The D'awan was a betrayer, a slippery snake of a man only interested in what the world could offer him. We’d thought his goals aligned with ours: The freedom of Wánměi. They hadn’t. Harjeet Kandiyar was only concerned with himself. His business interests. His empire. His world.

  And now it seemed his world was the whole of Wánměi, not just Park Road in Little D'awa. He’d stepped blithely into the Chief Overseer’s shoes, but strangely for him not been vocal about it. What was his endgame? Why keep Wang Chao’s death a secret? Why not claim the glory for himself?

  And why was he here?

  Because Shiloh was here. She had to be. That’s what his last message to me had been about; a note sewn into the hem of my bridal gown, the ky tyah I was to have worn when I was forced to marry Wang Chao.

  Your favour has been paid in full, Elite. So, this is on the house. I control Shiloh. Wánměi is mine. If I were you, I'd get out.

  It hadn’t been a bluff. It hadn’t been a megalomaniac throwing his weight around because he could. Harjeet Kandiyar controlled Shiloh. And my bet was Shiloh was here.

  What that meant for Wánměi, I did not know.

  But what that meant for our mission tonight was impossible to ignore. We had to succeed.

  I scanned the newest arrivals, as the second round of workers strolled in for their meal. And found what I was looking for. Assembly line workers and amongst them was the identity we needed.

  I looked over at Tan, who had spotted the Citizen in question as well. He nodded his head, and moved out from the serving counter with a tray to collect dirty dishes and offer a distraction for what came next. My eyes caught Trent’s as I moved to grab my own tray, steady deep blue held mine in a plea that spoke volumes; take care. I smiled reassuringly and worked my way toward the Citizen I was after, whilst trying to keep Wang Jie between me and Harjeet.

  Breathing through my nose slowly, purposely keeping my respirations down, I slipped into the moment like a well worn coat, welcoming the adrenaline rush; the increase in awareness that came with the approach of performing an impossible task. Until I’d met Trent, this was what had made me feel alive. This was what I’d lived for. Taking something that wasn’t mine, taking something that should have been too hard to take.

  The more difficult the heist, the more I got out of it. The payoff was in the achievement, was in beating a system that seemed so very tight. It didn’t matter how much the item in question fetched me; sometimes I’d steal things for only the thrill the adventure would provide. Sometimes I stole nothing, just tested my skills against a security system as though it was an obstacle course for a professional cat-burglar.

  Tonight would be no different, even though the outcome was more important than any item I had ever purloined before.

  I picked up a few dishes from a nearby table, wove between a group of assembly line workers like a dancer on a packed stage, straightened chairs and wiped surfaces, all the time getting closer and closer to my mark.

  Wang Jie’s eyes tracked my and Tan’s progress in the throng of the cafeteria, but never once did he not place himself between Harjeet and me. A kernel of unease settled in my stomach; so much was riding on this man I didn’t really know. And for once, Tan’s recommendation didn’t sway me.

  Then a crash sounded out to the side of the room, well over Harjeet’s shoulder and out of his line of sight. I watched the usurper Chief Overseer shift to see what the fuss was about, but instantly Wang Jie was in front of him offering more tea, taking his attention back from the room as I dropped my cloth on the floor beside a group of factory workers; their eyes all on the clash of sounds and murmured words of apology a few feet away.

  My hand slipped out and released the identity card on the man I was after, no one the wiser as I stood upright and walked away.

  Before I made it back to the serving counter the management team arrived.

  My eyes caught Trent’s. In a flash he was out from behind the food area and crossing to Tan, making the scene a little more chaotic with a few well placed reprimands.

  I spun on my heel, my eyes searching for Wang Jie, who was floundering, trying futilely to keep Harjeet’s attention on him and not the continued racket from across the room. But he was losing the battle. Harjeet had stood up from his seat. Any second now and he’d turn around and see both Tan and Trent, neither of whom were in disguise like me.

  I stared at Wang Jie, his frantic and panicked gaze coming up in that instant and connecting with mine. I nodded towards Harjeet, gave a good scowl to urge him to do something, anything, to keep Harjeet from turning around.

  His mouth opened, as if to say something, which I knew wouldn’t be enough.

  Harjeet threw his napkin down on the table in frustration and began to turn around.

  I stilled, right next to the management employee whose identity would get me through the security on the highest floor of the factory, and with no other option, swiped my foot out and tripped the woman up.

  I went down with her, a tangle of limps and bodies and dirty dishes, and just before we hit the hard linoleum floor, I gripped the edge of her colleague’s tray of food and sent that flying.

  The clatter was earsplitting. The woman’s scream of surprise was even worse. A breath of air escaped me, even as I frantically patted her body pretending to search for injuries, offering mumbled words of apology under my breath, while the rest of her group of co-workers bent down and started to help us right the mess.

  Her identity card slipped into my pocket before she made it to her feet.

  I kept apologising profusely, making sure my words didn’t carry over the noise of the management team helping her to her seat.

  “I’m so sorry, Citizen,” I whispered, offering a lip tremble and pathetic sniff to follow it up.

  “I’m fine,” she replied, an air of Elitism to her that didn’t fool me. The CEO of the factory would be Elite. No one else would come close.

  And now Harjeet ran the place, who was to say an Elite was at the top or not. Harjeet Kandiyar wouldn’t settle for second place. At home. On the streets. And especially in his businesses.

  I scrambled to pick up the mess on the floor, my eyes darting through the legs of the management workers at the table and seeing Harjeet had sat down again, Wang Jie placing more food in front of him and talking a mile a minute. A breath of air left me. My eyes found Tan and Trent’s across the room, already returning to the kitchen with their own tray of distractions.

  I stood, bowed my head in a show of respect to the management team and in particular the poor woman I’d just accosted, and then made myself walk slowly back out of the cafeteria and through the swinging doors.

  Trent and Tan stood just inside, chests rising and falling too quickly, perspiration beading across their brows.

  “Too close,” Tan said.

  “Did you get it?” Trent asked.

  Both statements saying more about the men than anything else.

  I nodded my head and placed the tray I was carrying on a nearby bench; my hands shook as I lowered it.

  “Lena,” Trent said, suddenly at my shoulder.

  “I got it,” I replied, cutting off any concerned words before they were said. “We don’t have much time,” I added, already undoing the buttons on my blouse and beginning to strip it off.

  Tan had turned around, his back to me, and was doing the same to his; an assembly line appropriate safety shirt complete with reflective stripes emerged, once he’d turned the uniform inside out. Trent’s eyes didn’t leave my face while I redressed. The deep blue almost a grey; stormy again.

  I did the blouse up - now a suitable look for an office worker - my fingers trembling on each button, making the going too slow. Trent reached out, eyes still on my face, and took over the task.

  He had it completed too swiftly.

  His hands lifted from my body, taking with them much needed heat and something I couldn’t quite name at first, and then realised it was comfort.

  Trent gave me comfort; until then, not something I’d realised was so very wanted. Indeed much needed.

  “Get in. Get out,” he whispered, as Tan turned around, the new identity card I’d just placed on the bench beside him, now attached to his belt instead of the kitchen employee one he’d been wearing.

  I did the same, swapping mine over and then withdrawing my blusher compact and snapping the back open to reveal several sets of contact lenses inside. I fished out Tan’s appropriate ones, and replaced the ones I was wearing with the woman’s from the management floor.

  “In and out,” I finally repeated.

  Tan checked his watch. “We’ve got twenty minutes before they have to iRec again. We need to be back here in fifteen.”

  “We’ll keep them occupied,” Trent announced, moving to the swing door and peering out through a crack. “If you’re late, Alan and I will do our best to buy you time.”

  He turned back to look at us.

  “Don’t be late,” he added and then opened the door and slipped out.

  I looked at the floor, my breathing too fast again. The shaking in my extremities just wouldn’t quit either. My head throbbed in time to the too quick beat of my heart. And I was sure that was bile trying to make its way back up my gullet.

  For a brief second I thought perhaps I might be concussed.

  Then I realised it wasn’t that. It was fear.

  I’d felt fear before when performing a heist. But this was different. This was chunky and heavy and distracting. This didn’t offer an injection of adrenaline that I could use to heighten my focus. This confused and hindered and could mean any one of our deaths.

  “You OK?” Tan asked.

  Honesty would have me replying no.

  Necessity had me saying, “I’m fine. Let’s do this.”

  We pushed through the swing doors and immediately made our way down to the far corner behind the serving counter and out of sight of those employees who had just arrived. Trent had placed a tall, bushy potted plant in front of the doors earlier, allowing us a brief window to escape through unseen.

  Once away from the serving area, we’d blend in. But crossing the floor and exiting the main door without Harjeet seeing us, required coordination with Wang Jie. We waited until he spotted us, the seconds ticking by like a countdown to a bomb, then moved in synchronisation with him, as he cleared Harjeet’s table methodically and slowly, and then started to serve up his dessert from the trolley at his side.

  He’d moved the layered server so it was on the side of Harjeet’s table farthest from the door. Making sure Harjeet was looking at his next course and not the exit.

  Ten tortuous seconds later, thinking every drone in the room was surely watching us, Tan and I slipped out of the cafeteria with welcomed relief, only to be faced with yet more drones. This time, they did notice us.

  “Your meal break is not over,” the first drone announced in Shiloh’s voice.

  “I feel unwell,” I replied, ironically not having to act looking it. “I have prescription medicine in my office.”

  The drone buzzed, accessing employee records. Its metallic hand came out and lifted the holographic identity card off my belt, red eyes focused on the barcode and holographic image along the bottom.

  “Proceed,” the drone finally announced, releasing my card and standing aside to let me pass.

  The employee I’d chosen suffered from a minor stomach upset; the records the drone accessed would have complemented my story.

  “And you, Citizen?” I heard the drone ask as I started to walk away, leaving Tan to his fate. I forced myself not to turn around and see what was happening. The second drone could have been watching me, even if the cameras should have all been on a loop courtesy of Si.

  And a secretary from management wouldn’t have been overly concerned with an assembly line worker to even bother to stare.

  “I’m behind in my work,” Tan said quietly, affecting a contrite tone. “I haven’t met my quotas,” he added, the words ones we’d prepared beforehand. “My supervisor has allowed me to use some of my meal break to catch up.”

  The buzz of the drone processing Tan’s words sent a shiver down my spine. I slowed my pace, not sure if I’d be able to stay and listen once I rounded the too swiftly approaching corner.

  Then Shiloh spoke. “You are in section twelve-dash-two,” she said. “Your work is all up-to-date.”

  My steps faltered, I risked a look over my shoulder. Tan’s face didn’t give any emotion whatsoever away.

  His hands, though, were fisted at his sides, white across the knuckles.

  “Return to the cafeteria and complete your meal break,” Shiloh ordered.

  My eyes met Tan’s as he dutifully followed the drone’s command, turning to go back through the cafeteria doors, and then I stepped around the corner of the hallway and was out of sight.

  A wide white walled, floored and ceilinged corridor met my eyes; it seemed to go on forever and ever. An impossible length of nothingness, an insurmountable distance to cross in such little time.

  But it wasn’t the sheer size of the hallway that made me feel so very small.

  It was the enormous task before me.

  Just one identity. No more then ten minutes now. To bring Shiloh down.

  Chapter 25

  It Would Be A Sure-Fire Give-Away

  Lena

  The third floor of the factory housed management, and looked nothing like the rest of the building that I’d so far seen. The walls had morphed into delicately detailed oriental patterns; small cherry blossoms, gnarled tree branches, and fluttering hummingbirds as they hovered over their next meal. It was exquisite and ostentatious. But perfectly Elite.

  The new paint smell that met my nose told me Harjeet had redecorated. In two short weeks he’d made this his home.

  Unease settled low in my belly as I approached the two drones guarding the management floor.

  “You there!” one called as I came into sight. “Halt!”

  I stood still, several metres down the hall from the door I needed to get through. Unarmed. Assuming an identity. In a building whose security defied all logic. If I was a genuine management employee, this was the scrutiny I’d have to go through every day. What was wrong with these people? How could they not see this was over the top?

  The drone walked toward me, the metallic clunk of its feet on the marble floor echoed off the walls and reverberated inside my head. Its pace seemed laboriously slow. Minutes seemed to tick by, when in fact it was only seconds. But too long. I had to get in and get out before the woman I’d left down in the cafeteria needed to iRec.

  Before the kitchen worker I was meant to be needed to do the same.

  The drone stopped in front of me. “Prepare for eScan,” it announced in Shiloh’s voice.

  Its hand came up, the green light of the iRec laser already flickering, a humming adding to the buzz the drone continually made. I rested my chin on its cool fingertips, felt them grip my jaw just like the one at the front gate of the complex had, and waited for the laser to scan.

  Five seconds later, which felt like five hours, the drone released its grip and stood back.

  “You may proceed,” it declared and for a second I couldn’t move. Literally stuck to the floor with dread. Anxiety making all normal functions vanish. It was pure adrenaline that forced me onward. And the fact I’d relied on it too many times to count in the past.

  Going forward, where others would have fled, felt natural. Long ago had I lost any instinctive physiological response of flight. Fight was all that I knew. And all that got me past the drone and through the management offices’ doors.

  Inside it was deserted. Cameras filming, but again, God willing, on a loop courtesy of Simon back at the base. But no drones. This lack of oversight had me pausing. Drones had been on every corner, in front of every door getting here. They’d tracked my progress, only iRec-ing me when I used the elevator, but otherwise if I didn’t stop at their door, they let me pass.

  And yet in here, the most sensitive location in the complex, there were none.

  The reception area was unmanned. The telephone system switched to automatic. The chair that belonged to the woman I was impersonating sat empty. I scanned her desk, swiped her vid-screen and used the eScanner at the side to access the system. Immediately finding that most of it was locked above her security level.

  I didn’t delay any longer. There would be nothing of note at her station. What I needed was further inside.

  Her retinal scan allowed me access to all of the offices; she served every one of the management team so could come and go as she pleased. I bypassed all of middle management and went straight for the CEO’s corner, hesitating at the door only long enough to steady my breaths. The green light of the eScan laser felt ominous, but it didn’t sound an alarm when it was done.

  I stepped into a replica of Harjeet’s private quarters at Park Road. Luxurious fabrics in rich colours, swathes of velvet and heavily embroidered silk materials hanging in strategic places, cutting off the view to certain spots around the room. The main area held a large dark wooden desk, something that would be difficult for the average Citizen to acquire. Not native timber, nothing like any tree I had ever seen. Inset in the middle was a rectangle of leather, somehow making the entire object seem more regal for it. I could smell the leather from where I stood several feet away. It matched the oversized chair behind it.

  To the side was a more casual setting; low lying square table, copious brightly coloured and tasselled cushions scattered across the floor. Potted palms in brass pots, intricately woven silk rugs covering opulent looking tiles, decorative sofas and chaise longues placed just so. There were vases and tall smoking pipes and detailed dishes sitting on a series of shelves. With tiny knick-knacks next to leather bound books completing the look to perfection.

  But then, I’d never expected anything less than faultless D'awan decor once I’d realised this was Harjeet’s domain.