Until we turn the corner around the back side of the building and come face-to-face with a group of workers in full nullaz suits.
A sparking maz barrier blocks the alley off from the rest of the street. The workers haul huge piles of rubble away from a long fissure running straight down the alley, while a techwitch and a spellweaver work to stitch the crack back together bit by painstaking bit.
“Oi, this area’s off limits, kids,” a woman wearing a foreman’s colors says, stepping up to the barrier.
Jaesin turns on the charm. “Sorry, our bad. Just wandering around while we eat,” he says, hoisting his sugary fruit tart for her to see. “We’ll go.”
The woman nods, but her gaze follows us all the way down the road until we turn a corner, then collapse against the side of a greasy gray factory.
“Well, that plan’s screwed,” I say, licking the last of the almond cream from my fingers. “This job just got a lot more difficult.”
“Maybe not a lot,” he says. A link request pops up in my lenses, and I accept so we can study the map together again.
He continues. “If we think there’s just the one pipe, then theoretically any well-hidden location with underground access along this path should work, right? We just need to get down there relatively close to where we were before.”
He has a point, and there are plenty of sewer access points along the way. I’ve always found it a little weird that we carry something as powerful and valuable as maz in pipes running right alongside the ones that carry our sewage, but so it is. Made sense to use the existing infrastructure in the wake of the plague, I guess.
“Do you have your baby with you?” Jaesin asks, circling a few points along the projected path of the pipe, voice neutral. Good. Focus on the job and not my awful slip. I may have made up my mind about the job in my own head, but he doesn’t need to know that. I don’t even want to think about it right now, considering I’ll be tasked with protecting these pipes in a few weeks. At least I’ll have a thorough knowledge of all the vulnerabilities, right?
“I do, yeah.” I reach into my pocket and withdraw a tiny drone, a custom model I built for a school project two years ago. I got a perfect score on the project and a private email from my teacher praising my work. I also got a referral to the headmaster for a week’s suspension and a stern warning that building tools of espionage was highly frowned upon at Kyrkarta Memorial Polytechnic. Like it’s some kind of sacred institution for supporting the learning of Kyrkarta’s youth, rather than mass schooling for the city’s orphans. There were always lots of teachers from outside cities, here on some kind of grant program. Go work with the sad orphan children and have your student loans forgiven! They were always obnoxiously sincere and patronizing.
Regardless of its troubled origins, I love my little drone. At the time, it was a way of getting past my issues with maz, figuring out how to work with it without being paralyzed by fear or disgust. Building machines to control and contain it definitely helps. I’ve tinkered with my drone a lot more since its original creation, and it’s better than anything out on the open market now, in my totally humble opinion. It has a tiny maz port that can accept the smallest maz cartridge available to the general public, and I load it with raw obscuraz when we can spare it, to help it conceal itself. It’s nearly invisible unless you’re looking for it.
I subvocalize a command to my deck to bring up the drone’s operating console and share the drone’s cam feed with Jaesin, then toss the little guy into the air. It takes right off, four times faster than a fly, zipping through the alleys and blocked streets we don’t have access to. I bring up its GPS tracker and overlay it on the map we’ve been using to plan our job, then direct it to fly along the projected path of the pipe.
So many of the underground access points, whether they’re sewer holes or MMC’s cleaner, security-heavy access hatches, are right out in plain sight in this district. Not as much need for aesthetics in this part of town. Obviously not a great choice for us, and another reason we never pulled jobs here. With a frustrated growl, I get rid of the cam feed and map and let the drone’s vision completely overtake my contact lenses, so all I see is what it sees. It’s a bit like being strapped to the nose of a rocket, way disorienting, but I have a much better feel for the space around the drone and where the potential sight lines might be. As the drone draws nearer to the junction station, I begin to despair. If we have to hit the station itself, this job will be twenty times harder, enough so that it wouldn’t even be worth the credits. But then—
“There!” I command the drone to slow and hover. There’s a park a few blocks from the station, a wide, mostly cleared greenspace with markers for earthquake wards, but with a few rare trees standing around the edges as well. And near those trees is a little bump in the terrain. I zoom the drone in closer, circling around to see . . . yes. The bump is a slight ridge to conceal an MMC maintenance hatch, and it’s near enough to the trees that we’ll have a bit of extra concealment. I check its location against the map, and unless someone was drunk-designing when they planned out the sewer system, it’s definitely on the same pipeline.
“You know anything about this park?” I ask Jaesin. He shifts uncomfortably beside me.
“It’s a bit out in the open, but if we hit in the middle of the day, we should be fine. This place really fills up at night, though.”
“Spelldealing?”
“A bit. Hooking up, mostly. A few stimmers here and there. Some harder stuff.”
I bite my lip and restrain myself from asking further. He had a bad year when we aged out of the group-home system and moved into our first flat at fourteen. We don’t talk about it.
“Maybe they’ll be too distracted to care about us, then,” I say instead.
“You wanna risk all those eyes seeing us slip into the sewers? All we need is for one person to call the badges, or for them to discover the missing maz later and have someone call in a tip on us. Day is our best bet, around ten thirty in the morning, when even the late folks have gotten to work, but enough time before lunch for us to get in and out before the crowds. Done with half a day left before the deadline. Extra two thousand creds, banked.”
I shrug. All good points, I know, but going during the day feels like waving a giant flag to announce our activities. We’ve always hit at night before. We’ll have Ania and Remi and their misdirection spells to help us slip by unnoticed, but it won’t stop anyone particularly observant. Or anyone looking for us specifically.
I bring the drone back a few streets and find a sewer cover with a finger gap it can duck through, then fly quickly back to the access point at the park to double-check there won’t be anything in our way underground. Once I hit the hatch, I turn back around and trace the pipe back to the valve we tapped last night, counting intersections against the map to make sure I’m in the right place. Straight shot, no blocks, no extra security, no issues. Looks like we have a plan.
“It’s dangerous,” I say, because I have to. If Jaesin’s going to have a dad crisis about it, better for it to happen now.
Jaesin nods, and the corner of his mouth twitches up into the faintest grin.
My answering smirk is automatic. Adrenaline and hot blood race through my veins, making my skin tingle, my fingers twitch with anticipation. Getting away with eighteen thousand credits’ worth of maz in broad daylight?