“All together?” Dani shouted. “I don’t think so.” She pointed at the doorways as the security teams, all dressed in black like some kind of SS thugs, entered, carrying void strips, and this time Dani screamed like a terrified old woman, “They’re going to hurt us! Nazis!” She released her magic, outside. Into the parking area.
In the employee parking lot, two cars exploded.
A guard slapped a void strip on her, and Dani dropped as if dead.
Mable
Mable watchedas four patients were loaded onto gurneys. Sirens were blaring in the parking lot as firetrucks and police zoomed in. She wanted to run out and get the police to come in, arrest the staff, or get them to go into Building Z and check it out, but … no probable cause, and police would believe the staff and Devoe and not old people. That had always been the case. And … this was the plan, create havoc so Dani would get taken away.
“Fuck,” Marvin muttered, and gripped her hand. She gripped back, holding on for dear life.
“She’ll sleep this afternoon,” Zeddie said of Dani.
“Fuck,” Marvin said, tightening his grip on her.
Sandra shared quick glances with them, hers full of command, which shocked Mable. Sandra was not the commanding type. Or the Sandra she knew wasn’t.
The light-skinned black woman’s dark eyes demanded they gather behind Dani’s gurney. Together, they followed Zeddie as they all went to the inmates’ elevator–Zeddie, and the counselor to drop off Dani in her room, or so they said. Sandra, who suddenly appeared full of purpose and resolve, pushed her way into the elevator with Dani, her eyes like thunderclouds.
Zeddie and the counselor who had knocked Dani out looked confused. The counselor said, “Ma’am, you’ll need to take another elevator or wait until this one returns.”
Sandra stared them down, “I like that crazy old white woman,” she said, playing her role, pointing at the gurney. “I’m going to make sure she gets to her room.”
Mable pulled Marvin in too. The doors closed, leaving the six of them alone; five standing people–three of them magical practitioners, and two of them voids–and Dani, lying under a sheet.
“What happens to her now?” Mable asked.
Zeddie looked at her quickly in the reflective metal and away.
The counselor, Deborah, according to her nametag, said, “She’ll be evaluated. She sounded paranoid in the dining room. It’s possible that she’s had some kind of mental break. If so, she’ll be moved to a different facility. The Sevens isn’t equipped to handle people in that condition.”
Mable frowned. Sandra looked down and whispered to Jesus. Marvin cursed again. All playing their parts, yet all being themselves. They had placed Dani in this position. If she was hurt, it was on them.
Mable
Mable sat on her toilet,in the only place in her room where there was no surveillance, holding her secret laptop, and pulled up pictures of her fake grandkids. She entered the encryption code making the photo dissolve into lines of computer code, and tapped the sequence that would execute part one of Program ABZ, or Attack Building Z. If the MTT worked, this should wake the tracking device.
Dani, if she was really out and her magic was still voided, could be found. If she was awake, she would feel the sting as the tracker went live. The plan was for her to lie still, let the small device do its first two jobs: perform a diagnostic on itself, and then send out a GPS for Dani’s location. Within five minutes Mable knew the device was working and had a GPS on her. Dani was no longer in her dorm room.
Dani already being gone made things harder, but she never expected things to be easy. Mable paused Program ABZ and opened a photo sent to her email from Tridevi’s office. Once she had it on her drive, she dissolved that photo. More code was buried there and she isolated the program she had worked on for weeks, ever since Zeddie had first smuggled in the small tablet, hoping that the Sevens’ IT team was too busy watching the replay of all the cameras to notice her stealthy incursions into their system.
Deftly, she inserted a single line of code into the IT team’s internal servers, and sent it searching. Another fifteen minutes later, she took over the security system, shut down the surveillance system for all the dorms, the teaching sections of the school, the grounds, and the basement. Not building Z. She couldn’t do that remotely. She needed to be there and plugged into a system to disable the servers there.
Initiating a final line of code, Mable opened all the locks on every dorm room door, and patted her laptop. It wasn’t a pretty purple like hers at home, but it had done good work. She was proud of it. For the moment, she had done all she could from the safety of her room.
She grabbed her bag of electronic goodies and high-tailed it out the unlocked door. In the hallway, she opened Dani’s door, just in case, but as she had expected, the room was empty. Dani was already gone. Her friend was in danger.
Marvin
Tridevi metin the basement utility closet, the same basement Marvin figured Dani had been transported through, unconscious and unable to defend herself, the same closet he and Mable had hidden in. He passed out scrubs to each of them from the stash he had discovered on that rendezvous, that had combined fun and business. Silent, they turned their backs on each other, put on the nursing uniforms, and clipped on fake IDs. Even Sandra.
When he was dressed, he turned around. “I thought you were staying here to be our backup,” he said to Sandra, who was staring at her fake ID.
“I’ve been—” She stopped and looked into the distance in the small room. It was a thousand-yard stare, an expression he had seen when he was in the service, on the faces of Marines who had seen too much, done too much, or lost too much.
Sandra took a slow breath and said, “I’ve been sitting on my backside too long as it is, waiting on the Lord to fix my life.” She pulled her gaze back to his. “I’m going with you.”
Marvin patted her on the back, a single quick pat, like he might to his grandson. It was part pride and part encouragement. Until today, Sandra had been mostly the mousy, quiet, forensic accountant at Tridevi. This Sandra he was seeing was probably the real Sandra, the Sandra from before. Before magic had ruined her life.
