“This is a storage facility,” Hagar explained. “We have reason to believe it is being used by a cell of anti-Flame heretics.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “And you want me to do what?”
“Break in, use an eye-snapper to take some pictures, and then get out,” Hagar said as if all of that was the simplest thing in the world.
“By myself?” I asked. “I don’t have any experience breaking and entering. And whatever an eye-snapper is, it sounds painful. Maybe you should find someone with more, I don’t know, thievery skills to do this.”
“Jace,” Hagar said with a faint smile on her lips. She reached out, took my hands, and squeezed them. “You’ll be fine. And let’s not pretend that you don’t have experience taking things that don’t belong to you.”
That jab stung a little harder than I would’ve liked after what I’d gone through last year. She was right, though. I’d stolen things, sneaked all over the campus, and even fought a messenger from the Locust Court. I probably could get into a storage facility without too much trouble.
“Anything in particular I’m looking for?” I asked.
“I’m your handler on this one,” she said. “I’ll be right there with you in the eye-snapper. Just look for papers, computers, anything with information. When you find it, look at as much as you can without making a mess.”
“All right.” I squared my shoulders and stiffened my spine. I’d volunteered to be a hero. It was time to get to work. “Let’s get on with it.”
“Perfect,” Hagar purred. She pulled two more small items from her belt, and I wondered how she’d managed to hide so many things inside the thin strip of cloth around her waist.
The first item she retrieved was a small black half sphere. She handed it to me, and I found it smooth and cool to the touch, though the flat side was a bit sticky.
“That’s the eye-snapper,” she said. “Press it to your right temple, just below your hairline. I need to calibrate this before you can leave.”
A faint rush of disorientation staggered me when I adhered the device to the side of my head. My vision blurred, doubled, then righted itself. The first faint throbbing pain of a headache sprouted behind my left eye. The pain was tolerable, though if it got any worse I’d be in trouble.
“One moment,” Hagar said.
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them they were covered with a faint oily sheen. She held very still, as if she didn’t trust herself not to fall over if she moved.
“Turn your head to the left,” she instructed. “Now to the right. Now face away from me. Hold out one or more fingers in your line of sight. Oh, that finger?”
“You saw that?” I asked.
“The eye-snapper sees all,” she said in an ominous tone. “Or at least everything that you see. And while it’s operational, I see everything through your eyes. Now, time is running short, we need to get moving.”
By the time I turned around, Hagar had banished the shine from her eyes and held what looked like a fancy laser pointer in her right hand. The slender silver tube was covered in tiny dials, screws, and buttons. Its tip glowed ruby red, growing brighter and dimmer in regular pulses.
“This is a key wand,” she explained. “Very rare, very expensive. No touchy. Like the eye-snapper, this is Shadow Phoenix jintech. None of the other clans know about this, and we’d like to keep it that way. Our little toys give us the edge we need to keep an eye on the heretics. Consider all these gadgets to be part of your geas. Don’t breathe a word about them. We don’t want the traitors to the Grand Design to know our capabilities.”
“You keep saying that,” I said. “The Empyrean Plan. What does that mean?”
“There’s no time for a full explanation. The short version is that the Empyrean Flame has a great design,” she said. “It gives each of us a purpose and protects us from the dangers that lie outside our society.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about all that. The idea of some mysterious entity laying out a long-term plan for my life without my input didn’t really appeal to me. Mostly because it hadn’t really worked out very well for me, so far.
Then again, being eaten by the Locust Court’s hungry spirits wasn’t very enticing, either.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s next?”
Hagar fiddled with her key wand for a moment. She pressed a button, and a beam of scarlet light lanced out from the wand’s tip onto the wall between the sitting room and the kitchen. She sketched a narrow archway on the wall in crimson light.
My heart caught in my throat when she completed her drawing.
There was a hole in the wall.
As strange that was, what lay beyond the hole was even stranger. The sounds of city traffic reached my ears, and the faint soothing scent of a recent rainfall teased my nostrils. The side of a building, its damp concrete surface glistening with the green glow of a reflected stoplight, blocked my view of anything else through the arch. A rat, as big as my foot, peered back at me, then scurried off into the darkness.
“That building’s your target,” Hagar said. “I have to close the portal behind you for security, but I’ll be watching the whole way. As soon as you find what we need, I’ll open another portal to bring you back.”
“How am I supposed to get into the building?” I asked.
“The storage facility is technologically inert. The heretics use a lot of jinsei tricks that don’t work well with modern gear,” Hagar said. “There’s no standard alarm system, no closed circuit television, nothing like that. Find a fire escape, break out a window, and slip right in.”
“There are no defenses on this building at all?” I
