Silas drove forward carefully. The entirety of Zhabei was on edge. Though its streets were relatively quiet, the hush was caused by a cloak of nervousness. One could press their ear close to the stores and hear a malevolent thrumming. Its civilians had decided to clamp their mouths shut not because this was a restful night, but because they were afraid being too loud would draw unnecessary attention.
His eyes Aickered up to the rearview. Everyone inside the vehicle had been largely silent on the short drive too. They were almost at the drop-oP point right outside the perimeter, where the others would use a side door to enter the outer facility. From there on, Silas would continue to the control tower. He would step in as Shepherd.
The moon peered out from behind a cloud. When his eyes went to the rearview again, Rosalind was giving him a strange look, but he couldn’t tell if it was that or his own guilt drawing goose bumps at the back of his neck.
They don’t know, he thought. How would they know?
“It’s here, Silas.”
Silas braked, almost missing the turn.
“Sorry,” he apologized quickly. “My vision is bad at night.”
Celia opened her door. “Not to worry,” she replied. “Good luck. Come on.”
Alisa slid out too. Then Rosalind. Last, Orion sidled over the seats to get to the door, clapping his hand over Silas’s shoulder.
“Be safe,” he warned. “You too,” Silas returned.
They made it past the facility perimeter easily. Getting into the facility itself would be the hard part.
Orion winced, shaking his 1st out. The side door hadn’t budged. “What the hell is this made out of? Solid gold?”
“Gold is a soft metal,” Celia said plainly. “It can break quite easily. It’s only heavy.”
When he glanced back, incredulous that he was getting a scienti1c correction at a time like this, Rosalind gestured over her sister’s shoulder for him to ignore Celia and continue.
“Go for the handle, silly,” Alisa said.
Orion frowned. When he struck the door again, he aimed downward, onto the handle, and though the door still stayed quite 1rm, the handle broke oP, clattering onto the concrete stoop outside. “I would have worked that out eventually.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
He kicked the door hard, drowning out any more of Alisa’s lip. It thudded back, making a clatter against the wall. This sector wasn’t supposed to be well guarded because it was so far from everything important in the facility, so there was little reason for anyone to have heard their entrance. The moment they entered the base, though, they had to assume they were close to being caught at all times.
Alisa went in 1rst, having been assigned the role of reconnaissance. “I’m much faster than everyone else,” she had said when they had planned this out. “Let me check the sector 1rst. Then I will come back with the best path for movement.”
When she disappeared, she didn’t turn into the hallway like a normal person. She lunged onto the wall for a boost upward and grabbed onto a vent in the ceiling, kicking the grate away and climbing through.
“Mon Dieu,” Rosalind muttered, watching Alisa scamper out of view. “Are we sure she isn’t superhuman too?”
“Maybe she was born with spider genetics,” Celia added. “I was thinking cat.”
“Have we checked for a tail?”
Orion blinked rapidly. “We’re joking, right?” he asked. “Please tell me we’re joking.”
Rosalind patted his arm. “I hope to the high heavens that we are joking.”
Alisa kept her breath quiet despite her exertion, crawling along the vents. She had memorized the blueprints when Silas put them in front of her, so it wasn’t hard to 1nd the exact paths she needed to investigate.
“Oh, shit—”
Without warning, the panel in front of her almost gave way under the press of her hand, wobbling before she snatched her arm close to her chest and halted in her path. Voices Aoated through the gaps, bringing instructions from below to guard the perimeter. Reports of movement sighted. That was fast. Hadn’t Priest been given a later time?
Alisa reached forward carefully, prying the loose panel from its place. One of the bolts was still 1rm, but she twisted the panel clockwise, then anti-clockwise, jostling it repeatedly until the bolt fell, landing on the linoleum tiles below with a clink.
Alisa jumped down. She still clutched the panel like a makeshift shield,
looking around where she had landed. Some sort of boiler room. Maybe the steam had weakened the vents.
She poked her head through the door. There were a few cells here too, but they were empty, their bars pulled open.
Footsteps clattered around the corner. Alisa pressed back into the boiler room at once, waiting for the sound to pass before inching the door open again, watching the soldiers move through the larger cell block and disappear through a set of double electric-controlled doors. All the electric doors operated with signals from the control tower, but there were boxes beside them that Silas said would break the communication line if they were disconnected.
Everything here is rudimentary at best. Just assume that if you break
something, it will turn a door back to manual.
If Alisa was still facing north, then going directly past those doors ought to take them into the inner facility. This should work.
She started to run the way she had come, tracing the hallways back.
Celia gnawed on her lip, following Alisa forward. There was a pit in her stomach. A festering pit made of blades, digging around her internal organs and driving her fanatic with worry.
“Mèimei, stop scrunching your sleeves like that,” Rosalind whispered from behind.
“What?” Celia whispered back. “I am not scrunching anything.”
Alisa put her arm out at the front of their single-1le line, signaling for them to pause as voices bounced down the next corridor. While Celia drew to a halt, her sister reached around her, giving her left hand a slap.
“What did I just slap your hand away from then?” “My hem, technically.”
“That’s still something.”
“If the both of you don’t hush,” Alisa said, “I will perform this rescue mission alone.”
Celia thinned her lips. The voices seemed to have faded, so she gestured for Alisa to continue onward.
“Some nerve you have speaking to your superior like that,” Celia muttered.
“I know,” Alisa retorted, moving again. “You don’t smack me around enough, so I have grown too bold—oh, shit, step back!”
Just as Alisa hissed her instruction, an alarm blared through the corridor, loud enough to give Celia’s eardrums a hefty shock. Silas’s signal. The north door had been pulled, which meant the south door was clearing of guards. Celia shifted, ducking out of view while a group of soldiers hurried by in pairs, paying no attention to the four intruders hidden by the wall. Out of the corner of her eye, Celia spotted Rosalind communicating with Orion silently, and the pit in her stomach twisted further. The sight was eerily familiar, not because she had seen any of her sister’s interactions with Orion in the past, but because it reminded her of somebody else.
“Come on,” Alisa said, and though she might have intended for it to be a whisper, she was nearly shouting to be heard over the blare of the alarm. “It’s
clear until the south door.”
They ran into a wider area, where the ceiling rose high and two stairwells on each side led up to a platform circling the rectangular hall. The middle was open
—Celia could see past the platforms and into a second level of empty cells. Cobwebs had started to grow along some of the bars, which meant they had been untouched for quite some time. Though that probably should have been a calming thought, a chill skated along her shoulders instead.
“Orion, get the box,” Alisa commanded. “Get it?”
“Break it!”
He smacked a 1st into it, hard. The metal crumpled, shortly before sparks lit up at the top of the door. Celia and Rosalind reared back in concern, but Alisa was already searching the vicinity around them, mumbling under her breath. She found a guard’s baton. Handed it to Orion.
“Again,” she said. “The handle 1rst this time.”
Orion gave her a silent look of chagrin. He struck the door handle with the baton, and when the metal snapped oP, the hinges creaked on Alisa’s push.
In the next hallway, there were soldiers on guard.
All of whom stirred at the disturbance, noticing the arrival of intruders. “We’ll handle this,” Rosalind said, reaching into her hair. “Alisa, Celia—
forward.”
Though Celia hesitated brieAy, Alisa did not. She grabbed Celia’s wrist, and as Rosalind and Orion split like a creature cleaved into two for combat, Alisa pulled her forward in a straight shot down the hallway.
The south door opened smoothly. No lock, no bar. Only the hinges groaning, and then Celia was peering around the next sector of the facility, trying to make sense of its long layout.
It was dark. Glimpses of the moon peered through the windows, which were not so much windows but rectangular cutouts in the stone walls, lined by metal bars. They had found themselves on an elevated platform: a set of stairs led down onto the lower-level cells. At the commotion, a guard shouted to another below, but it seemed there were only the two of them, left behind on watch while the north door took everyone else’s attention.
“Quick,” Alisa said. “Before they see us.”
Have mercy on my soul. I do what I must when there are greater matters at stake—
Celia drew her pistol, aimed over the railing, and shot the guards dead.
“I have this,” she said, already running along the platform for the stairs. “Go back and help Rosalind!”
Alisa nodded, pushing through the door again. Before it could slam closed, Celia heard a faint scream on the other side. She didn’t let it slow her frantic descent down the stairs; she could only hope the sound hadn’t come from their side.
“Oliver?” She skidded in front of the 1rst cell. Not him. Someone else, clothes tattered and handcuPs holding them to the Aoor. Most of the other prisoners didn’t react to her presence, though none of them looked as if they were on the verge of death. One woman blearily lifted her head, and Celia could only assume that it was exhaustion keeping them to the corners of the cells instead of shaking the bars, wondering what was happening outside.
“Oliver!”
She spotted him at last in one of the farthest cells, the only one with some sort of bed. The guard had fallen dead nearby, and Celia scooped the keys from his belt, jamming each one into the lock on Oliver’s cell until something 1t. She heard a click. With a quick push, the bars were clattering open with a thud-thud- thud.
Why was Oliver strapped down?
“Oliver, can you hear me?” She grabbed at the 1rst restraint she saw, trying to tug it free. It didn’t budge. Beneath them, the white clothes Oliver had been put in were stained red—not enough to think that they had been cutting him into pieces, but enough to be mightily concerned.
She reached into her boot, pulling out a small penknife. Oliver seemed to come to consciousness while she sliced at the restraints, his eyes struggling to open. His hand jerked. As did his legs.
“Celia?” he murmured. “Am I hallucinating again?”
“No, it’s me. Let me get the last one—” She cut through the restraint at his shoulder. Loosened from his hold, Oliver tried to move, but whatever they had
done to him, he had turned delirious, almost tipping right to the Aoor.
“Hey, hey, wait—” Celia caught him. He was so warm that it was like touching a furnace. “I’m going to get you out, all right? But you need to tell me your capacity. Can you walk? Can you see?”
“They said… they said…”
She was going to take that as a no to both questions. It seemed that he had perceived her presence, but he wasn’t registering the rescue ePort. In fairness, an Oliver who was alert would have told her oP the moment he saw her here. He would have given her a whole earful about how stupid it was to break into a Nationalist stronghold, and Celia was incredibly upset that she wasn’t getting the lecture because that meant he was too injured to deliver it.
“Oliver,” Celia said 1rmly. “Can you—”
“They ran oP to evacuate the outer wings,” he murmured. “Be careful.”
Celia pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. The heat stung her skin.
He was burning up beyond belief. “What are you talking about?”
He lolled onto her. With a gasp, Celia grabbed his shoulders, holding him steady. She could hear him struggling with each shaky breath and every strained ePort to lift his head.
“Oliver,” she demanded. This was too important to let slide. If he put in this much ePort to warn her, she knew she needed to understand. “Why are they evacuating?”
He inhaled. Exhaled.
“Japan,” Oliver managed. “Japan is bombing us.”
