet. I forced it to remain, bringing him back to life before he was even cold. It took a lot of energy, but I was feeling good, and I had plenty of the meds to recharge with.
My new soldier drew his gun from a shoulder holster, and I directed him forward, back out the door. I kept him in front of me as we came out into a much nicer hallway, painted a deep red and gold, lined with expensive artwork, vases, and statues.
“Myra, anything?” I whispered.
“
Not yet. If you keep asking it’ll take longer.”
Right. I trailed my zombie down the hallway, reaching the end at the same time the user did.
A blast of fire tore into the corpse, lighting up its clothes and sending me backpedaling away. I drew my gun and directed my puppet to shoot at the same time. Eight pops sounded, and the pyro thudded to the floor.
“Come on,” I said. “We find the door and go through it, or we get the hell out.”
“I can’t argue that plan,” Frank said.
I sprinted down the hall, hoping I remembered the blueprint correctly. There was a great room toward the southwest corner of the building that seemed suitable for a doorway. I wanted to try that one first.
We kept going, making it closer to the target without trouble than I would have guessed was possible.
Where was everybody?
I got my answer when a bullet hit me in the chest, finding an opening in the spread of my trench and punching through my body so hard I could feel it push the backside of the bulletproof coat.
Damn me for wondering.
32
Dead man walking
I fell onto my back, finding myself looking up at the ceiling as the bullets kept coming, launched from who knew where. Shika and Frank managed to get to cover around a corner, leaving me bleeding out in the center of the floor.
They probably thought I was already dead.
I wasn’t, but I don’t know how I wasn’t. I couldn’t breathe. My heart was thudding in my ears. My face was getting hot. After everything I had been through, after what I had survived, I never imagined I would go down like this. A single, simple shot from an invisible opponent.
Invisible was the operative word. I only knew he was there when he knelt over me and put his hand to my chest to see if I was still breathing.
Idiot.
I got stronger when I was closer to death. I couldn’t get much closer than this. I only had to lift my finger to dispel his magic. A bullet hit him squarely between the eyes a fraction of a second later.
He fell on his side next to me. I lifted my head slowly, the world beginning to move like molasses. The thudding was gone. In fact, he wasn’t as stupid as I had thought.
