“The carry comes home and tells the story. The support comes home and explains the things that kept the story from ending early. Nobody buys the support a drink.”— Paladin online, popular support guide
The van pulled into the evening flow at exactly the residential limit, which was the first thing Erika took issue with.
“Seventy,” she said, like a diagnosis. “We’re doing seventy.”
“Well, my dear driver, that’s the limit.”
“It’s the residential limit. I can do two hundred up there, and you’re going to make me sit at seventy the whole way.”
I closed my eyes. “Eri. We stay at ground level and at seventy. We’re undercover.”
She shook her head. “We’re in an orange van.”
“In a forgettable orange van,” I said, “that nobody remembers because it followed traffic laws. Vans get yelled at and remembered when they speed.”
She made a sound low in her throat, the sound of a grievance filed for later, and held it at seventy.
West Corporate fed us out onto the long commercial arteries that ran toward the farming districts, and the traffic thickened at shift change, a slow river of delivery cars and commuter minis.
We crawled.
Ad-holos turned in the wet air between the towers.
The rain came down as a fine grey nothing that beaded on the glass faster than it fell; the wipers only bothered every third pass.
“Rain’s good,” I said.
“Rain’s good,” Natalya said in my ear. The earpiece flattened her down into the voice I’d known before Aurelia, the one that had rerouted my commute to a luggage locker; twenty minutes after she’d stood in a storage unit and couldn’t get a sentence about her own pay to the end. “Free stealth buff. People don’t loiter in it; cameras go noisy. Weather’s on your side tonight, kotě.” A key clacked. “Don’t get used to it.”
“Okay, navigator.” Erika tipped her chin at the windshield without taking her eyes off the car in front of us. “Where am I putting this thing? What’s the target?”
“BVF-TG-04. West Farming District. The farm itself, I go around to the south, there’s a service corridor, that’s the way in. But you’re not parking at the farm.” I pulled the map up and turned the band so she could glance at it between brake lights. “Ten-story office building directly across the street, north side. Shared building, a lot of companies rent in it, rooftop lot on top. We park up there, you’ve got a clean line of sight to the farm for Natalya’s mast, and a van on an office roof at shift change is the most boring object in the district.”
“Mm.” Erika chewed it for a second. “That lot. Free, or paid with tracking?”
I wanted to say free, but I haven’t actually checked, so I just stared blankly.
“Because Roy did us plates.” She nodded down, where somewhere under the orange a set of false numbers waited that I hadn’t thought to ask for and Roy had simply handled. “Good ones. The plate’s fake, fine, but it’s a thread. Anyone ever decides to pull on it—” She lifted a hand off the wheel and let it drop. “I’d rather not hand them a thread.”
I sagged in my seat.
Roy had thought about the plates. Roy, on a creeper under a chassis, grease to the elbow, talking to an undercarriage like it might talk back, had looked at the job and seen a thread I’d walked straight past, and bolted a fix in before anyone asked him to. I’d built the whole plan. Sourced a chemist and a cloner, and a driver, crossed every line off Naiche’s list, and not once had I thought about the part: How do you pay for the parking without telling them you were there.
And Erika had spent her evening with him while he installed her netrunner’s chair and read Natalya’s spec off his band in that little deadpan, and thought of the plates. Mi reina. Of course she thought he was—
“Dash?”
She’d glanced over. The car ahead had stopped, and so had we, and she was looking at me instead of the brake lights.
“He’s spiraling,” Natalya announced in both our ears. “I can hear it. The breathing went funny. Dashi, that’s the breathing of a man trying to carry 0/0/7.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not, and it’s fine that you’re not. Parking’s a boring fail state. Nobody dies of parking.” Several clacks, fast. “This is the part of the lobby where the carry stops crying and the support does something. Watch.”
I let go of the breath she’d diagnosed.
“Found your building,” she said. “Cross-street tenant lot, ten floors, shared reservation system. And—ugh.” The clacking stopped. “Reservation only. It wants a name, a corporate affiliation, a vehicle reg, a contact band, and a reason for visit. It wants me to tell a parking garage why, Dashi.”
I groaned.
“You groan, but it’s real. Every field I fill is a field that has to survive a check later.”
Roy, I thought, would have known a lot that didn’t ask questions. Roy probably had three.
“Give me a second.” Most of her left the conversation; her voice went where it went when the rest of her was working. The clacks came in bursts now, long runs and hard stops. The traffic crept us two car-lengths forward and quiet again. “Okay. No—this is better than I thought. There’s a VIP tier. Buried under the normal flow, no front end. You don’t reserve, you don’t pay, you don’t get a single field. You roll up, and the gate forgets to look at you. No log, no ticket, no camera handshake. You park, you leave, and the system keeps a clean little hole in it shaped exactly like you were never there.”
“That exists,” I said. “Why does that exist?”
“Because somebody built it to.” Slower clacks now, reading more than typing. “Somebody with admin on the tenant system carved themselves a door they could use off the record. Hm. Hold on—”
“Natalya.”
“I’m seeing who.” The clacks stopped dead. When she came back, there was something in her voice that was delighted and a little bit awful. “Oh. Top-floor lease, one of the company's owners. Set the VIP door up himself, about eighteen months ago, and he uses it, regular hours, odd hours. And he’s running a second band on this network that his registered one doesn’t know about, and the messages on the quiet one are not going to his wi—”
“Natty, that’s okay.” Erika said, eyes forward as the traffic finally broke, and we rolled. “We’re almost there.”
I looked up from the band.
The farm had been ahead of us the whole crawl, lost behind the brake lights and the turning ads, and now the road bent and handed it over whole.
Thirty floors out of a district where nothing else cleared ten. One glass tower, every level lit from the inside in the same soft pink, and through the glass the bays ran back in stacked rows; hydroponic trays three and four deep, thick with leaves, under spectrum light that turned the rain on the windows the color of cheap wine.
Across from it, the ten-story block with our roof on top sat dark nearly to the street.
“Shift’s up,” Erika said, reading the empty windows. “Twelve hours, just turned over. Everyone’s gone home.” She let the van coast toward the ramp. “So we park on top of an empty building, across the street from the only lit thing for blocks, and we watch a farm.” A grin started. “Best job I’ve ever had.”
The pink tower climbed the windshield as she brought us around toward the office ramp.
The ramp wound up through the dark of the office block, and the gate at the top lifted for us without a light, without a ticket, without anything that would later admit a van had passed it. Erika rolled out onto the roof, took us along the low wall at the edge, and set the van down nose-out in the corner. The engines wound down under the floor. The rain tapped on the roof.
The farm stood across the street and went up.
We were ten floors off the ground and it cleared us by twenty more, a slab of lit glass climbing into the rain, every floor the same soft pink, the growing bays stacked behind the panels in long rows that ran back out of sight. From up here it looked like somebody had set a section of greenhouse on its end and kept building until they got bored.
I climbed out into the wet. The cold came off the concrete; the city threw its colors up off the low roofs around us; and I went to the wall to look at the thing I was about to walk into.
A door slid shut behind me. Boots on concrete. Natalya came up to the wall on my left with her hands shoved into her sleeves and her shoulders drawn in, and she looked at the farm instead of at me.
“Big,” she said.
“Big,” I agreed.
She gave it to me without preamble, eyes on the glass. “Codes. You’ll hear them in the ear. Don’t answer unless I ask you something. Green is good. Green is nothing, feeds calm, nobody curious, you’re a maintenance ghost and I’m bored. If I say green, or if I say nothing at all, you keep going.”
I glanced at her, but she kept looking at the farm. “Okay.”
“Yellow means the other runner noticed a hand in the system that isn’t theirs and went looking for it. It happens. I go quiet, I look like a glitch, I make myself dull until they lose interest. You don’t stop on a yellow. You move a little faster and you don’t dawdle.”
I gave her another nod, but doubted she saw me. “Okay.”
“Red, you leave. Whatever’s in your hands, you put it down, you walk, we drive. Red means I can’t keep them off you anymore.”
“And black.” She stopped at the word.
I tried to shift closer to her, but she hadn’t reacted. “What’s black?”
She turned from the building and looked straight at me and grinned.
“Black is mine. Black is the thing nobody hands you on a job this size, and you’ve got it because you paid for me.” She pulled a hand out of her sleeve to count on it. “One skill kills every signal within a kilometer. Comms, badges, cameras, the whole spectrum; dead, like the air forgot how to carry a message. A second one goes back through everything that was recorded in the seconds before it dropped and eats it. No feed, no log, no helpful witness with a band in his pocket. Gone.”
“That’s huge.”
“It’s loud.” Her grin widened. “It’s the loudest thing I can do. The second I drop it, anyone with a working brain knows something is happening in the exact spot where a kilometer just went silent. If Bhavsar’s runner has a counter, and a Fortune 15 orbital might, we fight over it, and the clock runs the whole time we fight.” She held up five fingers. “Five minutes. From black, you’ve got five minutes to be off the property and gone, because then the silence lifts. I don’t drop black unless red already failed. With luck, you never hear it.”
The grin folded away as fast as it had come, and her eyes went back to the glass, her hand back into her sleeve. Then she dug in a pocket and held something out.
A shard, matte, the size of a thumbnail, warm from her pocket.
“Take it.” I did. “Surface access gets me most of a building from out here. Most. There are systems they keep off the open net on purpose, like closed loops, no wire I can reach from a van, not even with my skill. If I hit one and I need it, I’ll say the word, you find the nearest port on the circuit, any port, and you slot this. That puts me inside the thing I couldn’t touch.” She smiled. “It cooks itself two hours after it goes in. Once it’s in, it’s a clock, and once the clock’s done it’s slag. One shot. So keep it somewhere you can find in the dark, and when I ask, I’ll want it fast.”
I zipped the shard into the chest pocket beside the vial. “Anything else you want to know?” she asked.
I shook my head, started to turn for the van, and then the thing I’d been holding since the storage unit came out on its own. “Do you jack in? Plug something into the back of your neck, go under, the whole—” I waved a hand at my skull. “Like in the movies.”
She turned and looked at me as though I’d asked whether she flew to work.
Then she laughed.
“The movie.” She shook her head. “Kotě. Nobody good jacks a cable into their skull to read a parking lot. I’ve got a skill for that.” Her hands had come out of the sleeves without her noticing; she was talking with them now. “I mean, nobody good does that anyway, only amateurs. The deep net is scary. Like you can do things you can’t from outside, but the skill protects me, somewhat. Najjar makes similar chrome, but I would never put Najjar inside me. So I’ll use my skill. By the way, for smaller ops, like we did when we met, the surface net I can run half-asleep, eating with one hand—”
She stopped.
She’d heard herself. The hands went still and then back into the sleeves, and the color came up her neck all at once, like she’d been caught doing something more private than explaining her own job.
“...Anyway,” she told the building. “It’s a skill.”
She walked back to the van, climbed in, and pulled the door shut. A moment later, a low housing on the roof of the van unfolded a dish into the rain, swung a few degrees, and settled, aimed across the street at thirty floors of pink.
Erika had the driver’s window down despite the weather, one elbow out, watching me.
“So,” she said. “You go down there, you do your thing, you come back up, and I'll drive us home very fast.”
“That’s the plan.”
“It’s a good plan.” She held my eyes, and there was none of the cat-café teasing in it now. “Come back up, Dash. If it goes wrong down there, you say so—I’m not sitting in this van waiting politely. I’ll come get you.”
“You’d have to leave the rig.”
“I’d leave the rig.” She said it as if it cost her nothing. It would have cost her a lot. “Go on. Good luck.”
I went around the front of the van and started across the roof toward the corner, where I’d take the—
The sentence had no end because I didn’t have one.
I stopped walking.
I had a route through the southern service corridor mapped against a single camera. I had two thermal blind spots memorized off seventy pages, a vial, a shard, a cloned badge. And I was standing on the roof of a ten-story building with no idea how a person got down from the roof of a ten-story building to the street.
I put my palm flat against my face.
Roy. Roy would have known. Roy would have walked this roof once and clocked the stair core and the elevator and which door let out onto which street and which had a lens over it, the way he’d done the plates.
“I’ll just go,” I whispered to myself, checked the vial in my chest pocket, and walked toward the stairs.