“Sorry.” For him, I stopped tapping my fingers on the window.
In the backseat, Alexia sighed. I glanced at the clock on the laptop. Two in the morning, which was damn close to when the other robberies had taken place. If something was going to happen here, it would be soon. The other two stakeout teams were in different, later time zones, so they had us as an early warning system.
We sat and fidgeted in silence for a while. At about ten after two, the mute laptop made a noise. My heart leapt. Finally, some action. The noise wasn’t the sharp alarm that announced human-sized movement by the fence, though. The birdlike chirp easily could have been just that—a bird flying too close to the fence, or a breeze blowing a piece of trash.
Ethan tapped a few keys. The laptop display shifted to video surveillance of the main gate, an overhead angle from the camera’s position on the telephone pole across the street. I leaned closer to the screen, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
“There,” Alexia said. She’d slid forward between the two front seats, and she touched the monitor at the gate’s upper hinge.
Sure enough, the hinge was moving. Both the top and bottom hinges, as a matter of fact, and the locking mechanism on the opposite side, too. And not just moving. Melting. All of the police reports on the other robberies mentioned the front gate being completely removed, and blowtorches were the most common theory on how that was accomplished. But unless our thieves used invisible blowtorches (and were invisible themselves), this was some sort of Meta power at work.
I turned on my com and said, “Alpha team to Beta and Ceti, we have movement. Possible robbery suspects.”
“Acknowledged, Alpha team,” Marco replied over the com. He was heading up Beta team, and his response was followed almost immediately by one from Ceti team.
A series of chirps erupted from the laptop—more micro-movement inside or around the gate. Ethan changed the screen to show all eight camera angles at once. They were small, which made it harder to see details. Something tumbled to the ground on the west corner of the warehouse, probably a security camera.
“I think it’s safe to assume one of our suspects is a metal manipulator,” Alexia said.
“Human blowtorch,” Ethan said in a quippy tone that made me smile.
“So the human blowtorch unlocks the gate and kills the cameras,” I said. “How do they make the truck disappear?”
“Time to meet the magicians and find out.”
We climbed out of the van as a unit and met at the fender. Ethan and Alexia wore similar uniforms of black cargo pants and black jackets, each with pockets for accessories like coms, utility knives, and emergency cell phones. My uniform was a reproduction of my original—which had been burned beyond usability at the same time I was—made of a snakeskin-like material that stretched with my body. This one was still a unitard, but without the low, revealing back of the first, and with the addition of a belt that held my own extra items.
Under the glow of a nearby streetlight, my hands flashed a familiar azure shade, both comforting and annoying. I’d embraced my blue skin a long time ago, but sometimes it made stealth work tricky.
Ethan led. We stuck close to the building across the street from the warehouse fence, keeping to the shadows as we approached the main gate. There was no traffic here at this time of night, and we’d checked the area an hour ago for any transients or hookers who might turn into accidental collateral damage. Should be just us and our thieves.
At the end of the block, we clustered under the overhang of the building’s main entrance, boarded up and abandoned long ago, which afforded us protection from spying eyes. The main gate was across the street, less than thirty feet away, and just as we reached our hiding place the gate toppled over backward with a jarring clang of metal.
My body prickled with kinetic energy as it always did when my adrenaline was up. Muscles and bones thrummed with the power to change their shape, to release that adrenaline the best way they knew how—except a large portion of my damaged skin no longer allowed such a release. It’s like walking a fine line between pain and pleasure, when the pain is just a little too intense and never reaches that peak that turns into the best orgasm you’ve ever had. Release remains out of reach; pain and frustration is your constant reminder.
It sucks.
We remained in the shadows of our hiding place, watching and waiting for our thieves to show their faces. They didn’t disappoint.
Two slim figures stole into the street from the construction lot on the next block, and for a split second I was confused. They appeared to be regular teenagers, dressed in jeans and sneakers. The boy was slightly taller, with average brown hair, and he wore a red T-shirt with the imprint of a white skull. The girl had close-cut fire- engine-red hair (natural or dyed, I wasn’t sure) and wore several layers of tank tops in different colors. No ski masks, no backpacks of equipment. They couldn’t be older than twenty.
Ethan glanced at me, his green eyes asking the same question as mine:
Then again, last month we’d come up against the twenty-year-old versions of our dead parents and mentors, thanks to the genetic manipulation of certain government-funded research companies. We’d had more bizarre opponents than a pair of punk teenagers.
Jack and Jill—their new names until we caught their punk asses and identified them correctly—strolled right through the broken front gate. Targets acquired.
I unsnapped the safety strap on my modified Coltson .45, a semiautomatic pistol most popular about five years ago, when Colt bought the Glock and began manufacturing a new line of hybrid pistols. Dr. Abram Kinsey, our group’s resident scientist, doctor, and general inventor, had created and perfected special magazines of tranquilizer rounds for those Coltsons. Rounds we rarely used in the field, but could be useful in taking down uncooperative Metas and Recombinants without having to kill them. Tonight we were all armed, but as the weakest person in our little trio, I was the only one who actually retrieved my pistol.
Ethan turned to face me and Alexia. He pointed at himself, then the sky, with a single finger. At his eyes with two fingers. Translation:
I nodded. He slipped around to the other side of the building, the wind rippled a bit, and then silence. I waited for a signal, whether from him or from inside the fence. We had to catch the thieves in the act, or all we had on them was unlawful entry, but patience wasn’t my strong suit.
“I’ve got a line on them,” Ethan said moments later, his voice a little hard to hear over the windy com. “The girl is melting a door off a delivery platform while the boy’s backing up a tractor-trailer.”
Well, now we had them on destruction of property. “Copy that,” I said. “How do you want to do this?”
“We need to stop them before they finish loading the truck. One of them definitely manipulates metal, and once they’re inside the truck, they have a two-ton weapon at their disposal.”
“I can get us inside through another entrance,” Alexia said. “Once they’re busy loading food, they probably won’t notice us until it’s too late.”
“Okay, there’s an employee door on the north side of the warehouse, about twenty yards from the gate. Hold on.”
I counted to seven before he ended the pause.
“They’re inside. Go now.”
Alexia and I ran across the street, right through the nonexistent gate. Our shoes were quiet on the blacktop, and Ethan was waiting for us at our entry point. Two blue metal doors had NO ADMITTANCE painted in white letters, like a dare.
Alexia pressed her palms against the door, doing whatever it was she did when she “read” metal. She could identify types of metals, even from a distance, and the more natural a metal’s state, the easier it was for her to move or break it.
“Hinges and locks,” she said. “I can break through them with little damage.”
“Perfect,” Ethan said.
“Do you think they’ll bill us for this?” I asked, and he snickered. One of our workplace rules was to cause as little property damage as possible.
We did our best.
Alexia used her Meta power to tear apart the metal in the left door’s hinge and lock, and as a unit we quietly
