“Lark?” Ozzy says. “What are you doing?”
“Just stretching my legs,” I say, flinging my door open.
I tuck my tablet into my jacket, shove the bat under my arm, and slip into the alley shadows, keeping low.
Static in my ear explodes. “Lark. No,” Knight growls. “You stay in the car.”
“Can’t hear you, connection’s bad,” I whisper. “Try again later.”
I jog down the alley, sticking close to parked cars until I’m tracking the back side of the warehouse fence line. There’s a sagging section behind a dumpster—classic lazy maintenance.
I wriggle under.
Inside the yard, it’s quieter. Just the distant hum of the highway and the drip of some mysterious liquid from a busted gutter.
I skirt the outer wall, tablet in one hand, bat in the other. The nearest camera is about eight feet up, bolted near a floodlight. I can’t reach it. But I can find its power.
Utility conduits run along the wall, snaking down toward a junction box near the ground.
“Arrow,” I murmur, “if I kill the power to their grid, does that also kill your access?”
“Yes,” he says tightly. “And it might tip them off.”
“Okay. Plan B.”
I crouch near the junction box and jack into the nearest wired connection with a portable adapter. My tablet screen flickers, then fills with a prompt.
Hello, little camera.
I tap commands fast, fingers flying. This system is high-end, but someone lazily left a default manufacturer password on one node. Idiot.
“I’ve got access to the cam network,” I say. “Sending a loop of the last clean ten minutes. Can you piggyback, Arrow?”
“On it,” he says. “Okay, I see the feed. I’m lacing in false timestamps. You’ve got… maybe five, ten minutes before the system self-checks and realizes it’s lying to itself.”
“Plenty.”
On the tablet, the interior view rewinds and starts looping. Knight moving down the hall. Then Knight moving down the hall again. And again.
I look up at the real camera.
“Bite me,” I whisper.
“Lark.” Knight’s voice is ice now. “Where exactly are you?”
“Improving your odds of not becoming famous,” I say. “You’re welcome.”
He mutters something that sounds like, “I’m going to handcuff her to a chair,” which does things to my brain I don’t have time to unpack.
“Focus, Knight,” Arrow says. “You’re clear for now. Get what we need, then get out.”
Knight grinds out, “Copy.”
I slip back along the wall, but before I go, my gaze catches on something near the corner of the building—a second junction box I didn’t notice before, tucked half behind a stack of busted pallets.
“Arrow?” I say. “Did you know there’s a second line out here?”
“Define ‘second line.’”
