Not three minutes later, the same guard came out, head swinging from side to side. Victor had made sure he dropped the keys in the direct path the guard had taken back from the generator building, and sure enough, the guard bent down and picked up the keys from the ground, circling his fingers through the lanyard this time, before heading back into the citadel.
Five minutes after that, Victor returned to my side, his shirt tucked back in, his hair smoothed into place, dapper as ever. “We’re in, kid.”
At least into the generator building. Iris and I still had to climb and break into the actual citadel. But I took Victor’s success as a good omen. I wasn’t the superstitious type, but we needed all the luck that we could get.
? ? ?
I loped through Snake Alley’s covered market. The crowds were thinner on a Thursday night, but there were still enough people out that I blended in with ease. Brightly lit shops and restaurants flanked both sides of this popular Taipei destination. The air was thick with deep-fried foods, cigarette smoke, and more exotic smells. Large snakes nestled in glass cages for customers to gawk at, their thick bodies coiled, appearing ready to strike. Turtles clambered over one another in red and blue plastic tubs, smelling of brine and rotten eggs, so pungent my flimsy face mask was of no help. Made into soups, both the snakes and the turtles were believed to have strong healing and medicinal properties. Although these days, you were as likely to get seriously sick from eating the reptiles due to filth and disease.
More pedestrians had worn heavy-duty face masks since news of the “super” avian flu broke. The government had ordered the slaughter and disposal of thousands of chickens, but the outbreak had already killed dozens of meis and had moved beyond just the homeless or weak. The fatality rate hovered at 80 percent, just as Arun had predicted. It wasn’t considered an epidemic, though, because no yous had died yet, their lives somehow worth more because they owned more. I realized after my illness that I had survived by sheer luck; having succumbed to a similar strain when I was ten years old, I had built some immunity.
News of Joseph Chen’s illness never broke, and four days after I had seen the men with hazmat suits in the Chen’s home, the property was put up for sale. Perplexed, I took my airped up to the eightieth floor. The entire home had been emptied of furniture, as if the Chens had never existed. It filled me with a sense of foreboding, as if Jin had murdered the family and I had been an accomplice.
I never messaged Daiyu to follow up on her friend. The longer we didn’t speak, the more convinced I was it was better to make a clean break of it.
Unsurprisingly, raffles for Jin’s more affordable suits were selling like mooncakes before the midautumn festival. Chinese pop-song beats mingled with the voice of a man talking over a loudspeaker as he demonstrated skinning a thick yellow boa before draining it of its blood. I felt Iris’s presence like a twinge at the back of my head. If I turned, I knew I wouldn’t be able to spot her, she was so stealthy in her tailing of targets. But she was behind me somewhere. We had agreed to meet at the citadel just a half mile from Snake Alley ten minutes apart. The building was easy enough for Iris to scale, being a stronger and more agile climber than I was. Victor had gotten us climbing shoes and handholds that could stick to concrete as easily as a gecko to a flat wall using van der Waals forces, he’d explained. They were so new on the tech market, they weren’t even being sold yet. But Victor had managed to get them, like he got everything else.
The hard part was deactivating the sensors that formed a dome above the top of the citadel, which would trigger Jin’s alarms if Iris and I tried to climb onto the building’s rooftop. Replicas had been made of both keys to the generator building, and Victor had gotten in without a hitch earlier and turned off the autotransfer switch so backup power wouldn’t kick in. Lingyi, hacked into the Taiwan Power Company, was ready to shut down the electricity within a mile radius of the citadel. Now Iris and I just needed to get into the building undetected.
I emerged from Snake Alley and turned down a small side street with a few pedestrians. Dirty walls, iron bars, and endless lines of laundry drying pressed in on both sides. At eleven p.m., the residences were mostly dark and quiet. The farther I walked from Snake Alley, the more deserted it became. Broken windows of empty, abandoned apartments and doorless frames gaped as I passed them. I wondered how many homeless meis were sleeping inside these buildings, which looked ready to collapse at any moment.
I reached the citadel’s towering column of concrete, and it reminded me of a giant stone monster. Looking up at the flat, blank wall, I felt the adrenaline course through me. I stretched my arms overhead and rotated my shoulders, loosening up. We had chosen a moonless night to break in, and with the thick smog settled over the city, the area was dark except for two floodlights at the citadel’s entrance. Reaching into the pouch slung at my waist, I powdered my hands. I’d never climbed anything so high before, much less without a harness.
I took out the handholds, testing them against the concrete wall. They had short handles as the grips were attached to six-inch circular discs able to adhere to any flat surface. Other than the shoes made of the same material, these were the only things that would be keeping us on the wall. As long as we held on. Iris and I had practiced climbing at headquarters with the gear. She took to it straightaway, but it didn’t come intuitively for me. I flicked my wrists in the way Victor had shown me to deactivate the handhold’s grip on the concrete, practicing several times.
A faint stir of air was the only indication that Iris had arrived. She pulled a black knit cap over her shock of short platinum hair and winked at me. “Hey,” she said and tilted her chin up. “Not so bad.”
Yeah. Not so bad if I didn’t plunge to my death to be flattened like a scallion pancake. “Sure,” I said out loud. “Easy.”
She grinned, but I could only see the humor in her dark eyes above her face mask. Iris wore the same black cargo pants as I did, and a short-sleeved black tee. Only she had half a dozen syringes sheathed on each side of her pants, within perfect reach to stab someone with a sleep and memory-wipe spell.
“Is the area clear?” Lingyi spoke into our earpieces. She was monitoring all of us on her MacFold from our headquarters. I could picture her in my mind, in a bright tank top, pushing the black frames of her glasses up as she typed. Arun, who wasn’t needed for this operation, had some lab crisis to deal with and was the only one in the group not linked in to our com sys.
“Yes, boss,” Iris replied. “Will let you know when we’re at the top.”