Page 58 of Coldwire
“We may need to get out of the car,” Blare says, “and sneak a bit closer.”
“Miz, you’ll have to go in first.” Nik lowers the handheld. “Proceed as we planned. We’ll be in within the next twenty minutes, all right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay,” Miz breathes. She looks nervous. She’s been tugging at the tip of her nose, playing with a phantom ring she’s removed.
“This will work,” Blare offers quietly.
“Yeah,” Miz says again. She stops fidgeting, pulling her mask up to cover her face. Blare offers Miz a small earpiece. She inserts it without further instruction. “Testing, one, two,” she murmurs, and Blare nods, hearing the audio through an identical piece in their ear.
“You’ll be fine,” Nik says. His screen lights up again, attempting a new cloning sequence. In tandem, there’s another car approaching, the sound of its tires following behind the electric signals of its owner’s credentials. “Keep your head down.”
Miz exhales. “Off I go.” When she closes the door, its echo is compounded by the emptiness of the lot. Blare winces, quickly bracing the handle after the door closes as though they can suppress the sound. They cast their glance over to me. I splay my hands, not sure what exactly they want me to do to help.
Nik groans, his screen turning dark.
“Missed it again,” he declares. “At this rate, everyone will have arrived for the day, and we won’t have a way in.”
Blare lets go of the door handle. “And you were so picky before on who you wanted to clone.”
“Sorry if I wanted an all-access pass.” While the road is quiet, Nik swipes to a new tab. “Forget the electrical engineers. I’ll take anyone at this point. I’ll take the unpaid intern.”
Yellowing grass blows into the lot and swirls over the hood of the car. Nik sits back for a minute, his head lolled on the seat. As I predicted, it’s started to drizzle outside, darkening the morning and dragging up sludgeand grit. The air has the faintest tinge of orange, compounded by the dreary weather. With each car that rumbles past on the road, another line of dirt sprays near Xixi’s car.
I push my forehead to the window, eyeing the mud bed forming around the vehicle. Nik’s device can’t seem to catch any of the employees arriving to work, but they’re sure catching us in the splatter zone.
Downcountry urban areas are already relatively quiet. But outside the city center, the isolated edges bypass silence entirely and descend into barren paranoia. Here, there are few people with business to tend to. Anyone lurking has no good intentions. That includes us.
“Hey, Nik?” Blare says suddenly. “Channel one.”
Nik straightens in an instant, reaching for the glasses he tossed onto the empty driver’s seat. Whatever Blare sees on their handheld is communicated to Nik without missing a beat. Nik turns pale.
“What is it?” I ask.
“NileCorp.”
I allow no visible reaction. My breathing stays the same pace; my hands are relaxed in my lap. Consciously, I walk myself through every step it takes to seem nothing more than mildly concerned, as though I’m only thinking about my own well-being as a fugitive.
Then Nik adds, “Medan security is murmuring about NileCorp forces in the city. They may know that we’re going after the program. They’ll want to intercept it.”
My concern grows genuine. I can’t make sense of this. Teryn said so too:That program is not something we can access. Nik Grant needs to acquire it first.In what world can Nik Grant retrieve a program that NileCorp can’t? NileCorp hires first-class decryption experts. Yet somehow it’s a better gamble to let me sit tight with Nik as a ticking time bomb than to make a capture and use a brute-force attack for the program.
“If they’ve only touched down, surely we won’t run into them,” Blare says. “I’ll tell Miz. Miz? Are you hearing me?”
They turn away, facing the window to murmur into their earpiece. Nik, meanwhile, slowly withdraws his device from the window, his eyes pinned to the rainy day outside.
“Isn’t NileCorp under the impression the program was deleted?” I ask.
“It was only a matter of time until they discovered otherwise,” Nik replies.
Because of Nik? Is he already aware that they’re watching him?
“And what does NileCorp know?” I push. “About the nature of the program?”
“They know enough.” Nik puts his handheld into his jacket. “They can’t have it.” He pushes open his door and marches into the rain.
Immediately, I open my door too, throwing my legs out and standing. “Blare, stay here.”
“But—”
