Chapter 24
Crack Team
MARC
Ella emerges from the pool house, clad in black from the light turtleneck top to the curve-skimming leggings.
I look away. These last weeks have felt like climbing a sheer rock face.
When I started, I was confident in my ability to scale the heights, but now each handhold is more narrow and unlikely than the last. Bits of gravel scrape my fingertips and skitter to the ground.
I can’t see the next grip, and I can’t see my way down.
So I hold myself here, every nerve and muscle screaming, waiting for death or rescue.
No matter how much Ella likes my kisses—and she does—she is always in control.
I’ve been wrestling with my attraction for her almost from the first moment I returned from Seong, but at the end of every night, cheeks flushed and lips swollen, she is very much the master of herself.
She’s still looking for a way to escape, and when I have to let her go for the last time, I’ll do it. I promised.
I shoulder a black backpack and take her hand, threading my fingers through hers. “Caroline will pick up the dress and tiara.”
“Are we really doing this?” she asks.
I nod. “Nils agreed to let us do a security test. He’s giving us thirty minutes to try and cross the wall,” I say, pulling her behind a sculpted bush. “Think of it like war games. If the palace guardsmen tag us within ten meters of the perimeter, we lose.”
Ella cranes her neck. “What’s in your backpack?”
“Rope, folding stool, voltage tester, laptop.”
She reaches up and kisses me. “Do you want to renounce your title?” she asks. “We could run away and become a crack team of hackers, righting the wrongs of a corrupt society. We could spend our winters in a non-extradition country, sipping cocktails on a beach, and wreaking havoc with the locals.”
The dream of me and Ella in a lonely shack in Lijuela takes up residence in my brain like a mountain shrine, overgrown with moss and vines, echoing with desperate prayers. I wheel away and run a shaking hand over my face. “First, let’s get over the wall. How do you want to do it?”
She gauges the distance between us and the fence, and settles on the grass as she logs into the laptop. “I assume you brought this because you already sent a phishing email?”
I crouch down. “I wanted to be prepared,” I say. She grabs me by the collar and jerks me forward for another kiss.
“Put some knots along the rope at intervals,” she directs. Her fingers begin to fly, and I busy myself with the assigned task.
“We’re going to do it along this stretch,” she says, pointing at a schematic of the perimeter, deciding so quickly she might have spent the last decade casing the palace for this moment. “The bushes will cover our approach.”
Ella and I zigzag across the palace grounds, sticking to the shadows, pausing to evade security. “Are you ready?” I ask, folding her against the trunk of a tree, my breathing ragged.
“I’m worried about the glowing screen,” she whispers.
We’ll have to use the laptop to override the electrified wire, and we don’t have time for more elegant solutions.
Ella looks around my bulk. “Let’s get to some dense vegetation,” she says.
Her body tenses, ready to run across open ground, and then checks. “My family won’t be unprotected if we—”
Ella never forgets her family. She can’t.
“They’re safe,” I reassure her. Nils and I have been thorough.
We silently sprint across open ground and break through the hedge line. I pull her under a large ornamental bush, where she opens the computer and turns the brightness all the way down.
“I don’t like our odds,” she hisses.
I grin. “They promised not to taze us.”
We have fifteen minutes left. I unpack the rope, coiling it on one side, and snap the stool open.
“That’s three cameras down,” she says, tapping the keyboard.
“Now they know we’re coming.” A rush of activity sounds beyond the hedge, the pounding of shoes along the perimeter fence.
“I cut the cameras on the south side and another one by the workshops to divert their attention. If we’re fast enough here, it won’t matter that the cameras can see us. ”
A guard slithers between the narrow gap between the hedges and the wall, and we hold ourselves absolutely silent until we hear the heavy beat of retreating footsteps.
“What about the electrical wire?”
She gives an outraged squeak. “Nils is trying to change his password. I can keep him out as long as my hands are on the keyboard.” She grins. “He can’t reset it because I keep slipping an exclamation point in when he tries to duplicate it. If you go right this second, you can get over.”
I perch on the stool, touch the voltage tester to the line, and it beeps loudly. Nils promised to dial the voltage back…
“Okay, not this second. I’ll get it,” she swears, her fingers performing magic. “Now.”
I slip the looped rope over a fencepost when a noise sounds in the distance. Someone has spotted us.
“You go first,” she whispers. She grabs the front of my shirt and hauls herself up, convinced my strength is enough to hold us both.
I give the rope a tug, and test the wire. The voltage device is silent. “Brace your feet at the top, step over the wire, and rappel down,” I say. Two and a half meters is not so high.
“I’m still keeping Nils out,” she insists. The guards will be here any moment and I shut the laptop almost on her fingers.
“You’re going now.” I scoop her onto my shoulder and she grabs the rope.
“Come quick,” she commands. “Nils—”
I shrug her onto the wall and she steps over the wire, gives a delighted, roguish salute, and rappels down the opposite side.
Soon, the rope lands on my head. I hear Thor barreling across the meadow and scramble to the top of the wall.
I step over and lean back, but my greater bulk makes the rope unstable.
I swing suddenly and knock against the wall, my knuckle grazing the wire.
A current flies up my arm as a hot, sharp sting.
I land hard, and air gusts out of my lungs.
Ella sinks to her knees, running her hands up and down my limbs.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, my voice tight. Sondish, English, and Seongan curses ricochet through my brain when the head of palace security pulls up in a golf cart.
“Nils, you vailys, you were supposed to turn the voltage down,” I grit.
He crouches, pokes my chest with a stick, and waves away a clutch of interested officers.
“It was the tiniest little zap,” he says, moving the stick up under my chin. “Did we scrape your pretty face?”
“Why did you let me talk you into that?” I say, struggling to my elbows. Blood oozes from a scratch on my hand, and I have no one to blame but myself. “Ella could have been hurt.”
Nils laughs. He actually laughs. I’ll have him sacked—
“I never worry about Her Royal Highness when she’s in your hands,” Nils observes. “You would die rather than see her hurt. If you need patching up, I guess we could call the surgery.” In horror, I watch as he lifts his shoulder and pinches the short-wave radio.
“You wouldn’t dare,” I grunt.
He laughs. “The rope is a little low-tech. I expected better.”
“You were the soft target,” I grind out. “You and your hunger for scalped Dragons tickets. You threw the gates of the Summer Palace open yourself.”
Nils scowls. “You made it over the wall and I’m not registered for the FC Motovia game? Flamen hell. Flamen. Hell.”
“I promise you can finish this discussion tomorrow,” Ella chides, blowing gently on my hand.
Nils wedges himself into the golf cart. “We’re turning that all the way up now,” he says, pointing at the electrified wire, “so don’t try anything stupid. I’d better see you walking past the south gate in a timely fashion.” The cart rolls away again.
The night is soft, and a gentle breeze follows us up the hill and through the golden gates. At this hour there are no news vans, protestors, or tourists, and I nod at security. “Was that everything you ever wished for?” I ask, lights from the palace illuminating the gravel drive.
Our shadows trail behind us, following where we lead.
“Better.” She smiles and lifts her fist. I tap her knuckles, and our hands make the form of tiny explosions, falling away from one another. “When you’re ready for your life of crime, let me know.”
Ella follows me back to my car and digs out my emergency kit, looking for a band aid. She leans me against the bumper like I’m really injured.
“I can—”
She clicks her tongue, and I think of Atlas and his lichen-covered stone, groaning in my walled garden under the blazing sun and in the bitter cold.
No one ever lifts his burden. No one ever tends to his wounds.
Ella holds my hand and dabs on a salve, blowing gently.
She applies the too-large bandage and gives it a kiss.
I tilt her face up and follow her kiss with a warmer one.
We part when Vrouw Tiele comes tripping through the lot, jangling her keys in the midst of a suspiciously timed coughing fit.
I spend the next week on a business trip to London and have to content myself with late-night texts and mid-day check-ins. I speed home on Friday because Alix messaged me not to bother. She was only having her bridesmaids in and out for dress fittings.
It’s been six days since I saw Ella, and I take the stairs two at a time, tapping on Alix’s door. “Is it safe to come in?” I ask.
Before I enter, I force my expression into lines that read, “This is boring. I’m a little bored. I’d rather be doing double entry bookkeeping.” My plan is to cross the room, lean on the back of a sofa—pick up a book or something. Every word out of my mouth is going to sound like a chore.
But when I see Ella standing on a dressmaker’s platform, my plan is blasted to hell. “What in the name of Erasmus are you wearing?”
Alix giggles. “You sound exactly like the housematron at Saint Sissela’s.”