Hacking Their Hearts (Forbidden Empires #11)

CHAPTER 1

Eliza

◆

Six minutes to courier. My pulse is at seventy-eight, which is the high end of acceptable.

The wet on the rooftop tar is a fine cold film under my knees, and my mother's folding knife lies open on my thigh where I can reach it without looking.

The wind off the harbor smells like cold rust and the burnt coil of something a sector tower vented six hours ago.

Out past the breakwater the harbor foghorn cycles every four seconds — low, patient, a long flat note that owns the wet air between buildings. The amber status LED on my wrist-cuff scanner pulses steady, a slow heartbeat against the underside of my forearm.

Status: green. Egress: mapped. Time to courier: six minutes.

I crouch lower behind the ventilation hood, and the cold pushes up through the tar into my shins with the patient insistence of something that has been waiting all winter for the chance.

The Vexis Annex's rooftop transit corridor runs east-to-west across the gap between two service shafts, a concrete tongue laid down between Sectors three and one ninety stories above the wet street. Nobody comes up here in person.

The corridor is for courier traffic only, sealed, automated, and read-restricted to a single bonded route. Which is exactly why I am here. I have always been good at being in places nobody walks.

The pre-Network folding knife on my thigh is my mother's.

I have not closed it since I came up the fire escape at two-oh-four.

The mother-of-pearl handle is dulled to gray in the wet, and the eight-and-a-half-centimeter blade catches the corridor's running lights once, twice, as I check the angles.

I do not need it for the lift; I carry it because I have not gone anywhere without it in twelve years and it has set into my hand like a bone in the wrong place that became the right one.

The signal-jammer is inside my left jacket pocket, the size of a deck of cards.

I press my thumb against it through the lining, twice, the way other people pray.

It is fully charged; I tested it twice tonight and once before I left the flat, because my mother taught me redundancy was the only kindness the world reliably offered, and she said it three days before she died.

I keep still and count the courier on a separate channel — the wrist-cuff's passive read, no broadcast, just the signature of a Vexis-Axiom badge climbing the rooftop ladder mast. Forty meters out. Thirty. Twenty.

He comes through the corridor on schedule at two forty-seven.

Tall. Long coat against the wet, polished black shoes I will hear at a distance of three meters.

Right hand at his side, left hand cuffed at the wrist with the bonded courier sleeve.

The wrist-sleeve is what I am here for. Inside it, magnetically docked to a contact pad against the inside of his forearm, is a fingernail-sized slug of titanium.

I move when his foot hits the third corridor seam.

The signal-jammer comes out of my left jacket in my left palm.

I thumb the trigger, and there is no sound at all, only a fine dead band opening across the width of his shoulders — a hole punched in the field where, an instant ago, a hundred small handshakes had been singing to each other too high for ears.

Copper floods the back of my mouth, the way it always does the half-second the jammer fires — a bright metallic bite I have never been able to explain and have stopped trying to. The collapsing interface throws off a thread of scorched ozone, sharp and electric, gone before the wind takes it.

His neural-interface drops. It is exactly what it always is — the small lateral give in his stride that tells me the body has lost its handshake with the cortical mesh.

He hits the wall on his right side, shoulder first, head loose, and slides into a half-sit against the bulkhead.

His eyes are open. His mouth is slack. He is fully conscious and his motor cortex is six seconds behind his intent.

Forty seconds. I will not need that long.

I crouch beside him without touching his skin.

I unfasten the wrist-sleeve with the tip of my mother's knife — three small twists at the bonded ring — and slide the drive out of the contact pad.

It comes free with a thin click I would not hear if I were not listening for it.

The titanium shell is fingernail-sized. Matte black.

A single amber status LED already pulsing against the heel of my palm.

I stop, kneeling. The LED is awake.

Something cold opens low in my gut and stays open.

The drive is drawing power. It is already in countdown.

Seven other thoughts crowd the doorway of my skull at once, and there is no time to let any of them through; I let my hands move ahead of them, the way they were trained to, and drop the decoy slug into the empty contact pad and let the bonded sleeve close around it.

The decoy is a fake I spent three weeks machining off a fingernail of pre-Network titanium I bought from an old salvage tech in Sector-eleven; it will read genuine through the badge's surface scan and it will fail authentication the first time anyone in Tarn's office plugs it into a key-cradle.

I have always known the decoy buys me hours, not days. I have always built for hours.

I am back at the ventilation hood with most of the window still in hand.

The signal-jammer goes into my left jacket.

The drive goes into my contact-pocket inside the right inner lining, between the silk and the canvas — the same pocket my mother stitched into her own coat when I was nine.

The folding knife goes back into my left back pocket, blade closed, mother-of-pearl handle warm now from my thigh.

I move east. I do not look back at the courier. He is not my responsibility. He gets up in eight minutes when the jam-clean threshold drops. He will not remember anything before the third seam. He will report a memory gap and a polite man in a clean office will tell him these things happen.

The fire escape network east of the Annex runs three blocks before it dies into a sealed roofline, and I do not take the dying route.

I take the one my mother walked me across when I was eleven, which is the unmarked maintenance gantry over to the next tower's service spine.

The gantry has been condemned for nineteen years.

It is still there. The rust has not won yet.

I cross it in eleven steps without slowing, and I do not look down at the four hundred meters of wet air below.

My boot finds the last rung of the far ladder, the wind shifts from harbor-salt to the colder inland draft as I come off the Annex's lee, and the drive rides its small hard weight in the contact-pocket with every drop I take down the service spine to street level.

---

By three o'clock I am on a roof six blocks east of the heist. The rain restarts on schedule. I crouch against a stack vent, my back to the wind, and let the adrenaline shake out of my hands.

The shake comes in two waves. The first wave is short and ugly, and I clench my fists through it until the tremor moves up out of the fingers and into the forearms, where I can ignore it.

The second wave is slower, the kind that comes when the body decides to remember that it spent four minutes preparing to die and would like to acknowledge the fact.

Cold gets into my joints. I sit with it until it goes.

When my hands are steady I take two fingers and touch them to the inside of my left wrist. Twice.

The surgical scar there is three inches long, white and clean, a clean horizontal line just under the tendon.

My mother put a thumbdrive port into me at nine and took it out at twelve when she realized she had built it wrong.

She apologized. She apologized until I made her stop. The scar does not hurt.

It has not hurt in the fourteen years since she closed it. Touching it is the only motion of mine that has not changed since I was a child.

She would tell me, if she were here, that I am very good at this. She would also tell me, in the same breath, that I am about to be very stupid.

The hand-poked silver-wire tattoo runs down the inside of my left forearm from the elbow crease to the heel of the hand.

I did it myself at sixteen with a needle and a bottle of ink I bought off a tattooist in Sector-nine who did not look at me twice.

It is meant to be a wire, the kind of thin signal-wire my mother used to braid into the lining of her coats.

Most days it looks like a thin gray line.

In the wet it darkens almost to silver again, and the rain finds the channel of it and runs along it like a current finding its old path.

I pull my sleeve down over it. I am not interested in being read on a rooftop.

I ping Hael. Two-line burst, encrypted, single bounce off the spoofed relay I keep at Sector-twelve. The text is plain. Lifted. Inbound for handoff. Confirm site.

No response.

I count to thirty.

I ping again.

No response.

The wind goes through the seam at my right shoulder, and I do not adjust my coat.

The absence on the line sits inside my chest like a swallowed coin, the kind of weight that does not pass and does not warm.

The plan was simple, the way Hael's plans are always simple: lift the slug, walk it east, put it in his hand at four o'clock behind the noodle stall in Sector-seven. He set the site himself last week.

The site does not matter now. Nobody is coming to the noodle stall at four.

Hael is not a man who lets a comm go past forty seconds.

He answers in twenty. He has answered in twenty every single time we have run a job in eighteen months — at three in the morning, at noon, in a stairwell with his ear half-torn from a glancing round, and one time in the bath. He answers.