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Chapter 1
Lila had everything under control.
She padded silently into Senator Edward Serrano’s office, pulling the door closed without a sound. She had not chosen the man or his office randomly. The puffed-up politician favored oversized leather furniture and velvet drapes. Both would provide Lila with plenty of cover if a patrolling guard peeked inside. She wasn’t worried about being found, though. Her partner had carefully timed the men’s paths. According to Tristan, she would have at least twenty minutes to steal the files and withdraw from the Bullstow compound.
Flush with time, Lila raided the senator’s mini-fridge and opened a bottle of Saveur, taking several deep gulps of the expensive beer. It tasted lightly of vanilla and smoke and money. A lot of money. She slid the bottle cap into her trouser pocket and let her fingers skate over the slick wooden box on his desk. She didn’t need to open it to know what was inside, for the mild scent of tobacco drifted throughout the office.
After pocketing a few cigars, she tossed her black peacoat upon the senator’s desk. The heating would not be turned on again for another hour or two, but she was glad to be rid of the coat despite the chill. It was a cover of poverty she was unaccustomed to, a strange weight that barely flowed past her hips.
Shivering, she tossed her frayed newsboy cap and the thermal hood on the desk. In a perfect world, her cheap gray shirt and trousers would come next, followed by her stiff work boots, which had already worn blisters into her heels. She could have done the entire job in her thermal suit. The skintight material kept her from being seen on thermal cameras, but she would be marked as a high-end thief if anyone saw it.
Lila took another swig of Saveur and plucked the senator’s laptop from his desk. Stretching out languidly on the couch, she began her second break-in of the evening.
Tapping quietly on the keys, Lila tried the most common passwords at the login prompt. Breaking into the senator’s laptop was the only part of her plan that she had not accounted for. Perhaps she was getting sloppy, but these jobs had begun to feel too routine, too monotonous, and too easy. Perhaps they didn’t come often enough to counter the drudgery of her day job. Perhaps she’d partnered with Tristan for too long, and his irresponsibility had rubbed off on her.
Yes, she thought, narrowing her brown eyes. It was probably Tristan’s fault in some way.
Lila typed yet another permutation of the word Odin—the most commonly used password by men in politics—into the login screen. She hoped for the sake of her government that Serrano’s password would not be so simple, but those hopes were dashed on her fourth attempt, as was the chance to test her new password-cracking program.
She was in.
Brushing her dark curls from her eyes, Lila scanned the senator’s desktop. She spied a folder entitled Toys, but on this occasion she chose not to trespass against Senator Serrano’s privacy. He had nearly two dozen children, after all, and at this time of the year, it might be nothing more scandalous than a gift list for the Winter Solstice. If it wasn’t so innocent, she knew she didn’t want to see what the folder might contain.
Instead, Lila logged into the senate’s network under Prolix, the username of one of her fake accounts, and transferred a few programs to Serrano’s computer. She depended on such programs to hide her activities and to keep an eye out for snoops, and she updated them often. While they ran, she set the entire BIRD to back up on her star drive, a slice of memory the size of her knuckle. She then leaned back into the cushions of the couch and checked her watch. The guards would not patrol the second floor for another twenty minutes. She still had plenty of time.
A light on her snoop program flashed red.
Lila sat up instantly and put down her beer. She squinted at the snoop’s user ID. Her programs did not recognize it, which meant that the account was fake. If someone had laid a trap, she might have just armed it. She couldn’t be caught in the Bullstow compound, copying files from senate’s network. A conviction for pilfering files from the BIRD would place a hacker’s neck in the hangman’s noose.
Lila stood up and paced back and forth while the database copied. When the screen flashed green, she dove back to it at once and brought up her programs.
Save data on snoop: Zephyr?
The cursor blinked on and off.
“Of course,” she muttered, hitting enter, watching lines of numbers and letters blur across the screen. “What kind of name is Zephyr?”
Data copied.
Delete all logs and programs?
The cursor blinked again, waiting for approval.
Lila slammed the enter key once more and ripped the star drive from the laptop. The computer’s fan whirled as she twisted the memory stick into a pendant and hung it on the little gold chain around her neck. She frowned as the laptop worked. She had never been caught by a snoop before, and though she was confident in her programs’ ability to keep her hidden, she didn’t want to remain in the office one second longer than she had to.
She crouched over the laptop once again, holding her finger over the shutdown menu.
A loud screech pierced the air.
Lila startled, nearly shutting down the computer before it had finished. Every fire alarm in the building shrieked with the volume and shrillness of a thousand distressed toddlers.
Covering her ears, Lila madly sniffed the air.
She smelled nothing but the muted, stale scent of cigars.
Had Tristan hit the alarm as a warning? Were guards surging upstairs ready to capture her? Was it another mistake? If he had bungled things again, she would kill him. What would be the excuse this time? How hard was it to relax in the shadows, waiting to intervene only if the militia pinched her?
Sometimes it seemed like Tristan wanted her to get caught.
