The Terraces offered views, shopping, and restaurants, all catering to residents of the city longing for a brief return to the simpler, slower life in the provinces of their childhood. Here service was relaxed, the furniture was rustic, and the food tasted homemade.
Matias touched down in a small private parking lot on the Fourth Terrace, next to a quaint café protruding from the cliff. Its front wall offered the familiar carved facade of reddish rock etched with acid to a paler shade particular to the Terraces, where any new building space had to be reclaimed from the plateau. A hipped roof with upturned corners, lined with high-tech solar shingles made to resemble blue clay, shielded the building from quick torrential rains that soaked Dahlia year around. The café looked like it had always been there, but he was 100 percent sure he hadn’t seen it the last time he’d visited.
The moment he’d swung the aerial from the Davenport building, they’d agreed they required a secure terminal. Haider was a shrewd rival. Even if he planned on making money from their deal, he wouldn’t pass up a chance to pry the lid off their servers and rummage through their contents. There was no telling what fun surprises he had stuffed into the file he sent to their in-boxes. If they were dumb enough to open it without precautions, they would deserve everything they got.
They needed a scrubber and a quiet, private location to view their little gift. Ramona told him she had one. Matias had one as well, but if his lifelong enemy wanted to invite him to view one of her safe houses within the city, he would be a fool to decline. Learning more about the Adlers only benefited the Baenas in the long run. You never knew when things like that would come in handy.
Ramona’s door slid open, and she climbed out of the aerial. A moment later Matias followed. Sunlight spilled from the clear sky, warming the tiles under his feet. A hundred meters away, the Terrace ended, guarded by a stone rail, and beyond it an ocean of air stretched, the fertile plain far, far below rolling into the hazy distance toward the pale-blue mountains at the horizon. Wind buffeted Matias’s face, bringing with it the aroma of cooked meat, spices, and the scent of fresh bread.
How long had it been? A year? No, closer to eighteen months. Enough time for a new restaurant to be carved out of the living rock and wrapped in a facade of Dahlia clay.
The last few months had been a tense, focused blur.
Back when Matias had first left Rada, one of the jobs had taken him down to a planet where the natives raced large, fast herbivores. The animals were used to dodging predators. Despite their size, they were skittish and required small screens on the sides of their heads restricting their vision to the narrow tunnel directly in front of them or they would veer off course.
That’s what he was, Matias realized. A Metfost charger, racing to the finish, oblivious to everything else. Except he didn’t have a handler. He was the one who’d willingly put blinders on himself and sprinted.
He noticed Ramona standing next to him. She had turned her face to the sky, and the sunlight dusted her bronze skin with gold. Wind pulled at her dark hair. She caught it and twisted it into a bun with a practiced flick of her hand. She looked like she belonged here, on this terrace suffused with light and fanned by wind.
They stood side by side, bathed in scents of cooked food and sunshine. Ramona made no effort to hurry him along. They were in a hurry, but she must’ve sensed that he needed this pause.
Time was the one thing they didn’t have. He made himself turn to her. “Shall we?”
“This way.” She turned to the right and started walking.
They passed the new building, then a shop selling ceramics, and she led him to a two-story café, with the same reddish walls and covered balconies on the upper floor under an ornate pseudoclay roof. The thick, scarred wooden doors guarding the entrance swung open at their approach. A server greeted them, wearing an apron, a kitchen towel slung over one shoulder.
“The Green Room, Ms. Adler?”
Ramona nodded with a soft smile.
The server led them past the tables to a stairway, up the stairs, and to the left. They passed through another doorway into a small square room in the corner of the balcony. Directly across from the door and on their left, smoke-colored glass blocked the view outside. Matias’s implant told him that the walls on their right and behind them were soundproof polymer covered with a thin veneer of green plaster.
A single table and four chairs waited by the windows. Ramona sat. He took the chair across from her. The server retrieved two mugs of lemonade from the hidden niche in the wall, placed them on the table, and departed. The door shut behind him, and hidden metal bars slid into place with a familiar faint click. A blast-proof door. Ramona had taken “Do Not Disturb” to a whole new level.
Ramona tapped the corner of the table. A console ignited in the wood, painted in silver. She typed in a quick sequence. The dark glass to his left and behind her turned transparent, presenting him with a view of the Terrace and the passersby milling on it. They would still be invisible from the outside, but they would see anyone approaching.
“Nice,” Matias acknowledged.
“Thank you.”
Ramona touched the console. A narrow slit appeared in the opposite wall, releasing a vid screen showing a swirl of flickering sparks. She had sent Haider’s file to it and now the scrubber was crunching through it, stripping malicious code and traps.
Matias pushed a little further. “How secure is this place?”
“The restaurant belongs to the family,” she told him. “However, only my brothers and I use the Green Room. I had it built a few years ago, and it’s off limits to regular patrons.”
Of the three Adler siblings, Karion was the oldest, then Ramona, then Santiago. All three were secare. Karion and Ramona were the closest, separated only by two years, while Santiago just turned twenty this year. Since Karion lost his right arm, he had shifted to full support of his sister. Ramona was the nerve center of the family, Karion was its eyes and ears, and Santiago was the plasma cannon in the family’s hand. When someone had to be removed, Santiago would do it enthusiastically and without asking questions, because he trusted his sister and brother completely.
Sometimes Matias wished his sister hadn’t left to marry a woman halfway around the planet. Simone wasn’t born secare. He’d asked her once if she regretted it, and she hugged him and told him that the only thing she regretted was that his genetics had trapped him.
“Hungry?” Ramona asked. “I promise not to poison you.”
His implant could detect hundreds of known toxins. If she tried to poison him, she wouldn’t leave this place alive.
It would be a hell of a fight, though.
He acknowledged the offer with a nod. “In that case, please order for both of us.”
She tapped the console, conjuring a ghostly menu, made her selections, and nodded back. “Done.”
He drank his lemonade. Tart and aromatic, it was the next best thing to wine when one wanted to stay sober.
The vid display snapped into focus, presenting a list of everything it had stripped from the file. Let’s see, a data tracker, a location beacon, and . . . a worm virus. Given a chance, it would have ridden back to their home servers through their implants, burrowed in their network, splitting into segments, and detonated like a cybernetic bomb at a time of Haider’s choosing, destroying their data.