Chapter Twenty
Twenty
“Sorry I’m late,” Amelie said as she joined a wound-up Dani behind the bar. “There was some serious drama in our suite. Mel was all, like, disturbing my consecrated—”
“Hold that thought,” Dani said, already out of her apron and halfway to the breakroom. “Tell me next shift. Thanks so much again for covering!”
She made it as far as the street corner before she realized she’d forgotten where Silva told them to meet.
She’d read the professor’s message earlier and knew she was supposed to be going in the direction of downtown, but the details had left her brain, and she hadn’t brought her quartzpad with her, so she couldn’t even check the location pin.
Dani was considering going back inside and asking Amelie if she could use her quartzpad to message McKenna when she glimpsed a flurry of turquoise movement out of the corner of her eye.
She looked up to see a crow land on the nearest streetlight. “Gingerbread!” she cried. “Thank the gods. I’ve never been so glad to see an omen of death in my life.”
He rasped back at her, skull rotating on his weird neck, then swooped down from the streetlight and flew north, drawing a clear line for Dani to copy. She invoked a silent blessing on McKenna for yet again sending her familiar to the rescue as she followed him down the sidewalk.
Gingerbread led her for two blocks, Dani’s nerves jangling with every step.
Some part of her was still holding out hope that she’d get there and Silva would have changed her mind, decided to send someone else in instead.
Dani said a quick prayer to Hecate as she rounded a corner and OneiroLabs emerged on the skyline like the prow of a cruise liner, its lights smeared in the drizzling rain. They were just a few streets away.
A jagged fingernail of a shiver stroked Dani’s spine. She wasn’t much of a seer, but she recognized a warning when she felt one.
She had no choice but to ignore it. Gingerbread had come to roost on top of a white van, the kind that TV stations used, situated at the curb in front of a public park.
Much too large for a passenger vehicle and too sketchy to belong to a business, it had painted windows and a camera crane folded on the roof.
Dani advanced with the caution instilled by a lifelong wariness of unmarked vans, but as soon as she stepped onto the sidewalk next to it, the sliding door slammed open, and McKenna stuck her head out into the rain.
“Get in, babe,” she said. “We’re on a tight schedule.” She reached out, grabbed Dani by the arm, and yanked her inside—or tried to. Dani tripped on the way in, scraping her shin and nearly bowling McKenna over in the process. Two sets of hands grasped her by the arms and hauled her up to standing.
“Thanks,” Dani said, smiling when she saw it was Oliver who’d stepped in to help. She hadn’t seen them much the past two days, as they’d been busy in the greenhouse and the arcanobotany labs. It seemed like blending DreamLite with their handpicked plant medleys was still working reasonably well.
“You’re late,” said Katya from the left side of the van.
“Again.” Dani turned toward where she was half standing, half sitting on a stool in front of a wall of monitors, hands alternating in a hectic dance between an enormous keyboard on the desk in front of her and a laptop balanced next to it.
She had headphones on with one ear exposed and was loudly chewing a piece of gum.
“Oh, hush,” McKenna said in her direction, putting out a hand to catch Gingerbread as he dove inside. “She’s here now, isn’t she?” The crow shimmied up her arm and nuzzled under her hair. “And I told you he would come in handy.”
Katya rolled her eyes. “It’s still inappropriate to bring a raven to a stealth operation.”
“He’s not a raven,” McKenna snapped. “He’s a crow.”
“Same difference.”
“It is not—”
“An argument for another time, perhaps.” Silva was standing with her hip against Katya’s desk, bent over so that her head just brushed the roof of the van. “Thank you for joining us, Miss Lionet.”
The professor was surveying the monitors, which displayed the exterior of OneiroLabs from various angles in grainy black and white.
The biggest screen in front of them showed the service entrance, which Dani recognized from her last visit, when Max had smuggled her and Oliver out.
A guardhouse stood beside a plain black gate, its bars webbed with woven fibers of white light.
As she watched, a car rolled up, paused at the guardhouse, then proceeded as the gate tilted inward.
The light-web remained, passing over the car like a scanner.
Silva caught Dani watching. “Katya has managed to hack into the external surveillance. Everything you’re seeing is what security at OneiroLabs is seeing right now.”
“So we’re really doing this,” Dani said.
“Hell yeah we are.” Wyatt’s voice caused her to pivot, and she felt a new wrinkle form in her brain from the cognitive dissonance of the sight that met her.
The person sitting on the bench across from the monitors looked more like a nerd from the transmutation department than frat boy Wyatt, his muscles slightly deflated and a pair of glasses balanced on his nose.
He was inspecting himself in one of McKenna’s compact mirrors.
If she didn’t know it was him, she wouldn’t have recognized him at all.
“How do I look?” he asked. “Still hot?”
“Still douchey,” Katya said without turning her head.
“Budge up,” McKenna told Wyatt. “Make room for Dani.” She bustled over and flapped a hand at him until he scooted, then ushered her friend into the vacant spot.
“Hold still,” she said, and before Dani could utter a word of protest, McKenna reached out and gathered her purple curls in her hands.
Her eyes fell shut and her lips began to move in a mumbled incantation as she rubbed something into Dani’s hair—cocoa butter laced with some kind of resin, judging from the smell.
After a moment, a wintry brown spread from McKenna’s fingers and dug into Dani’s roots—her natural hair color, which she hadn’t seen in years.
“Don’t worry, you can wash it off at the end of the night.
” McKenna handed her a hair tie. “Ponytail it so I can get started on your face.”
Dani obeyed, her hands shaking. “So what’s the plan?” she said. “We’re still going in as test subjects?”
Silva pushed away from Katya’s desk and turned to face Dani. “Correct. You and Mr. Shalhope are scheduled for an overnight clinical study starting at ten—under invented names, of course.”
“Our contact set it all up,” Oliver said. “He won’t be there tonight, but he got you registered at the front desk.”
“And then what?” Dani said. “Once we’re in there, what do we do?”
“Miss Novak and I will be guiding you every step of the way,” Silva said. “In that vein—Miss Novak?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Katya gave the keyboard a break and spun on her chair, coming to a stop across from Dani. She held up her hands, equipped with long false nails, the same shade of silver as her hair. “You’re going to need one of these.”
“A fingernail?” Oliver asked.
“A skeleton key,” Katya said with a rare smile.
She peeled the nail off her right ring finger and passed it to Dani.
“These bad boys aren’t even legal here. They’re basically parasites—if you stick one in, or even on, any of their tech, I can use it to hack in remotely.
They’ll even self-destruct if I tell them to—and fuck up their system in the process.
They’re quite versatile and virtually undetectable. ”
“Sounds pretty cool,” Wyatt said.
“Pretty cool?” Katya shot at him. “I had to trade someone on the dark web my blood for these. I think they’re more than pretty cool.”
“Hecate’s bones,” Dani said, looking down at the unassuming object. “That’s intense.”
“Intense, but worth it,” Katya agreed. “That right there is how we’ll be able to get access to the security override function.
Once you’re inside the building, you’ll need to find a place to put it.
Ideally, we’d deposit it straight into their security control panel, but Professor Silva and I agree that it’s highly unrealistic to expect you to gain access to the control room, and too dangerous to try.
It’ll work if we put it in anything that’s connected to the security system, though—it’ll just take me longer to get fully tapped in, but that should be no problem with the gala being so far out. ”
“Okay.” Dani slid the silver nail into her pocket, then cursed—McKenna had stabbed her in the eye with a makeup brush. “Hey, can you go a little lighter on that spellshadow?”
“Sorry,” McKenna said, then proceeded to impale her again.
“Here, you take one, too, as a backup,” Katya said, handing a second nail to Wyatt. “If you lose it, I’ll slit your throat.”
“Gods above,” Wyatt said. “Have a little faith, woman.”
“Settle,” Silva warned them. “We need to go into this thing as levelheaded as we can. Miss Amari, are you nearly finished?”
“Yup,” McKenna said, sitting back to admire her handiwork. “All set. Isn’t she fabulous?”
“She’s lovely,” Oliver agreed. “Very girl-next-door, but mysterious.”
“Silly question, maybe,” Dani said, more concerned with logistics than how McKenna had glamoured her, “but—how do we get out? I mean, I know Wyatt can port us, but won’t they have security up to prevent people from zapping in and out like that?”
“They absolutely will,” Katya said. “But if you do your job and plant the device successfully, I’ll be able to plug into their power grid.
” She waggled her remaining fingernails.
“Once you’re ready to bounce, ping us and I’ll cut the power, which will knock out their shields, too.
Wyatt should have approximately fifteen to thirty seconds to port back here before the generator kicks in. ”
“Can do,” Wyatt said.
“Ping you?” Dani said. “How?”
“Oliver,” Katya said. “She doesn’t have her shell.”
Oliver startled at this, dug into their pocket, and held something out to Dani.
She blinked at the round, pink, delicate seashell they dropped onto her palm.
“It goes in your ear. I’ve enchanted it so that we can all communicate with one another telepathically so long as we’re wearing it.
It took me most of last night—I’ve never created a network for so many people, and it was a finicky job, but I did it,” they said proudly as Dani nested the shell in her ear.
This specific shell will only work for you—no one else can use it.
It took Dani a second to realize that Oliver’s voice had sounded in her head that time.
They smiled at her look of surprise. You can talk to the whole group, or concentrate on one person.
Focus on me, and only I’ll hear you. Go on, test it out.
Dani met their gaze, which was friendly and encouraging. I don’t think this is going to work.
“You did it,” Oliver said aloud. “It totally worked.”
Not what I meant, she thought to them.
Oliver didn’t have a chance to respond, because Silva said, “It’s nearly ten. Unless there are any questions, we need to move. Mr. Shalhope?”
“On it.” The boy jumped up and opened the door, then hopped out into the rain.
“Where’s he going?” Dani asked.
“He,” McKenna said, snatching up the mirror Wyatt had dropped on the bench, “is your driver.”
A car horn honked outside.
“Time to go,” Silva said. The magnetic force of her stare drew Dani up and out of her seat, but something in the older woman softened, maybe from how much Dani was shaking.
“I know it’s daunting, Miss Lionet. But I swear to you, I wouldn’t ask this of you if I didn’t think you were capable.
All of you,” she added, her gaze sweeping across her crew.
“I have confidence in each and every person on this mission. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have chosen you. Tonight will be a success. I know it.”
The others nodded, and Dani moved toward the door, her fingers curled into fists to disguise their trembling. Silva’s bravado didn’t comfort her. She still had that same creepy-crawly feeling that had come over her at the sight of OneiroLabs, like a trail of melting wax down the back of her neck.
She glanced back over her shoulder. “You look fabulous, babe,” McKenna said encouragingly. “You’re going to be great.”
But Dani barely heard her. Her eyes met Silva’s, and she saw in the professor’s gaze not the confidence of an assured victor, but the fear of a desperate woman who understood one pure and simple truth: Tonight, failure was a luxury they couldn’t afford.