The office stayed dark around me while she settled into the building.
“Cameras are mine,” Natty said. “Ground to dirt, every lens. You don’t render now. Walk like you are a cheater.”
I left the way I’d come, back into the low corridor with its sweating pipe runs, and found the stairwell at the far end where Regina’s diagram swore it would be. Down. The air got warmer with every flight.
The germination door sat at the bottom of the second one, a grey slab with a badge reader glowing patient amber beside the handle. “Natty. I need the badge; I’m stuck.”
“You’re stuck for nine seconds. Hold.”
I had no idea how netrunning even looked like, but she was clearly doing it. The holo movies always made so surreal, but this probably wasn’t the right time to ask her. “Okay. Reactivating. And—ugh. This is the part where I write to their HR system, and writing is the one thing their runner is parked there waiting to feel. I can’t do it quietly, kotě.”
I flinched. “Do we go around that? Or, can you make it look like nothing?”
“I planned for that; I’m dressing it up as a dependency hiccup. These corpo contractors steal our open-source hard work, and don’t know how it works, so it’s normal. Sync service chokes, badge desk gets a stale read, re-pushes the credential. These old systems do it on their own twice a week.” She paused, and even her mechanical voice became serious. “But. Yellow.”
“Can’t you just open the door?” I asked. “If it has access to that hr—”
“No,” she answered. “Open the app I sent,” she said, and I glanced at my band. “Then I’ll clone it.”
“Why not, though? It would be easier if you just opened it.” I pressed.
Natty was quick to answer. “Stop asking stupid questions and do it.”
[Dash Kloner]
“Dash Kloner?” I asked, but opened it anyway and put my band toward the badge and the display changed into something that looked like a legitimate badge. “Huh.” I placed the badge near the reader.
The amber flushed green, and the bolt drew back with a soft clunk.
“Door’s live. Go. Yellow alert. The dependency story buys me curiosity, but he’s curious now, and curious men make calls. Don’t dawdle.”
I pushed through into the heat.
The stairwell’s coolness went away all at once, and something thick took its place, warm as breath and wet enough that the first lungful felt like drinking. The light was the same pink I’d watched climb the windshield, except down here it had nowhere to escape to, and it soaked the floor and the rust and the backs of my hands the color of cheap wine.
Racks ran the length of the room and up past where the light bothered to reach, sealed trays stacked four and five deep, threaded by a rail that let the whole batch ride up to the bays when its time was up.
“Nice racks,” I noted at the garbage.
Behind the panels the seedlings sat in their thousands, each one a small, perfect green thing under spectrum light tuned to make it thrive; the cleanest objects in the building by a wide margin.
Everything around them was failing on schedule. The pipes overhead sweated. Conduit sagged between brackets that had stopped trying. A pump kept a low, wet rhythm somewhere in the dark, and under it the fans pushed the warm air in slow circles so the seedlings never knew a still moment. Eleven years past its last retrofit, and the only things in the room in perfect health were the plants.
I found the feed along the back wall, a dull metal cabinet with a dozen nutrient lines going in and a forest of them branching out to the racks.
I’d come ready to inject. The vial in my chest pocket, fine needles and a luer adapter rolled into one of the pants’ smaller pockets, the whole quiet plan built around pushing a plunger into a line and walking away.
There was nothing to push into. The cabinet didn’t take injections; it took cartridges. Proprietary, Bhavsar-stamped, a row of them seated in bays along the front, each one metering into the manifold on its own cycle.
Closed loop. No port, no valve, nowhere for a needle to live. “Natty. No injection point. It’s cartridges. A whole rack of Bhavsar cartridges.”
No answer; she was probably battling the netrunner, however that looked.
I crouched and got my first honest look at one. Bhavsar had spent real money making it look unopenable; a smooth shell, a branded face, a status light on the cap.
And then held the whole thing together with four recessed screws and no tamper seal.
The first one fought me. The screws came out stiff, my hands still carrying the tremor the cold and the clock had left in them, but the shell lifted and the reservoir sat right there behind a port I could finally reach. I uncapped the vial, measured the dose, fed it in, dropped the shell, ran the screws home—
My hand slipped.
A bright scrape ran across the recess where the driver had skidded. Fresh metal, obvious even to a non-tinkerer.
I sat back on my heels. One cartridge dosed and closed and useless, because the second a QC tech ran a glove down this rack they’d find the one with the shiny screw, pull it, bin it, and keep the rest.
I put my thumb over the scrape, found the small steady well of mana, and let Repair run. Equation asked how it should look, and I gave it an answer that felt right. The metal drank it and forgot the driver had ever touched it.
“Natty, I need to compromise every cartridge, right?” No answer. “Right, my side of op, on it.”
I dosed the ones I could reach, then healed every mark I left, until the dosed and the clean wore the same blank factory face and there was no seam to find by elimination.
The seedlings would still come up wrong in sixty hours, and a tech would stand here with a clipboard and a problem and no cartridge to blame for. You can’t pull the bad one when none of them look bad.
So I worked the rack. The second went faster, the third faster still, my hands falling into the same rhythm they found at the bench at home; screws, shell, dose, shell, screws, thumb and Repair across the scar until the metal lost the memory of me. By the sixth, the driver knew the recesses without my eyes.
“Five minutes, kotě. What are you doing down there?”
“Gardening.”
“...I hate that that’s funny.”
I sat back and looked at a rack that looked exactly like a rack nobody had ever touched. A great deal of paperwork, coming their way. At least, that was the idea. I was admiring my own invisible work, when Natty stopped pretending the night was going to plan.
“Dashi. The other one is not going home.”
The pump kept its wet rhythm somewhere in the dark, and I let it fill the silence while I waited for the rest.
“He came in for the badge. You tug a thread like that and a man of his quality follows it back to the loom.” She paused for a few seconds. “Sorry, was leaving a new trail. I have him off the cameras; he can’t watch you. But he’s in the logs now, line by line, patient as a grinder, and he’s good. Top corpo good. He’s going to find where I came in, and when he does, this stops being a mystery and turns into a game.”
“Hm,” I said.
“That’s not a plan. That’s a noise a man makes before he has one.”
I looked down at the badge still present on my band, at the borrowed face under the cloned name. A woman, mid-thirties maybe, with the tired stare of someone who’d retaken the photo twice and stopped caring on the third.
TECHNICIAN #126.
“The badge,” I said. “When they pull this apart—do they land on whose card walked in?”
“No.” No hesitation at all. “Their HR is a landfill with a login, such trash they can’t find legitimate logs. She keeps her job, if that’s the thing you’re asking.”
It was a little. I let it go before she could hear that it was. “Then get me out quietly.”
The pause answered before she did.
“No. Here’s the honest version, since clearly nobody briefs the client. To get onto their net I went through a hole in a dependency, of a dependency, of a thing nobody’s patched since the retrofit. It worked beautifully. It also left a trail on their log server, which I can’t access. Their runner is walking toward that shape right now, and when he reaches it, he’ll know which door I used and roughly when I used it. There is no version of the next ten minutes where Bhavsar doesn’t learn somebody was inside tonight. I can slow him down. I can’t un-happen it, kotě.”
I crouched there in the wine-colored dark, two flights under the city, with a finished op behind me and a runner closing on the only proof of it, and I made the worst kind of decision. “Do you have access to all of it? The entire building?”
“Most. Why?”
“Because if we can’t leave without them knowing we were here, we'll make sure they’re staring at the wrong room when they find out.” The idea came out of my mouth a half-step ahead of my belief in it. “Give them something loud. Something a thief would climb a fence for. They spend a few days chasing a ghost who wanted their secrets; they write it up as espionage; they file the forms, and nobody runs a glove down a rack of seedlings.”
“That’s insane.”
“Is it more insane than keeping us quiet? Which you just said you can’t?”
“Sakra. Fine. Bait. Hold, let me find you a worthy corpse.” Her voice was still so creepy. Were all netrunners so creepy-sounding? That wasn’t in the movies. “...Oh. Of course. There it is. They’ve got a terminal that isn’t on the net at all; its own little island, no wire I can touch, never will. A ‘seedling project,’ flagged restricted, readable from Orbital or off that one box and nowhere else.”
I was already moving toward the door. “That sounds valuable.”
“It sounds fenced, which isn’t the same thing, and you’d know that if you ran nets for a living.” She laughed, and it sounded really wrong. “It’s almost certainly nothing. You don’t air-gap a cultivar that matters, you air-gap the one some manager decided was special, so he had a reason to feel important during review. But it’s got a fence around it, and a fence is the whole trick. Nobody climbs a fence for a worthless thing. They climb it because there’s a fence.“ The grin arrived in her creepy voice.
“Where.”
“Up. Ground floor, north side, behind the part of the building that still has people in it, kotě.” The grin folded back. “Move.”
The stairwell took the warmth away one flight at a time, and the ground floor remembered it had staff.
The germination dark gave way to a corridor with a buzzing strip-light and a smell of cold coffee, and up here the building was awake in the small ways, a vending unit humming, a door somewhere sighing on a closer, a radio left low in an empty office.
“Door on your left, then hold,” Natty murmured. “Guard. He doesn’t know yet.”
MIRAGE came up at the word and the wall slid over my arms, my edges reading as whatever I stood in front of. The guard rounded the corner with a flashlight he didn’t need and a yawn he did, came close enough that I could have tied his bootlace, and walked straight on through the spot where I was standing, because a man looking for an intruder looks for a person, not a space anomaly.
The records room sat at the end of the spine, a row of dead screens, and alone at the far edge a beige box with a chunky little keyboard and a sticker that read PROPERTY OF —RESTRICTED— in the same soft, friendly font they’d used to threaten me at the front door.
“I’m at it,” I breathed. “And I’ve just remembered I slotted your shard two floors down. I’ve got nothing to pull a file onto.”
Natty laughed in my ear. “Oh, Dashi. Sweet, useless boy. Who said anything about pulling a file? We don’t need the data. We need them to believe someone took it. Wake the box. Find the folder with the fence on it. Hit copy, target the same folder, you get an error saying that’s stupid; they get a lie someone copied their data.”
So I reached.
The box woke up grumpy under my hands. I found the folder behind its restricted flag, opened it, picked the fattest file inside without reading what it was, and hit copy.
The alarm came down off the ceiling and up through the floor at the same instant, and the whole north spine went red and loud around me.
“There it is,” Natty said, almost fond. “Now run.”
I ran.
Boots were already converging behind me, three sets of them, all rushing toward the records room to defend a beige box from a thief who’d left.
MIRAGE held me dull against the walls while two guards pounded past close enough to feel the air move, neither one of them aimed at me, both of them aimed at the lie. The spine bent toward a loading window with the latch already worn loose. “Natty?”
“Disabling window sensor now,” she said, and I had it open and a knee on the sill before the second guard had finished his corner.
The drop was nothing. The dark below was wet and empty and exactly the West Farming nobody-comes-here I was promised, and I went into it and let the streets take me, hood up, pace bored, the only yellow object for blocks moving like it had every right to be where it was.
By the time the orange van pulled level with the curb three streets over, my heart had stopped trying to leave through my ribs. The side door slid open. I fell into the seat beside Erika, who’d brought the rig down off the roof the moment the night went loud, and who was lit up like she’d been waiting her whole life for exactly this.
“Okay,” she said, hands already flexing on the wheel, eyes bright. “Where are the bad guys?“
“There aren’t any.”
She blinked.
“They’re back there. All of them. Standing in a circle around an empty room, guarding a box from a guy who had already left, very upset about a file nobody stole.” I pulled the hood back and let my skull thunk against the headrest. “Nobody saw me. Nobody’s coming. There’s nothing to chase.”
“I’m out,” Natty said in her normal tone. From the welded chair behind us came, “Carry got out. Support is very tired.”
Erika stared at me, and I watched the whole glorious getaway she’d been building in her head deflate one degree at a time. “So,” I said, and I could feel the grin coming and couldn’t stop it. “We drive home. Boring. At the limit.”
“Nooooo!“