The swap dumped me straight into an air-conditioned lobby with floors so polished I could see my own reflection staring back, wide-eyed and soaked through like a drowned rat wandering in off the street looking for a loan.
Water sheeted off my coat and pooled around my boots in a spreading dark stain against pale gray tile.
Somewhere behind my sternum, my brain was still catching up with the fact that I’d been standing chest-deep in floodwater dragging a woman’s kid out through a vent thirty seconds ago, and now I was standing in what looked like the reception area of a bank that had never once considered the possibility of rain.
A woman behind a curved desk looked up from her terminal.
Corporate badge, corporate blazer, her features locked into the practiced, calibrated neutrality of someone on hour seven of an eight-hour shift.
Her chin dipped, her head tilted, and her eyes made a smooth, uninterrupted sweep down from my face to the gray tile where water was actively pooling around the welt of my left boot.
“Sir,” she said.
“You’re dripping on the atrium floor.”
Before I could produce anything resembling a coherent excuse, a voice cut in from my left, easy and unbothered, like this was the most normal thing in the world.
“There he is.” Drez clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to slosh more water out of my sleeve.
“Told you he’d make it. Man’s reliable, just slow.” He turned to the receptionist with the exact tone of a coworker running interference on someone else’s tardiness.
“Third-floor plumbing again. Whole east riser blew a gasket, flooded the stairwell landing. He got the worst of it coming down.”
The receptionist’s mouth twitched.
“Again? Maintenance filed a closure ticket on that riser two cycles ago.”
“Yeah, well.” Drez shrugged with the weary solidarity of a man who’d fought this exact bureaucratic battle before and lost.
“You know how the ticket queue is. I’ll flag it up the chain again, for all the good it’ll do.”
She sighed, the universal sigh of every front-desk employee who has ever been asked to care about a problem that isn’t hers, and turned back to her screen.
Just like that, I stopped being a soaking-wet anomaly and became a minor facilities inconvenience, filed and forgotten.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and gave Drez a look that hopefully conveyed both gratitude and are you kidding me with the plumbing thing.
“Nice to see you too, partner,” he murmured under his breath, steering me toward a low cart parked against the wall.
“You’re late. Crate’s yours now.”
My HUD lit up before I could ask what crate.
A soft chime, then Ossane’s clipped shorthand scrolling up the corner of my vision.
OBJECTIVE UPDATED: ESHKAR — SECURE ASSET (GLASS HEART) INTACT.
TRANSPORT TO EXTERIOR RECEPTACLE, LOADING DOCK 4.
CRATE ASSIGNED: CONTENTS FRAGILE, NO IMPACT TOLERANCE.
The cart held a single crate, matte black, roughly the size of a filing cabinet turned on its side, with foam bracing visible through a gap in the lid where somebody hadn’t quite closed it right.
Whatever the Glass Heart was, it apparently didn’t like being jostled, dropped, or looked at wrong.
Something in me wanted very badly to just walk away from that cart.
Leave it in the lobby, let the receptionist deal with it, and go find a towel and a corner to sit in until my body remembered how to be dry.
But I knew exactly what that would cost.
Drez had spent however long building a story around a delivery crew that included me.
If I bailed on the crate now, the whole cover story he’d stitched together came apart, and I’d be the reason a heist crew’s infiltration collapsed before it even got past the lobby carpet.
“Checkpoint’s this way,” Drez said, voice dropping to something more businesslike now that we were moving.
“They’re going to run your ID and pat down your gear. Don’t fight it, don’t get cute. Just let them see exactly what they expect to see.”
“And what do they expect to see?”
“A guy who works here.”
Turned out that was easier said than done, mostly because I did not, in fact, work here.
The checkpoint was a narrow steel archway staffed by two guards in gray-and-black uniforms, the kind with enough hardware clipped to their belts to make me nervous about sudden movements.
One of them waved a scanner wand over me while the other watched a screen displaying, presumably, everything the wand picked up.
“Contestant registration confirmed,” the guard with the screen said, mostly to himself.
“Gear manifest, personal effects only. No restricted items detected.”
I held very still and thought very hard about nothing in particular, which is a difficult thing to do when you’re standing in a puddle of your own runoff being scanned for contraband by armed strangers.
“No artifacts flagged from prior sector,” the guard added, glancing at his colleague.
“Clean crossover.”
I hadn’t even considered that they’d be checking for things I might have carried over from Namarre.
Made sense, though.
Wouldn’t want some flood-zone debris or rescue gear wandering into a corporate vault under the guise of a delivery worker.
I’d left everything from that job behind with Ilvane, notes and all, and apparently that had been the right call.
“He’s clean,” the first guard said, stepping back.
“Go ahead.”
Drez nodded like this was all perfectly routine, and we pushed the cart through.
A notification blinked at the edge of my vision, cheerful and entirely uninvited.
SPONSORED CONTENT: STAY DRY, STAY WINNING!
Redeem a Cascade Fabrics moisture-wicking travel set upon confirmed survival!
Because nobody wants to accept their prize money smelling like a wet dog.
Vassago’s idea of sympathy, apparently, was targeted advertising.
I ignored it, though some small, petty part of me filed away the fact that I would absolutely be cashing that in if I made it out of this building.
The corridor beyond the checkpoint opened up into something resembling the interior of a reinforced vault.
Overhead, smoked glass domes lined the ceiling in alternating rows, spaced closely enough to eliminate any blind spots down the center of the hall.
Thirty feet ahead, two guards crossed at the junction.
Their boots hit the tile in offset rhythms, leaving maybe an eleven-second window between their sweeps.
At the far end stood a heavy vault door with an active blue keypad, paired with a narrower steel hatch marked for service access.
“I’m doing the not-dying thing.”
“Same thing here, but try to look bored while you do it.”
A guard fell into step alongside us near the junction, clipboard in hand, the exact posture of a man about to ask questions he didn’t care about the answers to.
“Delivery manifest for Dock 4?”
“Yep.” Drez didn’t even slow down.
“Fragile asset, priority handling, already logged twice because your intake system flagged it as a duplicate entry this morning. I’ve got a support ticket number if you want it, but fair warning, it’s eleven digits and I will read every single one of them to you.”
The guard tapped his stylus against the edge of his clipboard, glanced down at the empty lines on his log sheet, and gave a brief, dismissive flick of his fingers toward the corridor.
“That’s fine. Go ahead.”
“Appreciate it.” Drez gave him a two-finger salute and kept walking, and I kept my mouth shut and my eyes on the cart, because it turned out the fastest way through a guarded corridor wasn’t stealth or violence; it was the universal human instinct to avoid paperwork.
We reached the loading dock gate without further incident, a wide rolling door with its own scanner arch, and the crate passed through clean, the machine reading off some code stenciled into the crate’s side that satisfied whatever database was watching.
Beyond the gate, gray daylight and the smell of wet asphalt.
Loading dock four sat maybe forty feet out, an open bay with a receptacle mounted on the exterior wall, a socket shaped for something I still hadn’t seen and already didn’t want to break.
“That’s it,” Drez said, some of the tension easing out of his shoulders.
“Get the crate in the receptacle, we log the drop, we’re done.”
He was wrong, but I didn’t know that yet either.
What I knew was that the moment we turned to head back inside for whatever came next in his plan, a new voice crackled over a floor speaker, calm and administrative in the way that always meant trouble for people like us.
“Attention, corridor seven-B. Unscheduled route audit in progress. All personnel remain in place pending clearance.”
Drez went very still.
“That’s our hallway.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning somebody upstairs decided to run a live check on exactly the path we walked in on, and now there’s a warm body watching that corridor in real time instead of a camera nobody’s looking at.” He said it flat, but I caught the edge underneath it, the sound of a plan cracking down the middle.
“I can’t move things when somebody’s actually looking. Doesn’t matter if it’s a lens or a set of eyes. Conscious observer, active feed, either one kills it dead.”
“So we go back the way we came and just look bored again.”
“Not with an active monitor sitting on that hallway, we don’t. Anything that shifts under my hand while somebody’s actively watching, it just stays put. Won’t even twitch. If I try to pull us through and it doesn’t work, we’re standing there looking exactly as suspicious as we are.”
I looked back through the gate at the corridor we’d just walked, the same domed cameras, the same guards, only now with the added weight of somebody in a control room somewhere actually paying attention instead of letting the footage roll past unwatched.
The dock behind us was open air, sure, but it fed back into the building through exactly one route, and that route had just been sealed off by nothing more dramatic than a routine audit some bored supervisor had decided to run at the worst possible moment.
“Okay,” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected, mostly because panicking wasn’t going to get the crate anywhere it needed to be.
“So we don’t go back that way.”
Drez exhaled through his nose, glancing along the dock wall, past a row of secondary doors marked with stenciled numbers I didn’t recognize and didn’t like the look of.
Every one of them led farther into the building we’d come here to rob, not out of it.
“There’s another way around,” he said slowly, the words carrying more hope than conviction.
“There’s always another way around. We just have to find it before that audit clears and somebody notices two delivery guys standing at a dock they already finished delivering to.”
I looked at the crate sitting on the cart between us, foam bracing and all, which still needed to be seated in a receptacle we hadn’t reached yet, and then at the row of unfamiliar doors waiting past the edge of the loading bay, and understood, with the particular clarity that comes right before things get worse, that getting into this place had been the easy part.