The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind (The Frost Files)

by Jackson Ford

  “Copy, Annie. Can you still attach the coupler? Over.”

  Annie frowns at the mess of cables. “Yeah. But it’ll take a while. Over.”

  Joy.

  “Understood,” Paul says. “But we can only run interference for so long on our end. You’d better move. Over.”

  Annie scowls, crouching down to look at the cables. She takes one between thumb and forefinger, like it’s something nasty she has to dispose of. Then she stands up, marching back towards the server-room doors.

  “Um. Hi? Annie?” I jog after her, earbud bouncing against my shoulder. “Cables are back there.”

  “Change of plan.” She keys her earpiece. “Paul? Tell Reggie to switch over the cameras on the 30th floor. Over”

  “Say again? Over.”

  “We’re going up.”

  I don’t catch Paul’s response. Instead, I sprint to catch up with Annie, getting to her just she pushes through the doors. “Are you gonna tell me why we’ve suddenly abandoned the plan, or—”

  “We can’t hide the coupler if they got people poking around the cables.” She reaches the elevator, thumbing the up button. “We need to go to the source.”

  “I thought the whole point was not to go near this guy. Aren’t we supposed to be super-secret and stealthy and shit?”

  “We’re not going to his office, genius. We’re going to the fibre hub on his floor.”

  “The what now?”

  “The fibre hub. Every floor has one. It’s where the cables from each office go. We’ll be able to find the right one a lot faster from there.”

  The interior of the elevator is clean and new, with a touchscreen interface to select your floor. A taped sign next to it says that floors 50–80 are currently off limits while refurbishment and additional construction is completed, thank you for your patience, management. I remember seeing that when we rolled up: a big chunk of the building covered in scaffolding, with temporary elevators attached to the outside, and a giant crane in a vacant lot across the street.

  When the elevator opens on the 30th floor, there’s someone standing in front of it. There’s a horrible moment where I think it’s Steven Chase himself. But I’ve seen pictures of Chase, who looks like an actor in an AD for haemorrhoid cream—running on the beach, tanned and glowing, stoked that his rectum is finally itch-free. This guy is… not that. He has lawyer written all over him: two-tone shirt, two-tone hair, one-tone orange skin. Tie knot as big as my fist. Probably a few haemorrhoid issues of his own.

  He eyes us. “Going down?”

  “We’re stepping off here, sir,” Annie says, doing just that.

  He moves into the elevator, mouth twisted in a disapproving frown as his eyes pass over me. Probably not used to seeing someone my age working security in a building like this. I have to resist the urge to wink at him.

  I haven’t seen inside any of the offices yet, but whoever built this place obviously didn’t have any budget leftover for the hallways. There’s a foot-high strip of what looks like marble-textured plastic running along at chest height. There are buzzing fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and the floor is covered with that weird, flat, fuzzy carpet which always has little lint balls dotted over it.

  “Jesus, who picked out the paint?” The wall above the plastic marble is a shade of purple that’s probably called something like Executive Mojo.

  “Who cares?” Annie says. “Damn building shouldn’t even be here.”

  I sigh. This again.

  She taps the fake marble. “You know they displaced a bunch of historical buildings for this? They just moved in and forced a purchase.”

  I sigh. Annie’s always had a real hard-on for the city’s history. “Yeah, I know. You told me before.”

  “And you saw that notice in the elevator. They just built this place. They already having to fix it up again. And the spots they bought out—mom-and-pop places. Historical buildings. City didn’t give a fuck.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I’m just saying. It’s messed up, man.”

  “Can we get this done before the heat death of the universe? Please?”

  It doesn’t take us long to find the right office. Paul helps, using the blueprints he’s pulled up to guide us along, occasionally telling Annie that this isn’t a good idea and that she needs to hurry. I pop the lock, just like before—it’s even easier this time—and we step inside.

  There’s no Executive Mojo here. It’s a basic space, with a desk and terminal for a technician and a big, clearly marked access panel on the wall. By the desk, someone has left a toolbox full of computer paraphernalia, overflowing with wires and connectors. Maybe the same dickhead who left the half-eaten sandwich in the server room. I should leave a note telling him to clean up his shit.

  The access panel is off to one side, slightly raised from the surface of the wall. Annie pops it, revealing a nest of thin cables. She attaches the coupler, which looks like a bulldog clip from the future, then checks her phone, reading the data that comes off it. With a grunt, she moves the coupler to the second cable. We have to get the correct one, and the only way to do that is to identify Chase from his traffic.

  There are floor-to-ceiling windows on my left, and the view over the glittering city takes my breath away. We’re only on the 30th floor, not even close to the top of the building, but I can still see a hell of long way. A police helicopter hovers in the distance, too far for us to hear, its blinking tail lights just visible. The view looks north, out towards Burbank and Glendale, and on the horizon, there’s the telltale orange glow of wildfires.

  The sight pulls up some bad memories. Of all the cities Tanner had to put me, it had to be the one where things burn.

  It’s bad this year. Usually, it’s some kid with fireworks or a tourist dropping a cigarette that starts it up, but this time the grass was so dry that it caught on its own. Every TV in the last couple of days has had big breaking news alerts flashing on them. The ones tuned to Fox News—you get a few, even in California—have given it a nickname. HELLSTORM. Because of course they have.

  This year’s fire has been creeping towards Burbank and Glendale, chewing through Wildwood Canyon and the Verdugo Hills. The flames have made LA even smoggier than usual. A fire chief on one of the TVs—a guy who managed to look both calm and mightily pissed off at the same time—said that they didn’t think the fires would reach the city.

  “Teagan.”

  “Huh?”

  “You got your voodoo, right?” She nods to the coupler. “Float it up into the wall.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Good idea.”

  The panel is wide enough for me to lean in, craning my head back. The space is dusty, a small shower of fine grit nearly making me sneeze. Annie shines a torch, but I don’t need it. She’s got the correct cable pinched between thumb and forefinger. It’s the work of a few seconds for me to find it with my voodoo and pull it slightly outwards from its buddies, float the coupler across and clamp it on. Annie flicks the torch off, and the coupler is swallowed by the shadows.

  What can I say? I’m handy.

  “Aight,” Annie says, snapping the panel shut. “Paul? We’re good. Over.”

  “Copy that. We’re getting traffic already. Skedaddle on out of there. Over.”

  Skedaddle? I mouth the word at Annie, who ignores me. She replaces the panel, slotting it back into place, then turns to go.

  As we step out of the tech’s office, a voice reaches us from the other end of the hallway: “Hey.”

  Two security guards. No, three. Real ones. Walking in close formation, heading right for us. The one in the centre is a big white guy with a huge chest-length beard, peak pulled down over his eyes. He’s scary, but it’s the other two I’m worried about. They’re young, with wide eyes and hands already on their holsters, fingers twitching.

  Ah, shit.

  THREE

  Teagan

  Getting caught would be very, very bad.

  Tanner would disavow all knowledge of our existence
, like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible. Difference being, Tom is a movie star with a squillion dollars and a hot wife (I assume—I’m not big on celebrity gossip). He gets to go home afterwards. If our mission ends, Annie and the others go to jail, and Tanner stops protecting me from the people in the U.S. government who want to cut me open and take a look inside.

  That was our deal. I work for her; she keeps me away from the people with scalpels and surgical masks.

  But we shouldn’t have been caught. It doesn’t make sense. Building security isn’t even supposed to know we’re here. Reggie fixed the cameras in this part of the building, made it so they’d show empty corridors on a loop. How did this jack-off know we—

  Ah. The lawyer. Probably something innocent too, an idle comment to the security chief as he passed him in the lobby. Didn’t know you hired out of kindergarten, Bob. Bob, or whatever the hell is name his, going Pardon me? And the lawyer says One of your crew, up on the 30th… looks like she’s still in diapers.

  We don’t carry guns. We’re not that kind of outfit. Guns, Tanner once explained, complicate a situation. They remove options, instead of adding more of them. It’s one of those things that sounds wise and profound until you think about it for more than two seconds and realise it makes absolutely zero sense whatsoever.

  Bob’s expression is thunderous. “You aren’t on my detail. Who are you people?”

  Annie doesn’t hesitate. “Head office sent us over,” she says. “They got some VIP coming in tomorrow, wanted us to make sure the place was clean.” She flashes a knowing smile, as if she can’t believe the higher-ups could be this dense. In my ear Paul says, “Annie, Teagan, what’s happening? Over.”

  The chief’s expression doesn’t change. “Bullshit. Why wasn’t I told?”

  Annie shrugs, the same can-you-believe-this grin on her face. “Beats me. I just go where they say.”

  There’s a moment where I think it’s going to work. Then it’s like a shutter comes down on the chief’s face. “Stay right where you are,” he says, gesturing to the two rookies alongside him. They both take a step forward, drawing their guns.

  Or trying to, anyway. It’s awfully hard to pull a gun when a psychokinetic force is holding it in the holster. Their matching expressions are ridiculous: identical confusion, followed by annoyance, followed by anger as they both try and yank their weapons out.

  I’m not supposed to use my ability like this. Not in front of people who aren’t on the team. It’s part of the deal: never reveal what I can do, to anyone, ever. Then again, it’s not like I’m being obvious about it. In my experience, the conclusion people jump to when something like this happens is usually not OMG! That woman over there has astonishing psychokinetic powers!

  “What are you doing?” the chief says to the other two. He goes for his own gun, which also manages to miraculously catch on its holster.

  Annie glances at me. “Are you—”

  “Yup. Run.”

  We take off in the opposite direction, sprinting down the corridor, the chief yelling at us to stop. As we turn the corner, I lose hold of the three guns, the men falling out of my range. I’ve only got about ten feet in every direction to play with, and behind us there’s the rasp of leather on metal as all three of them finally manage to pull their pistols free.

  Annie accelerates, charging ahead of me, long legs exploding out in front of her willowy body. She’s built for speed. I, on the other hand, am built for lounging on the couch watching Netflix. I’m not very good in foot pursuits.

  Annie ignores the elevator doors, shooting right past them. Smart. No point trapping us in a metal box that the guards in the main security room can control—assuming we’d even have time to navigate the touchscreen next to the doors and wait for the elevator to arrive. It’s not like Bob will let us call a time-out.

  Instead, Annie heads for another door, a little further down the corridor. One with a push-bar across it and big stencilled letters on its surface: fire door—keep closed. She slams through the door, and I tumble in after her. “Close it!” she yells.

  I reach back with my PK, slamming the door shut. Then I reach deep into the push-bar mechanism, grabbing the latch, twisting it, jamming it in place. Let’s see them figure that out.

  A split-second later, one of them reaches the door, his body slamming into the metal. The push-bar doesn’t move, the fucked-up latch refusing to give. Finally, a break. I sag back against the wall, panting, stitch burning a hole in my side.

  Annie speaks rapidly into her earpiece. “Paul, we need an exit. And tell Carlos he might need to do some fast driving.”

  “Copy.” This time Paul doesn’t bother giving her shit about not saying over. “What’s your location?”

  “On the fire stairs.”

  The stairs are bare, dusty concrete, well lit by glowing fluorescents. Our footsteps thud loudly in the enclosed space as we move down, going so fast that our feet barely touch each step. I’m concentrating so hard on not falling over that I don’t see that Annie has stopped until I almost crash into her.

  “What the shit?” I say, only just keeping my balance.

  “Listen.”

  Footsteps. A lot of them. Coming from below us, and coming fast. Annie turns and starts heading back the way we came, taking the stairs two at a time.

  I take a second to ask God, really and truly, why he hates me so much. Then I start climbing.

  The chief and his compadres are still banging at the door I jammed shut. Annie moves past with a glance, leaping up the stairs to the floor above.

  “Paul,” she says, pulling at the fire door. The footsteps from below are louder now, maybe twenty seconds away. “Thirty-first floor. Pull up the schematics. And get Reggie on the cameras.”

  It’s easy to see what she’s thinking. We can’t go down using the stairs, and it’s a sure bet they’ll be watching the elevators, ready to lock us in the second they see one moving. That leaves hiding—holing up somewhere until the heat dies down.

  It’s a great idea, except for the tiny detail that it sucks. They’ll just tear the place apart looking for us—assuming we even find a decent, non-obvious place to hide. It creates more problems than it solves.

  There’s another solution. A better one. Annie might be too dopey to realise it, but luckily for her someone else brought her A-game tonight.

  I picture the outside of the building, the construction, the floors cordoned off. Yeah. Got it. We can do this. I never thought I’d go for an idea that involved more stairs, but you can’t have everything.

  “Paul,” I croak. “Hold off on that.”

  “Say again? Over.”

  “What are you doing?” Annie hisses, half in and half out of the fire door.

  In answer, I sprint past her, lurching onto the next flight of stairs. “Just follow me.”

  “Teagan, what the fuck?”

  “Follow me!”

  She makes a grab for me, misses. Just as well. I really don’t have time to explain this to her, because the running footsteps from below are closing fast.

  There’s a moment when I think that’s she going to ditch me, running off by herself to hide. Then she hits the stairs, swearing, shouting that she’s going to kill me. Good thing I have a head start, or I’d be legitimately terrified.

  I ignore her, concentrating on making it through my own personal hell. My legs feel like they’re going to separate at the knees, like an overheated machine spinning itself apart.

  Somehow, we manage not to lose ground to the security guards coming up from below. And finally, finally, we reach the 50th floor, where the construction starts. The fire door has a notice taped to it, a lot of fine print about not entering the site without a hard hat and all visitors reporting to the foreman. I yank open the door, and a gust of wind from the change in pressure nearly shoves me back down the stairs. I force myself through, wait for Annie to come charging past, then slam it shut. My mind scrunches the lock closed.

  The floor is wide op
en to the outside world, a skeleton version of the ones below. It’s an incomplete maze of bare plywood walls and bundles of dusty electrical cables, metal sheets stacked in neat piles. The only light is a bare bulb, a few feet away from us. A cement mixer sits off to one side, lurking in the half-darkness.

  Annie puts her hands on her knees. “You. Stupid. Why.”

  “Not stupid.” I can barely get the words out.

  “We should have. Hidden. Waited for—”

  “Yeah. No.” I stagger away from the fire door, picturing the outside of the building in my head again. South-west side—that’s where we need to go. And I’m pretty sure west is on my left, so that means…

  Annie jogs after me. It really is disgusting just how quickly she gets her wind back. “Teagan, if you don’t start talking in the next five seconds, I’m gonna—”

  “Ha!” I spot what I’m looking for. “There.”

  The temporary elevator.

  I spotted it, attached to the outside of the scaffolding, when we climbed out of the van. The builders use it to move between floors, so the tenants don’t have to share their nice, clean elevators with guys in cement-stained boots.

  “You’re joking,” Annie says. A gust of wind almost drowns out her words, a wind thick with smoke.

  “Nope. We need to get down, right? And what’s the one elevator they won’t be monitoring from the security room? Or able to stop once it starts moving?”

  She stares at me, slowly shaking her head.

  “I think the words you’re looking for are, Thank you. Teagan, you’re a genius, I’m sorry I was ever mean to you.” I have a little bit of my own breath back now, and use it to skip over to the cargo lift. It reminds me of ones window cleaners use, with a metal gate you have to swing open to climb inside and a big, clunky control box. “Come on.”

  “Teagan.” She still hasn’t approached the elevator. From somewhere behind her, the guards are hammering at the fire door.

  “What are you waiting for?” I hold the gate open for her. “Come on. Time to skedaddle.”

  “It doesn’t go down.”

  “What?”