I grinned at him. “I hope it’s what you need.”
He stayed behind and skipped our meeting, wanting to test the sample straightaway.
My friends’ energized excitement shot through me the moment I stepped into headquarters. Iris was dangling from a thick rope notched into the twenty-foot ceiling, swinging deftly; she had managed to string red lanterns and paper firecrackers from the high ceiling for the lunar new year. I watched, mesmerized as she maneuvered from one rope to the next. Victor was sitting at the dining table, staring at his Palm. But Lingyi was watching Iris too, her head thrown back so her bob swept against her shoulders. She was grinning, obviously as in awe as I was over Iris’s acrobatics. Iris felt Lingyi watching, glanced down and winked at her; there was an openness in her face that only ever emerged for Lingyi.
“All right, Iris,” I said. “Stop showing off already.”
Iris pinned the last red lantern and gold-trimmed firecrackers before shimmying off the rope as easy as anything. “Zhou. Wait till you see what Victor got for us!”
Vic, hearing his name, joined us in the sitting area. He adjusted his cuff links and straightened his vest.
Lingyi settled onto the red velvet armchair, tucking her feet beneath her and pulling down the hem of her long white skirt. She took all of us in with one sweeping gaze, dark eyes piercing behind her thick black frames, then said, “I’ve discovered that Jin Corp has a backup site for their security systems in a building located near Snake Alley. Let’s call it the citadel. Victor and Iris have already scoped it out, and it isn’t as heavily guarded as Jin Corp’s main headquarters. Only eight to ten security guards manning it at any given time. Iris and Zhou, I need you two to break into the building so I can access their security system. It’s self-contained and completely offline. I need physical proximity to those machines in order to hack in.”
“How?” I asked.
“You climb,” Victor said. “I got the latest high-tech climbing gear for you to do it too.”
Lingyi then proceeded to carefully lay out our plan in detail.
“You’re assuming Daiyu’s security code for Jin Corp will work at the citadel,” I said after we went through everything three times. “What if it doesn’t?”
“Then we’re screwed,” Lingyi replied.
I laughed, and it sounded too loud. “That’s reassuring.”
“I can work on hacking the touch pad when you’re on-site. But the truth is, you can only log in a few tries before alarms go off with security.” Lingyi tucked a strand of her thick purple hair behind her ear. “We’d have six tries, tops. And that’s nothing when we’re talking eight-number combos.”
“So Daiyu’s code has to work,” Victor said.
“Zhou said that she has an internship at Jin Corp,” Lingyi said. “It’d make sense she’d have high-security clearance, especially as Jin’s daughter and successor.”
“That’s a bit of a leap, though, isn’t it?” Victor steepled his fingertips and lifted his eyebrows. “If Iris and Zhou fail, they’ll be thrown in jail. Jin won’t show mercy in their punishment—he has the best lawyers. But maybe that’d be better than actually succeeding and following through on this suicide mission.”
I snorted. “Tell us how you really feel, Vic.”
“It is a risk,” Lingyi agreed.
“We always knew that,” I countered.
Lingyi bit her lower lip, then said, “If you or Iris want to abort the mission—”
“I don’t,” I replied, cutting her off. “I want to do this.”
“I’m with Zhou,” Iris chimed in. She was in the corner doing chin-ups on the metal bar. I’d never seen her sit for longer than a five-minute stretch.
Lingyi nodded once. “Victor, are you still in?”
“Do I have a choice?” He gave her a lazy smile, eyelids dropping slightly, as if he were ready for a nap. “You lot would be hopeless without me. It’s terrible odds, though.” He switched to English. “We’re gambling with our lives, and the house always wins.”
The odds had always been against us, but once committed, I was all in. There was no going back now. We wouldn’t know unless we tried.
Lingyi rose. She was the brains behind our group, the hacker, the planner, the boss. But as her friend, I could tell how tense she was and realized how much we had riding on this break-in. If we failed, we were as good as dead.
“I can’t stress how important it is to follow the plan exactly as I’ve laid out.” She looked at each of us in turn again and held our gazes long enough so we felt the weight of it. “Am I clear?”
“Yes,” we all replied, except for Iris, who had climbed onto the padded platform. Dressed all in black and standing perfectly straight at the edge, head dipped, she reminded me of a match ready to be struck.
“Iris?” Lingyi said, quiet but firm.
Iris executed a perfect backflip onto the floor before she responded, “Yes, boss. I heard you.” She stretched her arms overhead like a panther.
Lingyi colored but didn’t press the issue. It wasn’t like her to get flustered. The stress of running the mission was definitely getting to her.
This break-in had to succeed or our objective would be at a standstill. And time wasn’t on our side.
CHΔPTER TWELVE
Three days after I broke into Jin Corp, I got an unexpected message from Daiyu while I was throwing knives at my target wall. Excitement spiked through me when I saw her icon on my Vox. I was acting like a hopeless, infatuated boy.
Hey, I’ve been busy with my senior project, but wanted to let you know they found my friend Joe behind Jin Corp, unconscious.
I had been searching for any bit of news on this, but had come across nothing.
What? I responded, unable to ignore the guilt threading through me. What happened?
Looks like a mugging. He woke finally with a fever and is delirious. The doctors think he’s caught that flu going around. He can’t remember anything.
I broke into a cold sweat. That was not part of the plan. The only way Joseph was exposed to the flu strain was because he had touched the vial I had stolen, or because I was still contagious. Either way, it was my fault.
I’m sorry, I replied. I hope he gets better.
But I knew from Arun that he thought the fatality rate of this mutated flu strain was as high as 80 percent.
They’ve sent him to a quarantined facility outside of Taipei, to try and give him the best treatment. I’m scared for him.
I swallowed hard. There was nothing I could say to comfort her, much less share the ugly truth. I’m the reason your friend might die, Daiyu. Please keep yourself safe, I simply said instead.
You too, Jason.
A soft chime; she had disconnected.
I scrubbed a hand through my hair, feeling like an utter ass and a horrible villain.
“Xiao Huang,” I said aloud, paging the doorman through the building’s com sys.