“Five minutes,” Ritter said in my earbud.
Five minutes during which Mari and I had to climb to the window and wait there until the patrol changed and the alarm was turned off so the guards could sign in and out for their shifts. That was when we’d force the window open with the crowbar I’d brought along for the job.
I reached the window ledge and balanced between it and my hold on the launcher. Mari was still rising with her own launcher and rope, painfully slow. Finally she shifted, disappearing from below and appearing next to me on the window ledge, grabbing her rope again just in time to stop herself from falling. Somehow she managed to prevent her abandoned launcher from banging into the side of the house as it dangled at the end of the rope.
“No way is this coming out of the eaves,” she whispered, staring up at where her grappling hook had penetrated the siding instead of making it on top of the roof. “I didn’t aim so well. I’ll have to leave it behind.”
“I’ll take care of it once you’re inside.” Ritter’s voice came to our ears. “In fact, I’ll take care of Erin’s, too, since I’ll be up there.”
I didn’t doubt that he would. His ability gave him strength, speed, and agility I only guessed at even after experiencing it firsthand. Two hundred and seventy-three years of practice helped, I guessed. All of which was a good thing tonight. We hoped to be in and out with no one the wiser. It was good to steal information from our enemies at any time, but far better to do it without them knowing we were onto them. Especially when we were dealing with the Emporium and the people on their payroll.
“Car approaching,” Stella said in our earbuds. “Get ready.”
My free hand closed around the crowbar, sliding it from my belt. If the house hadn’t been so protected, Stella would have used her technology to learn the house alarm codes, but whatever prevented me from probing the house also prevented any kind of signals from coming out. Our spybots were useless. If this house was attached to the Internet and the outside world, it was by cables buried deep in the earth.
“They’re opening the door,” Stella said. After several seconds, she added, “There, that should be enough time for them to have put in the code.”
“You’re clear to enter,” Ritter added. “No one in sight on this side of the house.”
My senses verified Ritter’s observation, so unless there was a sensing Emporium Unbounded nearby who could mask his life force, we were good to go.
I jabbed in the crowbar, but the window didn’t budge.
“Uh, any time soon, Erin,” Ritter muttered.
“Why don’t you come up here and do it yourself, Your Deathliness?” I put emphasis on the nickname I normally used only when he was irritating me.
“Maybe I will.” His voice held a mixture of threat and promise.
I reached out, tapping on his shield.
Let me in.
He couldn’t keep me out, not anymore, though he would be able to soon. All our Renegades were practicing shielding after I’d proven false the long-held belief that mind shields always worked. I’d learned that some sensing Unbounded—at least me and Delia Vesey, one of the Emporium Triad leaders—could break through normal mental shields. The discovery had come about partly because of desperation, but mostly because I was new and didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be able to do it. Ava O’Hare, who was the leader of our group of Renegade Unbounded and also my ancestor, couldn’t break through shields before I showed her how. Now she could break through the shields of our newest Renegades, who were mentally the weakest.
Ritter dropped his shield, and I channeled his ability, seeing immediately how to solve the problem. Mostly it was just brute force. The window slid open.
You owe me,
Ritter thought.
He had no way of knowing if I’d picked up his thought, so I chose to ignore it. His Deathliness was arrogant enough without me egging him on. The fact that he was that good didn’t help matters.
As I swung into the room, the shield over the house cut me off from Ritter, and I felt a yank of loss that was all out of proportion to a simple disconnect with any other person. I shouldn’t feel that way, despite our relationship, but I did.
“They are
so
going to know we were here if they open this window,” Mari said, sliding her hand along the frame before she closed it.
“The room’s unused,” I said. “It could be months.”
“It’s so dark.” Mari flipped out a penlight and swung it around the room before snapping it off. Long enough to verify that no one lurked in the corners.
Too bad I hadn’t been able to maintain contact with Ritter, whose ability gave his eyesight a boost in the dark. We were also cut off from communication until we disarmed the shield.
“Come on.” I led the way to the door.
We’d both memorized the plans to the house and knew where the security room should be. Careful research on Stella’s part had revealed that Mr. Desoto had installed a state-of-the-art surveillance system, complete with cameras and a dozen monitors. What we didn’t know was if someone actually watched the monitors constantly. It was, after all, Mr. Desoto’s residence, not one of his many businesses, though apparently our intel was correct about him storing important information here—the patrols were proof of that. Since it was his home, however, and patrols made regular circuits around the house, we were hopeful that instead of constantly monitoring their camera feed, the patrolmen would check the security room only if their computer programs alerted them to something suspicious.
We moved silently into the hallway and down a flight of stairs. The room we’d entered was far from the master suite, where I assumed Mr. Desoto was enjoying his evening, and that also meant we had a good way to go before we neared the security room where I had to plug in Stella’s decoder.
After gliding through a long hallway and a sitting room, we started down the front stairs that were illuminated by a slice of moonlight shining through the huge window over the entryway. The crystals on an elaborate chandelier above the entryway glittered as they eerily reflected the moonlight. Next to me, there was a brief change in the air and a soft pop. I knew without looking that Mari had shifted. She reappeared down below and crouched behind a wall table, giving me the all-clear signal. I finished descending the stairs the usual way, and as my foot touched the bottom stair, a series of beeps came to us faintly. I froze for a few heartbeats until I realized it was the alarm being reactivated. Hopefully, that meant the security room was unmanned.
We continued farther into the house, nearing the kitchen. When noise of a lid settling on a pot came rather too loudly, I put my hand on Mari’s arm and pressed us up against the wall of the hallway, sending out my thoughts to see who it was. I couldn’t sense past the house’s invisible barrier, but now that we were inside, everything in the house was available to me. The noise had come from the live-in cook, who was getting a jump on tomorrow’s meal preparations. No mental shield protected her thoughts. She was watching a television embedded in the wall, wearing headphones so the sound would have no chance of disturbing Mr. Desoto, though his suite was far enough away that it wouldn’t be a problem. I saw in her mind that she planned meals only for one person the next day because Mrs. Desoto and her two teenagers were visiting her sister in Chicago for the weekend. There was, of course, no information about the security room or where Mr. Desoto might keep his top secret files.
When inside people’s minds, I mostly remain an observer, careful not to touch their thought streams that appeared to me as rivers of sand falling from some imaginary ceiling and then curving sideways and away out of sight before reaching the floor. All the scenes of their current thoughts or any memories they were pondering would fling by at tremendous speeds, showing me details about their lives. If I touched the thought stream at all, people who knew of Unbounded would immediately suspect someone was inside their minds, while regular mortals might suspect they were going insane. Permanent damage was possible inside anyone’s mind, which was why I preferred to examine an unconscious person, since it was far easier to obtain information while the brain was sleeping.
But there were ways around my no-touch policy. I formed a thought of my own and set it adrift near the top of the cook’s thought stream. It floated for several seconds, drifting closer to the stream, until all at once it was sucked inside.
Almost immediately, she began thinking about the security room and the nice young man who was on the night shift. I gently released another thought. A suggestion really. She should take him a tasty snack. Again, her mind took over. Yes, some of those cookies she’d baked today and a hot cup of gourmet coffee with cream and two sugars the way he liked. The good kind of coffee and not the cheap stuff the patrol made themselves from a coffee pot inside the security room. The boy reminded her of her own son before he’d married and moved to Florida.
Keeping the link with the cook open, I refocused on Mari and the dark corridor where we hugged the wall. “Bad news,” I whispered. “There’s a guy in the security room, but the cook’s planning to take him some coffee. Her thoughts say he’s young enough that even if he’s Emporium, he can’t have Changed.”
“If she’s taking him coffee, we can use the magic powder instead of gassing him to sleep,” Mari said with a grin.
The magic powder would put an average-sized man asleep within two minutes but was gentle enough that he’d think he’d just fallen asleep. It wouldn’t be enough to keep him unconscious for more than a half hour, but that was plenty of time for us to play havoc with his security system, grab the information we sought, and get out. There was also a little something extra in the powder that would make the man traceable for up to a week within a certain range. It wasn’t anything we’d probably need in this situation, but we never passed up an opportunity to learn more about our enemies. If he was an Emporium operative, that little addition might lead to his capture when all this was over.
I waited until the cook had the coffee brewing and had walked around to the far side of the large counter, her eyes fixed on her movie. Then I did a double check for life forms. Sensing no one in the immediate vicinity, I whispered to Mari to drop her shield. Mari couldn’t shift to a place she’d never been or couldn’t see—unless someone she was strongly connected to was in that location—but I could see the kitchen area quite clearly through the cook’s mind, and I could channel Mari’s ability.
Crouching, I shifted to the near side of the counter and reached up to drop the powder into the mug the cook had waiting near the coffee maker. Given the very small amount of powder and the reading glasses on the counter, I was positive she wouldn’t notice when she filled the cup. Seconds later, I was back with Mari.
Let’s move,
I said to her before severing our mental connection.
We continued down the hallway and cut through another sitting room that was near the security room. There, we waited in the dark by the door. Within minutes, we heard the flip-flop of the cook’s house slippers as she moved down the hallway with her tray. I opened my senses and went along for the ride.
She knocked on the security room door. “Hey, Walker, it’s me, Melissa. I’ve brought you some decent coffee instead of that black slop you guys brew in there.”
The door was opened by a man who couldn’t be older than mid-twenties. “Hey, thanks. I really appreciate it.” He took a sip of the coffee, followed by a longer gulp. “Wow, this is amazing!”
“You’re welcome. I know it’s no fun working the night shift.”
He laughed, pushing back blond hair that was, in Melissa’s opinion, too long. “This job’s actually ideal. I’ve gotten a ton of studying done in the month I’ve been here. If I finish my degree, I’m hoping Desoto will move me up. I’d like to work at his factory in security management.”
“Which factory?”
“I’m not picky.”
“You’ll do it. He’s good to work for. He rewards loyalty, and to take the night shift like this, you’ve definitely shown that.”
Lovely to know they liked their boss. I felt a twinge of uncertainty. Maybe the information on the thumb drive was wrong about Desoto. After all, his business was to provide weapons to the US government. He should be one of the good guys. Yet the electronic shield around the house screamed that he was in bed with the Emporium or someone as equally dangerous. Anyone who worked for the Emporium was our enemy and an enemy of all mortals.
For all the information I was getting from Melissa’s thoughts, I saw nothing from the security guard.
Walker,
I reminded myself. He might not be old enough to have Changed, but someone had taught him to close his mind. I needed to get inside his brain to see exactly what he knew. Was he an Emporium agent? If so, did Desoto know he had an agent inside his house? It made sense for the Emporium to keep an eye on him if he had dealings with them, but Desoto might not be aware that all his movements were being watched every bit as carefully as he watched anyone who might be approaching his house.
I pushed against the wall surrounding the guard’s mind. It was gray like stone but was already crumbling under my touch, and I wasn’t exerting much pressure.
It’s the drug,
I thought.
Thankfully, Walker bid goodnight to the cook and went back to his chair behind the monitor. His thought stream was slowing. I caught images of his mother, a Styrofoam cup from his favorite coffee house, and a girl he’d gone out with the week before. Nothing about the Emporium or the information we’d come for.
He set down his coffee mug and blinked as the monitors blurred. Then he was out, the drug taking effect so fast his mind didn’t even have time to register that he was tired. All at once, I was in the lake of his unconsciousness, dodging memory bubbles. More of his mother and of a woman with long blond hair. A computer in a cubical, newspaper clippings. So much information. If he worked for the Emporium, I wasn’t seeing any sign of it. Not that it really mattered. Our job was to get the information, not waste time determining his loyalty.
“Well?” Mari whispered.