They’d never spoken to each other. Even so, he didn’t trust Niall. There was something off about the guy. While his detox may have been to blame—the mood swings, the dark brooding looks, the constant sweats, the rages—Dade thought it was more. There was an intensity about the guy that made Dade question his motives. And he always looked at Arden with speculation. Dade didn’t want Arden to be a cornerstone in any of her brother’s plans.
Arden, however, seemed to take Niall’s presence in stride. Though she seemed more and more exhausted after every encounter with her brother.
Mina leaned forward, her knuckles pressed to the surface of the table. She looked at each of them and then said to Venz, “Replay it.”
Venz was quick to do as she asked.
The feed started over. This time Dade focused less on the rantings of a madman and instead considered what Uri had requested.
Uri’s threat was overreaching. Lasair’s numbers were decimated. They were still regrouping. How did Uri think he stood a chance against Mina with her connections and artillery? Uri got his weapons from her. This guy was all bluster. If he meant business, he would have attacked and not bothered to send an empty threat first.
Uri hurled accusations, screaming, “That bitch broke into my warehouse and stole my shit.”
“It wasn’t his to begin with,” Arden said under her breath.
No one but Dade heard her. He kicked her under the table. She turned to him and rolled her eyes. She could at least pretend that what Uri accused them of wasn’t true. The vid contained no proof.
Regardless, Dade was thankful for Arden’s help the night before. Together they could be an unstoppable force.
Uri continued. “I want her. I want my stuff. And I want the person she was with.”
His focus strayed from the replay to watch Niall. He looked even more intense. His jaw clenched and his shoulder rolled. He didn’t appear to even blink.
“Are we done listening to this yet?” Arden asked with a yawn. “He’s a lunatic.”
Mina waved at Venz to click off the feed. Her eyes narrowed, and she looked ready to kill. “What did you do?”
“The boy is crazy. Do you really think I would break into Lasair’s warehouse?”
“Yes,” Nastasia said.
Coco laughed. “I was going to offer congratulations. That douchebag got what was coming to him.”
Mina sent Coco a withering glare. “Enough.”
“Sorry, boss.”
Then Mina was right back to grilling Arden. “What made you think it was a good idea to piss off Lasair? They want your head anyway. We have another mission that can’t be compromised, and I can’t have you running roughshod all over our plans and starting a war. You’re on the eve of paying off Dade’s debt and you pull this crap. Are you trying to destroy everything?”
Arden tilted her head. “You have us tracked, right? Did we leave the compound?”
Dade sighed, leaning back in his chair. He was exhausted. It would have been easy enough to deny the entire thing, and yet Arden was going out of her way to prove some kind of point.
He didn’t think it was smart that Arden taunted Mina. Saben had bugged Venz’s computer with a virus that Dade had gotten from Clarissa. It was a temporary fix made to look as if they’d stayed in the compound. Venz would find it eventually, and then Mina would explode and make this look like a tea party.
Arden didn’t seem to care about future repercussions. “Do you have a vid-feed of us? Because I remember being asleep then. But I suppose sleepwalking is always a possibility.”
“I do not appreciate your sarcasm,” Mina said. “If you were asleep, why does your face look like it ran into a wall?”
“She has a good point,” Dade agreed, amused.
“Not helping,” Arden said.
Dade chuckled. “Sorry.”
“Maybe that’s what happened,” Arden said after some thought. “I was sleepwalking, and I must have walked into a wall or a door.” She shrugged. “Something.”
“A wall shaped like a fist,” Coco added helpfully.
Arden tapped a finger to her mouth. “That’s a possibility.”
“Why do we put up with her?” Roan asked. “We expect loyalty. Send her over to Lasair and be done with it.”
“Loyalty,” Dade scoffed. “We didn’t choose to be here.”
Mina finally took a seat. She leaned back in her chair, her elbows on the armrests, and steepled her fingers. “I could have left you to Crispin.”
“At least with Crispin we knew what we were getting,” Arden countered.
“We’re offering friendship. A family,” Nastasia said.
Arden shrugged. “I don’t believe that.”
Dade wasn’t so sure. They’d been welcoming. And so far they hadn’t done anything disloyal. Instead, Dade, Arden, and Saben had been the ones to break that bond.
Coco interrupted. “If they don’t want to honor their commitment to us, then they need to be treated like the enemy.”
“Agreed, we can’t have them running around whenever they feel like it,” Roan added.
Nastasia said quietly, “We’re not locking anyone up.”
Dade almost laughed since Niall had been locked up for the past week. He looked over at Niall, waiting for him to say something. But he wasn’t paying attention. He kept his focus on the table with a scowl on his face.
“You invited us in.” Arden smirked. “This is what I do.”
Roan stood up, but Coco stood as well and held him back.
“Stop,” she said to him. “Let Mina handle it.”
Nastasia appeared the least ruffled, unlike Mina, nor was she like the overly aggressive Roan. She seemed more disappointed when she looked at them imploringly. “We are on the same side.”
“What side is that?” Arden asked. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Everyone thinks they’re on a ‘side,’ and yet everyone is out for themselves.”
Dade couldn’t fault Arden’s logic. She was right. Everyone was out for themselves. Yet he had hoped that they’d all pull together eventually. And he hoped that these people would turn out to be as true as their word.
Mina sighed. It was a weighty sound. “This isn’t going to resolve itself tonight. We need to focus on tomorrow and breaking into the CRC. Everyone needs to work together.” She looked pointedly at Arden. “Because if we don’t, we won’t make it out alive.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Dade snuck up to the doors of the CRC, moving between the security cameras. Making sure he showed up as no more than a shadow was what he did best. His ability honed by years of stealing from his father. Still, his anxiety was high, keeping him alert.
At times he had to slither along the ground in a crawl. The outline of his body melted from one deep pool of black to the next. Dade’s hood was up, his hybrid halo-glass mask on, and an air-breather in his mouth. He was covered from head to toe in a new specialty synth-suit Venz had created from the net-tech he’d invented to hide their vehicles. It worked on the same principles that the car had. Not exactly hiding Dade, but causing the gaze of anyone looking to slide past him.
Several feet from the door, he waited a beat, crouched against the side of the building. He used the time to catch his breath and steel his resolve. He would be seen when he moved toward the door. As soon as he got into place, he’d have seconds to set the charge sticks, and then they’d all be moving, the plan in motion.
Dade could see the countdown clock projected in the corner of the halo-glass. Each second gripped his muscles tighter. With the infrared, he could see Mina when she leaned out. She held a hand up, indicating five seconds, corresponding with his timer.
At the “go” signal, he shot toward the door, charge sticks already in his hands. There were more in the pouch of his belt.
He adhered them to the wall around the door frame. Stick after stick went onto the wall with quick precision. He spaced them apart as best he could. When he was done with the door, he continued dow
n the length of the wall.
Dade used a lot of explosives. They weren’t just making their way inside. This was a statement. The clock in the corner of his mask started flashing. He was out of time. He took the rest of the charge sticks and threw them near the door. They all had capacitors set to blow, their timers synced together through Venz’s expertise.
And then he ran.
He ran so fast that his muscles burned. Sweat poured off him. His lungs heaved, trying to get enough air.
Dade threw himself behind the shelter of vehicles where Mina, Roan, and Saben were hiding. He leaned against the hovervan, gasping. His body curled down, waiting for the explosion.
“Dade is clear,” Mina said to Nastasia.
Nastasia’s answer was to count the last three seconds into their comm. He knew that Venz was doing the same for the other group. Nastasia and Venz were working in tandem to run tonight’s dual operations. There was no room for error. Their job was to keep everyone alive.
Her voice hit “one” and then “zero” exactly at the same time the detonation lit up the black sky.
Dade’s head was down. He covered the back of his neck, and his eyes were shut. Yet the searing white burst of the explosion blast still leaked through his closed lids. The hovervan lifted momentarily against his back, resettling with a thump. He felt the heat and the rush of displaced air. Smelled the burning stench of melted metal and moonglass.
A blaring siren cracked the silence.
They now had exactly ten minutes to get in and out before the govies showed up. Their movements were synchronized between both teams. Everything coordinated down to the second, relying on the govies’ predictably timed reactions.
Nastasia reset the timer that appeared in the eye mechanism of their halo-glass masks and instructed, “Go.”
They were up and running toward the exploded side of the building. Focused, and working as a team. The three of them fanned out. They were loaded with firepower. Dade had a large blast-phaser in his hands and another strapped to his back, and several knives strapped to his arms and legs. His hips and chest were weighed down with a number of Venz’s concussion bombs.
Inside, the govies were waiting for them, grouped in the anticipated attack formation they were trained to organize into if the building was breached. Guards lined the halls, tucked into dugouts made for this purpose where they could conceal themselves while firing on the incoming enemy.
The three of them picked off the guards, alternating between their phasers and concussion bombs. Venz had outfitted their ears with a sonic dampener that broke up sound waves so they wouldn’t affect their team. The bombs detonated, and the guards fell. Each squad they cleared moved them several feet forward.
Dade stopped at every hallway branch, securing it before moving on. They didn’t want the govies to block them in. The guards ahead of them began to retreat.
“They’ve initiated their lockdown protocol,” Mina said, confirming his thoughts.
“Nine minutes,” Nastasia said over the comm, counting down the time.
Dade’s gaze immediately flicked to the corner of his halo-glass to confirm. He let out a breath.
That reminder of the time forced them to move quicker. They worked just as steadily, yet there was a desperation that settled in.
He felt like he was part of their team. He didn’t know if it was the time spent with them or the fact that he’d worked with them on other missions, but he anticipated their reactions now. They moved as if they were meant to fight together. It felt good, right in a way that had been slightly off-sync until now.
It made him think of Arden. Dade wanted to know how she fared. Wanted to ask after the other group, but knew that would interrupt the mission. At least he had Saben with him.
Being split up from her sucked. Still, maybe it was for the best. It would help him to keep a clear head while he worked. And he knew Arden didn’t need him. Though that didn’t stop him from wanting to keep her in his sight, just in case. He was sick of loss and didn’t want to face it again.
They moved inward toward the center of the CRC. The building was a series of concentric circles. Each had a gate of highly concentrated metal that couldn’t be cut through within the span of time they had.
The circles were designed so they could only be unlocked from the inside. Once the doors were shut, there was no path into the center. Anyone stuck between the circles would have to stay in that ring until whatever emergency was cleared and the locks were disengaged.
When they passed through the halls, every so often they would come across a metal door that was closed and sealed tight. It didn’t matter that they had already been locked out from the core. That wasn’t their destination. Instead they made their way around the outermost ring to the holding cells the govies used to detain and often torture high-value targets.
“Head for the unit tower,” Mina directed Dade and Roan. She set herself up with Saben, facing the hall from either side.
Dade and Roan turned down a hallway, running. Each second counted. Roan moved as if he were stalking prey. He was a little reckless, but his aim was dead-on, hitting the govies in the center chest. Dade focused on keeping them moving in the direction of the unit tower while watching Roan’s back.
He knew they had made it to the containment wing when the hallways were lined with white metal doors. Behind the doors, presumably, were citizens the govies had taken both for information and to experiment on.
Nastasia called through the comm just as they reached the guard tower, indicating how much time they had left on the countdown. “Seven minutes.”
Time moved too swiftly. They were three minutes in, and they hadn’t even reached the checkpoint for the second part of the plan. It set a fire under their asses. They both felt the push, cutting people down with a focused precision as they went forward.
At the unit tower, they cleared the halls around it. The tower sat in the center of four halls and was shaped like a hexagon. It had windows on all six sides of the enclosed room. From there, it controlled everything in the outermost ring.
There were two guards inside the tower behind the phaser-proof moonglass. They looked panicked, speaking frantically into their comm, and viewing feeds on large panels that monitored the rooms and hallways.
Roan walked around the kiosk, pointing his phaser through the moonglass at them. Of course, he didn’t shoot; there’d be no point. He yelled, “Open up.”
The guards—a young man and woman—yelled back. The man tapped things onto a light board while the woman pulled her weapon. They were both focused on Roan because he had begun to taunt them.
Dade went in the opposite direction, so he ended up at their backs. There was no time to finesse the door open. He slapped some charge sticks to the door’s locking mechanism that he could arm by hand and had a less destructive area radius than the ones he’d used to blow a hole in the building.
He yelled, “Fire,” at Roan, and stepped back for cover.
The blast blew the door out and threw the two guards inside onto the ground. It also took out several windows of moonglass. Shards were everywhere. Dade threw a concussion bomb into the hub just in case the two guards were still awake. They waited until it detonated before he and Roan ran inside.
He checked to make sure the guards were still breathing, while pulling electro-cuffs from his utility belt. They appeared to be mostly unhurt. Dade set about restraining them.
Roan was at the console. He had shut down the outgoing distress calls. Then he pulled up the panels to get a visual into the rooms to look for Crispin’s girl. “There’re no names on these files.”
Dade stood up and started going through the vid-feeds alongside him. The women all looked the same: beaten and waiflike, as if they were close to death. There was nothing to distinguish them as individuals.
“I’ll try to cross-reference them with the patient files,” Dade suggested.
“No,” Roan countered, “you plant the worm.”
Dade fished out the tiny disk from his tool belt. He searched for the plug-in that Venz had described. Dade thought he was pretty tech savvy, but this was far above the kind of tech stuff he usually did.
Now looking at the console, he was skeptical of his ability to navigate it. There were glowing buttons and data screens everywhere. Venz had seriously underestimated their system.
He could guess at the usage of half the equipment. Some were screen vids of holding cells that Roan was hacking. Some ran the doors and locks in this grid of the compound. The other stuff he had no clue as to what it was for. That was the area he concentrated on. They had some serious gear, and he wondered if most of it had come from other cities. And if so, how far advanced in technology were they?
Each one of the systems in the CRC ran independently. That was part of the failsafe procedure. Once the innermost ring was locked down, no one would have access to any part of the system until it reset. He needed to get the worm into place before the shutdown reached the center.
Venz couldn’t break in from the outside. That was why it was Dade’s responsibility to plant the worm. It would allow those in the other group to get control of their section, to complete their task. Without it, they’d be vulnerable. The entire plan rested on this.
Arden needed him to be successful.
Dade’s chest tightened to the point of pain. His breathing shortened, and he could feel dampness under his suit. He could not let them down. This plan would not spin into a death spiral on his watch.
Dade addressed Nastasia through the comm. “I don’t know what I’m looking for. Nothing looks like an upload input.” Everything was streamlined. There were no key inserts.
“There should be something.” She repeated the directions Venz had given her. She didn’t know any better than Dade. Neither of them was a technical wizard.
“There’s not a single slot where I can key in.”
“Let me get Venz. Hang tight,” she said.
The Stolen Sky (Split City Book 2) Page 22