“You should submit a new photo,” she said; “this one is too dark.”
“Yes, of course,” JD called out over his shoulder, waving in dismissal. If she’d been of African descent, the heist would have been a bust, but authorities are notoriously bad at differentiating between people of another race.
When he heard the guards chatting among themselves in quick Korean, he spoke to Khoder: “Have you got the interior cameras tied down?”
“Two-minute loop of empty hallways on every screen, bro.”
“Perfect.”
As soon as JD turned the corner he ran, swinging his right leg out so he could move quickly without needing to bend his knee. He had only a limited window to use the key cloner—if Shin used her credentials elsewhere in the compound, the system would flag the discrepancy and lock him out. He reached the elevator and hammered the button, willing the doors open.
JD rode up. When the doors opened at the fourth floor he exploded out of the elevator. He raced around the corner, too fast on the freshly polished surface. The worn sole of his ocean-plastic sneaker slipped over the tiles, his leg bending unnaturally as it went out from underneath him. The floor shot up and slapped JD in the face.
JD stayed on the ground, spikes of pain shooting from his knee in both directions. The pain rushed and thrummed through his veins, so sharp he thought he might vomit. He breathed hard, pushed himself up, and stood slowly, wincing when he put his weight on his right leg to test it. Nothing serious. Nothing snapped or broken. He walked slow at first, then began to pick up speed—but still he didn’t let himself run.
He reached the skybridge, where the four robots were still cleaning. He paused to stretch his leg, mentally cataloguing all the disparate hurts. A sheet of rain hit the window and JD flinched, stepped back, and nearly tripped over one of the bots. Water rippled down the window, city distorted, bent through an imperfect lens.
He hit the follow button on each of the robots and led them the rest of the way across the skybridge and into the Building Two elevator. The bots whirred and chirped as they ascended, and JD watched the numbers over the door climbing until they reached level eight.
The robots followed him through the short warren of hallways to Lee’s apartment. He set them to “Clean Area”—keeping them within a five-meter radius so he wouldn’t lose track of them—and reached a hand into the pocket of his coveralls. He checked his other waist pocket, then both breast pockets, then the cargo pocket at his left knee. He found his phone—sans battery, of course—Omar’s van keys, Soo-hyun’s taser, but no key cloner. He checked his pockets again, pulling each item out just to be sure.
The key cloner was gone. JD covered his mouth with his arm and screamed a string of profanities that would have made his mother blush.
His mind raced, the security desk, the brush with discovery, the elevator—the fall. It must have slipped out of his pocket. He left the robots where they were and limped back to the elevator, cursing under his breath the whole way. He hit the button and waited.
The elevator doors parted. Instead of his reflection staring back at him from the rear wall, JD came face to face with the long-haired guard. The key cloner rested on the man’s palm, gently clasped like a baby duck.
Time stood still and JD’s stomach sank. Unbidden, his hand reached into his pocket and his fingers closed around Soo-hyun’s taser.
“Did you drop this?” Long Hair asked.
Too late to stop, the taser was out of JD’s pocket, clutched tight in his hand. Long Hair’s eyes shot wide and JD lunged forward. The taser crackled as he jammed it into the man’s throat and hit the trigger. Long Hair crumpled to the ground, splayed across the elevator doorway, still holding the cloner. The doors closed, touched the prone form, and retracted.
A single word fell from JD’s mouth, that sacred word he used sparingly so it would never lose its luster: “Fuck!”
Police dogs leaped from the rear of the auto-truck, data upload-download syncing the machines, connecting them to the hub downtown at the precinct. Thermal imaging rendered useless by the heat blooming from the burning retail market. Visual information streamed in through the remaining sensors: electro-optical, backside illumination, lidar.
CBRNE sensors warned of petroleum fumes and toxic gases in the smoke. Audio sensors picked up the crackling roar of the flames, isolated its wavelength, and removed it from the incoming feed. Voices now—people crying, people talking in tones indicating excitement and/or fear.
Bodies moved in alleyways on the opposite side of the road. Dogs coordinated with split-second transmission of tactical data. They ran across the street and gave chase.
Unit K-9-983 trailed a suspect—tagged cfa4xpn7j3 on the fly. They were estimated to be between thirteen and sixteen years of age, height one-hundred sixty-three centimeters, weight approximately fifty-four kilograms. Traces of accelerant were detected on the suspect’s clothing, evidence filed inside the dog’s memory cube for future deposition.
The dog quickly gained on the suspect—the girl, really, a child—its legs stretching to bound across the cement. It pounced, struck the girl and knocked her to the ground. She screamed and rolled onto her back. The dog stood over her like a wolf over its prey. Blinding flash of light as the dog took a high-resolution photograph, tagged it with the relevant evidence, time, and date, uploaded the data package to the police servers, and left the girl there. Its metal body whirred as it ran for the next suspect, picking up on accelerant fumes like a bloodhound chasing a scent.
CHAPTER TEN
The cursing continued like a monastic chant, until finally JD closed his mouth and waited for his tongue to still. He pocketed the cloner, and dragged the moaning guard out of the elevator so the doors could close.
“Kid,” he said sharply into his headset.
“Already on it. Replicating footage from the guard’s last rounds.”
“How
