More sure than I was that we were going to survive today.
Bronte
I almost wishedthere was static in my ear just so I could hear that there was someone on the other end. I knew there was. An entire convention room of people were listening. Waiting. But the silence made my skin crawl.
The sonar frequency had been changing regularly, scrambling what they were getting on the inside. Two days ago, it had been changed to edit the security feed. We didn’t try to hack it, although eyes on the inside would have been great. But we weren’t willing to take the chance that we’d alert them that something was coming.
Instead, we’d settled on their videos repeating scrambled feeds. The Harem Project had some stupidly incredible technology that seamlessly married videos together so that it looked like one simple loop.
We parked more than a dozen blocks away and moved through the streets as absently as possible. Stopping at windows and pausing inside stores. We decided that the middle of the day on a Thursday was when we were going to do this. Our plan was to step foot inside around eleven that morning. We hoped that it gave us the highest likelihood of the important people, and greatest number of people, working.
Attacking a building in the middle of the night was well and good, but it wasn’t likely that we were going to find who we were looking for. It also seemed a little cowardly. We weren’t there on a rescue mission. We were there to kill murderers. The more, the merrier.
“Where are you?” a voice asked from the other side of the line. I sighed a breath of relief at hearing someone there.
“Looking at the building,” Saar answered.
“We should have given you chest cams,” someone else muttered. “Being blind is infuriating.”
I grinned, already knowing that that was Iker. A damned control freak, that one.
“Relax. We got this,” Saar said.
No one responded. At first, I was frustrated with the following silence. Because I wanted to hear their reassurance. But I also knew that we were keeping the feed quiet. One, so no one could pick up on it. And two, so as not to distract us.
“There,” Hadley said, pointing.
Our first goal was to disable the security. To jumble the feed and shut down the emergency responses, whatever those may be. To do that, we needed to attach one of our little boxes to a direct line.
“I got it,” Raiden said, plucking the box from Zilan’s hand and walking over. As my blood rushed in my ears, I had to remember that we were each heavily relying on our strengths. As a quake, Raiden’s was ground vibration. He’d know firsthand if someone was nearing, giving him every possible second to get it done.
But I still watched, terrified. Tense. Waiting for a shot to come from nowhere and strike him down. The three minutes it took him to attach it and come back to us had me almost passing out from fear.
Clearly, I needed to better manage my stress. This was going to be a long day.
“Ready,” Saar said. “You copy?”
“Copy,” someone answered. “When you open a door, we’ll shut it all down.”
I nodded, even though I wasn’t the one answering. There were half a dozen doors on the outside. And many windows that opened. Our goal was to lock them all down to prevent anyone from going out or coming in.Beforewe made too much of a commotion. And thus why we chose a time of day that was right between breaks. Too early for lunch, but far too late for breakfast.
“All indicators say the feed is scrambled. Proceed when ready,” someone said. It was difficult to distinguish voices when they sounded so far away. Probably because my heart was loud in my ears right now.
For a minute longer, we watched the doors we could see. There were three from this angle and while we couldn’t see what was happening on the inside. We wanted to get to the door unnoticed. Inside unnoticed. Set the system to shut down, locking all the doors and exits—both physical and magical—before anyone took note that we were there.
It was a long shot. Something we already knew. But that was our goal. And we figured that a door within a stairwell seemed the best possible scenario for that.
I knew where this stairwell led on all floors. What we’d find beyond. And while we assumed that the biggest dangers were going to be the worker bees and that we ought to take them out, we really wanted to focus on whoever was on the top floor.
Everything we were doing was a guess as far as who was involved. Who was in charge. But it was an educated guess that we were willing to take a chance on. This was the best opportunity we were going to get.
And we couldn’t blow it.
This needed to go right. It needed to go well.
Time didn’t matter. We would continue to gather strength the longer we went. Gaining power and energy from everything around us and each other. That wasn’t the issue.
Our only concern was the unknown. We were naïve enough to think that they’d let all their new secrets go when we took possession of their vans back at the mountain. They had more secrets. And I was sure that many of them, if not all, were just as deadly as we were.
