CHAPTER 25 #2
"Yes."
He steps back, and the titanium against my palm has gone the temperature of my hand.
---
Marcus is in his office with the corded landline pressed to his ear and a stack of three sheets I have never seen in front of him.
He is talking to Senna in low, dry sentences.
The silver lighter is flat on the desk under his left palm.
The amber overhead is warm against the slate button-down and the long dark coat draped across the chair behind him.
He puts down the phone when I come in.
"Darling."
"Cade."
"Senna and Wren are in the antechamber by 05:30. They will hold the corridor down here behind me. If anything comes through the blast door it goes through three of us first."
"Three?"
"I am — competent."
"You are competent."
"I am also going to be on your earpiece every breath, speaking only when I have to, and when I do speak you will do what I say even if it sounds wrong — especially if it sounds wrong. Understood, darling?"
"Understood."
He takes the lighter off the desk and hands it to me himself, and I slide it into my right back pocket where my own knife usually lives.
The pearl-handle folding knife is in my left back pocket, picked up from the workbench fifteen minutes ago and slid home the way you set a bone back into a joint that has been out for too long.
"You are taking it."
"Yes."
"I won't be able to flick it."
"That is the point. You can be fully present without it. I'll bring it back."
The right side of his mouth does the bare-faced thing it does when he has decided to stop hiding, and the small white pill case in his breast pocket clicks once as he stands.
He puts his hands on either side of my face, careful of the bruise along the right cheekbone where I caught a railing on the rooftop recon two days ago, and he kisses my forehead. Then my mouth. Slow.
"You will come back," he says against my mouth.
"Yes."
"Eliza."
"Yes, Marcus."
He breathes out and steps back, and for a moment he lets the whole of his face show what the slate composure usually hides — the full weight of him aimed at one thing, and he means to be caught doing it.
Then he laughs at himself, short and disbelieving.
"Bloody hell. Go. Before I do something embarrassing. "
"Cade."
"Quinn."
I do not say I love you — I have not said that to any of the three, and there has been no time and there has been all the time, and I will pick the words up if there is a later. I turn at the door.
He moves before I clear the frame. He lifts the long slate coat off the back of the chair and settles it over my shoulders, over the kit and the chest plate, the canvas heavy and smelling of amber and cardamom and the dry-paper thing under it.
"The tunnel runs cold," he says, low, fastening the top button at my throat with two fingers, careful of the medallion.
"Bring it back with the rest of you. " It is the slate, not the charcoal — his coat, not Adrian's — and the weight of it sits on the armor like a hand that means to follow me down.
"I'll bring it back."
He steps away. He is standing at the desk with both hands flat on the wood, bracing himself against the room as if the room might lift.
I take the spiral stair down at a jog.
---
The emergency egress hatch in the sub-level is a steel circle the diameter of a cot, and the cold air rising up smells of acid drip and old copper and the river that runs three levels below us.
Luca is already there with the rig case strapped to his back and his own Mk-V at the hip — a weapon I have never seen him carry deployed.
Adrian is at the ladder, looking down. Marcus has followed me; he stops at the bottom rung of the spiral stair, his knuckles whitening on the railing once and then loosening.
We do not say goodbye. The three of us at the hatch turn to him. He puts his right hand on Adrian's shoulder. He puts his left palm flat against Luca's sternum. Then he takes my face in his hands one more time and presses his mouth to mine, fast, hard.
"Read me when I get back," I say against his mouth.
"Yes, love."
That is the second time he has called me that.
The first was last night, against my temple, in the candle-low workshop.
This time it is in a sub-level corridor with the cold air rising up from below, and the word goes through me cleaner than the first did, and the back of my throat goes warm against the medallion.
I climb down first. Forty rungs to the tunnel floor.
The single working light at the forty-meter mark casts an orange pool below.
The dripwater is acid-rank and steady. I keep my brain in my body by counting rungs in eights, and by the time I reach the floor I have stopped counting and started breathing in time with the count instead.
Adrian's prosthetic clangs the rungs above me.
Luca behind him, careful, the rig case shifting against his back.
We do not speak in the tunnel. The light every forty meters means the next pool of orange is always too far, so I count my breaths to forty and start over.
My palm warms around the titanium ring inside my closed fist; the medallion at my throat warms with my heartbeat; the small folded weight of the chip rides over my ribs; Marcus's slate coat hangs heavy across the armor at my shoulders.
I am wearing six things that are not mine and one thing that is, and the one thing that is mine is the knife.
Adrian, low, ahead of me: "Twenty meters to the manhole shaft.
We come up into the alley behind the noodle vendor.
Senna has cleared it. We move west on foot, three blocks to the Vexis Annex service entrance.
Spoofed badges, Vexis technical staff, descent into the elevator bank.
Quinn. Renner. Stay behind me at the threshold; in front of me through the lobby; behind me into the elevator. "
"Copy," Luca says.
"Copy," I say.
Marcus's voice clicks into my earpiece, a small electric warmth: "Holding green. Senna is on her own line. Wren is at the medic bay loaded. The antechamber is sealed. The bunker holds, darling. Walk."
I walk.
---
Sector-5, the alley behind the noodle vendor, smells of broth that has not been cooked in eleven years and ice in a gutter.
The eastern sky is bleached pale. I do not let my gaze travel the half-meter to the back door of the storefront where Tomas Cade died; my left iris finds the gutter ice instead and stays there as we move.
Three blocks west. Glass towers begin to bracket the sky overhead.
Sector-3 is a different city — brushed steel and cold lights, the air HVAC-scrubbed of all character.
The Vexis Annex service entrance is at the rear of the lobby, off a delivery dock.
Luca's spoofed badge clears the scanner with a chirp.
The lobby is what I expected and worse, with a white marble floor that takes our boots' damp prints and turns them visible behind us like a register.
The Axiom logo on the back wall in brushed steel, four meters tall.
The receptionist does not look up; she is feeding data into her wrist-cuff.
We walk past her as Vexis technical staff and she registers us as the third triage of techs the building has logged this morning.
The elevator bank is six doors. Adrian picks the second from the right. He keys the panel with his prosthetic forefinger — the embedded transponder Luca built into the third joint last night flashes a half-second of green and dies — and the car closes us in.
Marcus, in my ear: "Forty-six seconds to Sector-1. Renner, set the rig for handshake. Quinn, breathe."
I breathe.
Luca is on one knee in the elevator car.
He opens the rig case on his thigh, fingers blurring across the laptop surface.
The portable antenna spools to the ceiling vent.
The three external drives wake in sequence — three blue LEDs.
He is mapping the Mk-VII firmware authentication packet to the building's Sector-1 wireless as we move because there is nowhere to stop and do it.
"Seventeen seconds to packet," he says, mostly to himself. "Seventeen and the override goes out. Sixty and the Mk-VIIs in this building are bricks."
"Copy," Adrian says.
The car climbs in a silence so smooth I can hear the small mechanical tick of Adrian's prosthetic settling against itself once a second, and the medallion at my throat is warm enough now that I have stopped registering where my skin ends and where the silver begins.
My pulse is at one-twelve and steady; I clock the number the way I clock everything, a reading taken and set aside.
What it stands for, I let go quiet, because the held silence in this car is the held silence of three people I have chosen, and that loosens something in me that no number measures.
The doors open onto Sector-1, corridor C.
---
Corridor C is white and cold; the light is sourceless, the light of a building that does not believe in shadows.
The walls are smooth panels, the floor polished to a mirror that throws our boot prints back at us if we turn.
Three doors on the left. Tarn's office is the last one. Ivor Kade is at the door.
He has two Black Cell seconds with him — same build, uniform, flat eyes; they are descriptors and that is all they will ever be.
There is a third I do not see and know is there anyway: the alcove past the last door stands open, and the mirror floor carries a wedge of matte black out of it that has no body attached on this side of the corner.
Two at the door, then, and the suggestion of a third somewhere past the alcove.
Adrian's chin moves a quarter inch toward it before it moves toward Kade, which is how I know his count is already running and mine is one short.
Kade himself is a stone in a tailored suit, his right wrist banded with the pre-Network garroting wire, his cybernetic right eye glowing pale orange in the sourceless white.
He sees us.