23
A few nights later, Tania slid through the hall like a ghost. Her camouflage activated to conceal her from quick glances.
She knew instinctively that she had to freeze when someone was about to look her way. Even though the camouflage was good, it wasn’t perfect. An observant pair of peepers might pick up motion and start looking a lot closer.
Her core told her to slip quickly when no one was watching, and to pause when she had to.
Above all else, she trusted her core.
She could feel Click in the ducts above and to her right.
The little spider golem was struggling to keep up.
So it should. It was a little toy compared to her. She was the cat’s meow. The bees knees. The real thing. The topper of the top.
No ticky-tocky little spider golem was about to get the goods on her.
No, sir.
The Reporting Hall was a quiet place this late at night. But there were still a few laggards floating around. And because they were laggards, they were quiet. One time, she’d been racing down an aisle of records and nearly slammed straight into some dunce who stepped in front of her from nowhere.
It was all Milo’s fault.
Her engineer hadn’t installed a scanning unit. What kind of engineer builds an 11-B and doesn’t fit it with a scanning unit?
Maybe he was too interested in her coochie.
That wouldn’t be a bad thing, but it seemed like he expected her to also be the ginchiest little assassin he could build.
A girl couldn’t juggle that kind of duality for long.
She needed proper guidance or else she’d go all curly in the head. And that wouldn’t be right.
Tania wasn’t the kind of dame who wanted to be curly.
She decided to put her heel down when she got back.
Either he pop her with some proper mods like a scanning unit or else he’d better start building another construct because she’d get curls in the brain faster than he could lift her skirt and pop her cherry.
“Whew,” she breathed, fanning her face.
Where had that thought come from?
Milo didn’t seem the type to pop a cherry. In fact, he looked like the only thing he’d pop was a vein.
He was such a stooge.
She leapt onto the top of the shelving, peering out across the wide warehouse where literally millions of records were kept. All filed meticulously.
Sorta.
Her core told her this place wasn’t a Records Hall before.
She could see the rails still decorating the roof. Once, automated arms worked here to keep other things on the shelves. Cores, most likely.
Milo had told her mages juiced cores to increase their potency with mana.
The thought of that made her shudder. Imagining having her core in the mitts of some filthy old mage was almost too much to bear.
It was bad enough knowing Milo had actually touched her core.
Had he gone so far as to fondle it before he inserted it?
Squatting on top of the shelving, she fanned her face again.
Had he messed up her skin? It was getting real hot lately.
Darting forward, she somersaulted from shelf to shelf before dropping back down into an aisle and checking where she was. Lucky those mages liked to put stickers on everything.
She was in Aisle 15. And this was Shelf R.
She took a few steps to her left, then froze.
Held her breath.
As a squat little mage with fuzzy red hair plodded out of the dark. He held a small wand in his hand and was busy waving it randomly. At least, to an outsider it looked random.
But she knew what he was doing.
He was scanning.
These security types all looked the same no matter what era they were in.
Flattening herself against the shelves, she watched as he paused at the top of the aisle. The tip of his wand glowed blue. The light shivered over her. If he’d been paying more attention, he might’ve seen it bent strangely as it swept over her.
But he was bored.
Nobody infiltrated the Records Hall.
To the mages, there wasn’t much point. What would they change?
He moved on, and she skipped silently up to where he’d been standing. She glanced to her left to see him plodding away into the dark. She went right.
All slinky like a cat.
Aisle 27 was what she wanted.
Aisle 27, Shelf C.
Where all the current students’ information was kept.
When she found it, she looked through the boxes, sniffing her way quietly through file after file.
Searching.
When she found Milo’s file, she pulled it out and squinted at it.
Opening it up, she checked it out.
“Wow,” she breathed.
Whoever had filled out his file really didn’t think much of him at all.
Pathetic.
Useless.
Recommend broom training.
She searched until she found a name.
“Harry Jellickson,” she read. “I’ll remember you, buster. Just you wait. You’ll get yours.”
She slid the folder back then reached into her coat and pulled out another. With a shy giggle, she popped her folder under his.
So they could be together.
Then gave the two files a pat and closed the box. Stuffing it back in place, she leapt to the top of the shelving again and gave a search. A few glowing lights told her where the security mages were.
They were all over the place.
“What a buncha bumpkins,” she sighed.
Then pounced silently across the aisle to the next shelf.
And carried on towards the exit, hopping lightly. She could feel Click scrambling through the ducts. He’d lost sight of her, but was doing his best.
Smiling, Tania slid out of the Records Hall and moved quickly to the Intakes Office. This was a little harder. The door was locked.
It took her a whole three snaps of her fingers to open the lock.
“Wow,” she grunted. “So hard.”
Inside, the office was fairly nice. Whoever worked here was organized. Like, really organized.
Even the paperclips were arranged neatly in their tin.
Creeping around, she poked through the drawers until she found what she was looking for. Blank ID’s. Forms for uniform applications. And room transfers.
She sat in the chair and got to work.
“Stamp this, stamp that,” she muttered, thumping the stamp where it needed to be stamped.
Forging signatures was easy peasy.
Just a few slick slashes of the pen.
“Nice job, girl,” she complimented herself, blowing on the wet ink. “Ain’t no better paperhanger than you.”
When done, she scooped up what she needed and shuffled the rest into the trays on the desk where they’d get processed like normal.
That was something else that didn’t change.
Bureaucracy was always a clunky old thing and no one was gonna look closely at anything.
She wondered why the mages didn’t use more magic on these things. Maybe it’s because they weren’t as good as dwarven mages.
Now they knew a thing or two about magic, she thought.
A dwarf mage could really do something with this place. Especially with all the runes still all over the place.
On her way out, she had to stick close to one of the security mages. The doors to the office level were actually magic. She couldn’t pass through them without being pretty much stuck down a mage’s neck.
Which was easy to do when you were practically invisible.
She just crept along behind one who looked like he needed to go to the bathroom and followed him out.
He looked back once or twice, glancing over his shoulder. But though a primal part of him suspected he was being followed, his eyes deceived him.
“Place is fucking creepy,” he muttered.
Tania couldn’t agree more.
She raced away from him as soon as she could, her bare feet padding silently down the stairs as she took them five or ten at a time. Bounding happily and free as a bird.
That’s how she liked to be.
Free!
Then into the dorms.
Most of the students were asleep. A few weren’t. A couple were cuddled up together in their room as she passed, making the kind of noises that sent a shiver down her spine.
“Whole place is full of pervs,” she muttered.
The Hall Monitor’s office was locked. But it opened with a few strokes of a hairclip. Inside was a bit of a mess.
She found a stack of room transfers and shoved a couple of her own among them.
Then she froze.
Standing in the doorway was a young woman with blue hair. And she was staring right where Tania was standing.
“Hmm,” Ket said, eyes pinned to Tania. “I thought I locked this.”
Tania didn’t move.
Then Ket’s gaze swept across her desk.
She pursed her lips.
“Well, I’m sure it’ll lock itself by morning,” she said with a long deliberate yawn. “But if anything’s missing, there’ll be trouble.”
With that, the diminutive woman turned and walked away.
Leaving the door open.
Tania blinked after her.
“Blast,” she mouthed. “Did I get seen?”
But that was impossible.
Her pride as an 11-B refused to believe it.
With one last glance at the papers she’d stuck into their pile, she twisted her face into a scowl and skipped out of the room.
Locking it on her way out.
After all, she might be an assassin and a thief, but she respected personal security.