“A lock that phones home is not a lock. Kovara products do not testify.”— Kovara Technologies, comparative marketing brief (legal review pending)
I went down the east stairs with my shoulder near the inside rail, eight flights of strip-light that buzzed as if they resented being switched on, my own footsteps and nothing else.
“Two cameras in there,” Natty said before I pushed through the door. “Both pointed at the landings, not the steps. Stay tight to the rail and you'll come up as nothing. Ground floor lets out the service side; push bar, no badge, away from the street.”
The push bar gave under my palm with a flat clack.
The service door let me out into an alley of wet brick and dead recycling units, the rain still arriving as the fine grey mist it had been all evening. The hoodie shrugged it off and left me dry, which felt like cheating. I went up the alley toward the street with the coilgun strap biting through my shoulder.
The road out front had filled the windshield on the way in, and at ground level it ran wider and emptier than it had any business being.
West Farming was built on long, straight roads made for freight, and at this hour the freight had clocked off. One delivery crawler sat dark at a curb two blocks down. The bus shelter held no one. The towers stood low and almost all black-windowed all around me, and the single lit thing for blocks was the farm itself; thirty floors of pink standing out of the wet like someone had set a greenhouse on its end and forgotten to stop building.
Nobody out here meant nobody to see me.
It also meant that if anyone was out here, I’d be the only thing worth a glance: a kid in a yellow hoodie with a rifle on his back, on a freight road, in the rain, walking toward the one building for blocks that anyone had bothered to guard.
“Traffic’s dead,” I murmured.
“Isolated. Affiliated feet only; which is a Hellboop way of saying nobody comes here who isn’t paid to be here.” The comms squashed Natty’s brash back over the timid, into the version that had cooked my old earpiece in my pocket once and afterward called it a demonstration. “Go around the west flank. North face is all lobby cameras. The west side stays blind to the street right up to the south corner, and then you’re in Regina’s corridor. And kotě, you stroll. Strolling is invisible.”
One day I need to find out what all those words meant. Roy would know… no, he probably wouldn’t. Roy’s probably just a normal guy and my mind made him an overpowered raid boss because of Erika.
Ugh, focus!
I crossed at a pace I hoped looked bored and put the farm’s west wall on my left, and up close it stopped being a glowing tower and turned into a building: a service face of glass panels and conduit, rust bleeding down off the drains. Leaves crowded the panes from the inside; trays were racked deep.
The wall ran on; the rain ran off the hood, and I kept the bored pace all the way to the south corner, and the south corner handed me the corridor.
It ran the base of the building behind a low perimeter rail, forty-some meters of wet concrete, a row of service doors, a stub of a loading dock at the east end under a dropped roll-shutter, and a scatter of big cargo crates left out along the dock, stacked two high and gone soft at the corners. Camera arms reached out every few meters. At the dark far end, past all of it, sat the door Regina had drawn me a route to.
I stopped at the rail, a meter clear of the nearest arc where she’d told me to stop, and put the mask on.
Natty laughed in a full-on laughing fit. “Dashi. You sweet, useless boy. I am watching you put on a mask.” There was no malice in it, only delight. “Over comms, I’d have let it slide. But I can see you, kotě, and I have to be honest with you: on a man wearing a hoodie that exact color, a mask does nothing. That hoodie has a fan club. Nobody out here is going to describe a masked man; they’ll describe the only yellow object in West Farming, and the mask gets a footnote.” A clack, and the delight went quiet without leaving. “It’s mine, though. The one I gave you. You kept it.” Another clack, faster, as if she wanted the warmth gone before I noticed it. “...Stupid. Keep it. Door’s at the dark end.”
I pulled the hood up over the mask anyway, for whatever good either of them would do, and let the fan-club remark die unanswered.
“One more thing.” The comms voice came up all business. “From here I’m half blind. That corridor runs its own sealed net, walled off from the street side, and I can’t lay a finger on a camera or a sensor past that rail until you’re inside and you’ve handed me a way in. So you walk it on Regina’s map and your own two eyes. Until you slot my shard, I’m a girl in a van, and you’re a maintenance ghost. Walk.”
I walked.
The corridor swallowed the last of the street’s grey within a few steps, and I went down it slowly, hugging the building side where the camera arms reached shortest, rain threading off the hood. The large crates loomed out of the dark ahead, the loading dock past them, the far door past that.
I was maybe a third of the way to it when Natty’s voice cut in.
“Yellow alert.” Instant, no warmup at all. “Two badges just lit the dock door. Inside, both swiping out. I can’t see your corridor. Down, kotě.”
I was already down.
I dropped behind the nearest crate stack, two water-stained containers, and put my spine flat against the cold plastic, and for half a second my thumb wanted the MIRAGE toggle. I left it alone, but I was ready to flick it on the moment they walked closer.
Which left me crouched in the dark, the entire plan taking a piss-break for the moment behind a box that used to hold lettuce.
A laugh reached me first, then steps on permacrete, then two voices. A lighter scraped. The smell of smoke came around the crate to find me.
“—wrote me up for it. For the trays. Like I’m the one who set the humidity.”
“You’re not winning that.”
“I’m not trying to win it. I’m trying to make him fill out the form. He hates the form more than he hates me.” The person dragged in and exhaled. “It’s the only thing they can’t dock me for.”
So this was the thing seventy pages couldn’t buy. Regina had handed me patrol cycles down to the ninety-second vape break, camera flicker patterns, a lock, and nowhere in any of it a single line warning me that on this particular Monday these two particular men would want a cigarette now.
“It’s the roster,” Natty whispered, as if the smokers might somehow catch a voice only I could hear. “Bhavsar cycles floor staff weekly. Hellboop scouted a window; she didn’t scout a calendar. I see they take smoke breaks every hour, but never at the same time as a guard. And kotě, they’re spending your window for you. That’s three minutes gone to a cigarette, and your patrol won’t care why.”
The cigarette took its time. They talked about a transfer, about whether the canteen would ever bring back the good noodles, about nothing at all, and they were in no hurry about any of it. I counted the rain and the slow burn of a window I couldn’t see.
Then a boot ground a stub flat against the concrete.
“Back to it before he comes.”
The door clunked, took them in, and latched. The smoke thinned and was gone, and the corridor was mine again.
“Both badges swiped back through,” Natty said. “Corridor’s yours. You spent four minutes on that.” The comms had gone all the way back to business. “Move when you’re set, kotě, but set yourself fast.”
I peeled off the crate and looked down the long, dark corridor at the smudge of a door I was about to learn entirely too much about.
I set myself at the edge of the dark and built Regina’s diagram over the top of it in my head; the lone visible-light camera and its cone, the two thermal arrays leaning into the same wall and missing the wedge of corner between them.
“This part’s yours,” Natty said. “Don’t stop in the open to think. Thinking out there is just standing still with extra steps.”
“Motivating.”
“Mm. Go on the flicker.”
MIRAGE came up, and the wall behind me slid over my own arms, my edges reading as whatever they sat in front of. The visible-light cone crossed without a stutter under the cloak, my shoulder a hand’s width off the wall where the two thermal arrays argued past each other and saw nothing.
I made the corner, dropped near the door, crouched, got my first honest look, and my stomach did something unhappy.
Regina had called it a tumbler. Standard, cheap, swapped in the last two years by somebody who’d noticed the seam and patched it on a budget. I’d packed my tools around that one sentence.
I had picks for a tumbler.
The plate under my fingers was matte grey, and across the bottom, in the soft, friendly lettering that’s supposed to make you feel secure, it read BePalistraSafe™.
“...Natty.”
“What? You’re at the door, the clock’s running—”
“It’s not a tumbler. It’s a BePalistraSafe.”
A silence, and when she came back, she sounded pleased. “Say that again.”
“Palistra. BePalistraSafe.”
“I know what it is. She messed up.” A clack, quick. “That is not on the Bhavsar template; their service doors are Kovara. To be honest, BePalistraSafe looks like a normal tumbler.” Another clack. “But that’s two.”
“Two what?”
“Inconsistencies. I’m keeping a list. Hellboop had it half right. She just got cheap wrong. They didn’t cheap out, kotě.” Natty managed to talk so much, and it was still unhelpful. “Which is flattering, if you squint.”
“Time’s ticking, Natty.”
“Eleven minutes,” her voice softened. “So it’s you, your tools, and however fast you turn out to be.”
What I had was a Palistra BePalistraSafe, eleven minutes, and a forum. I thumbed it open against my knee, found #ask-pro, and typed faster than I’m proud of.
[#ask-pro]
[Dash]: need a quiet way through a Palistra BePalistraSafe (friend’s warehouse. don’t.
[Eddy_Affordable]: Lad! who sold your ‘friend’ a BePalistraSafe? It has a tracker with a deadbolt stapled to it. Touch the mechanism and it pings their cloud before your pick is even seated.
[FluxFinch]: I can help. Educational Purposes Only, obviously. @crowbar wrote it
[FluxFinch]: [tinkererdb://share/palistra-tracker-optout-v2] that’s the ‘disable data collection on your own BePalistraSafe’ guide
[FluxFinch]: fully above board, which is the only reason it’s allowed to exist. what you do with the owner-maintenance path is up to you
[Crowbar]: and do NOT yank the tracker module. amateur hour
[Crowbar]: Palistra logs ‘tracker went dark’ the same as ‘door forced’. spoof it
[Crowbar]: hand it a maintenance handshake like you’re the owner setting it down for service: it muzzles its own beacon, writes itself a nice boring authorized-open, and drops the bolt to manual so you can work it like the dumb little tumbler it’s pretending to be. token format’s on page two.
The replies landed in the time it took me to get the faceplate screws started. That crowd never slept, and a stranger asking how to beat a Palistra at ten o’clock was apparently the most fun anyone in the channel had had all week.
I opened the link from inside the channel and skimmed the guide.
It was clean, faintly smug walkthrough of how to stop your very own BePalistraSafe from selling the record of every time you came home.
Page two had the maintenance handshake.
The faceplate came away in four screws and one stubborn clip, and behind it sat exactly the contradiction Crowbar had named: a fat little comms module doing all the bragging, and underneath it a deadbolt so ordinary I’d have laughed if I’d had the breath to spare. I found the service contacts, matched them against the guide, and fed the module a handshake that told it the owner had come down to put it into maintenance.
It believed me.
The status light slid from its watchful blue to a blinking red, and somewhere in a Palistra cloud a line wrote itself down saying an authorized technician was performing scheduled service on a door at this exact, boring hour. The bolt let go of its smart hold and went manual. A dumb tumbler, pretending it had never been anything more.
“Beacon’s down,” I breathed. “It thinks I’m the janitor.”
“Then stop telling me about it and be the janitor.”
I got the picks in. The core was honest work after the rest of it, but the clock and the cold and the rain sliding off my hood into my collar had put a tremor in my hands, and honest work goes slow when your hands are arguing with you.
“Seven minutes,” Natty said.
The first pin was set.
“Five.”
The second came, then the third, the fourth digging in and fighting me for it.
“Three, kotě, and—” Her voice went to an edge. “There’s a light coming up, at most two now! Hurry!”
I quit thinking about the light. There was a pin, a tension wrench, and the fourth pin set, and the fifth followed it like it had only been waiting to be asked, and the bolt slid home the other way.
The door gave inward onto a darkness that smelled of wet soil and electricity. I went through and drew it shut behind me.
“I’m in,” I whispered. “Please tell me you can see me now.”
“Of course I can’t see you. Are you serious right now?” She said, openly affronted. “It’s air-gapped, Dashi. The whole operational side of that building runs on a net with no wire reaching out to the open net, which is the entire reason I am sitting in a welded chair, in a van, in the rain, at this hour, getting damp, instead of at home in a warm room with good light and a drink and my own ceiling. Have you ever once wondered about that? Why I’m out here? Near?”
“...No?” I glanced around, which helped with nothing, because there was nothing to see. A maintenance corridor ran off into the dark with a low ceiling, pipe runs overhead, a smell of wet soil.
She let out a sigh. “Then let me brief the client, since clearly nobody did. I am here because I cannot fight a Bhavsar runner from my couch. The second you touch their feed, their orbital wakes up and goes looking, and the only thing standing between you and a very polite detention is me, on their net, eating the signal faster than they can read it.”
I wanted to make a joke about eating, but decided not to.
“To get onto their net I have to go in and run it live. I can do that from out here. Barely. Blind, from the outside, fighting uphill the whole time.” A clack. “Or you find me a computer. Any computer. A terminal, a port, a smart kettle, I do not care, so long as it is plugged into that building.”
Her voice picked up, warming toward the part she actually wanted to say. “Because here’s the gift, kotě. They put a Palistra on the door. Real money. They put their HR, logistic doors and manifests into the open net, so people could work from home.”
“From your couch,” I said.
“Not funny. And then, behind it, they ran the whole building on one flat network; cameras, feeds, the orbital handshake, the kettle, all of it, no walls between any of them instead of separate circuits, which would double the cable, and Bhavsar would sooner die than pay for cable twice.” I heard the grin arrive.
I looked down the corridor again, properly this time.
Forty feet along, a doorway stood open, and inside it, catching a single weak emergency light, sat the round-backed silhouette of an office chair. “Hold on. I think I found your box.”
I went down the corridor, past the pipe runs, to the open door. It was a small, windowless office, somebody’s grey little kingdom of clipboards, a cold mug and a wall roster of names. On the desk was a terminal with a row of ports down its flank.
“Found it. Office off the maintenance corridor, one terminal, ports on the side. Asleep, but it’s plugged in.”
“Good. Don’t slot it yet; wait for me. I'll go in first. Give me a minute. Don’t touch anything.”
Then the comms went quiet.
I stood in a stranger’s office two flights above the thing I’d come to ruin, holding a thumbnail of warm matte glass between two fingers, and waited while a woman in a van reached across a street.
The earpiece clicked. The voice that answered was not hers, or it was hers, but processed, synthesized.
“Now.”
I slotted the shard.
“I’m in.”