Page 89 of Coldwire
But as soon as they enter the hotel and locate the laptop, they’re going to start looking at the security footage. Reviewing the patrons who came in and out. The ones who match street footage near Chung’s building.
Kieren barges his way back to the fourth floor. I’m close enough behind him that I follow through on the same swing of the door. The lights in the hallway have dimmed, accommodating the burgeoning evening.
“Right now the police may only be following a cursory report from Chung’s building,” I say, “but it’ll hit the radar of Medaluo’s federal agents before long. We can’t let them look into us until we’re done with the posting.”
“Shit,” Kieren says again.“Shit.”He pushes open the door into our hotel room. “Wake up! It’s time to go!”
Rayna bolts upright instantly. Despite her quick movements, her expression is entirely still asleep, failing to follow the situation. Hailey doesn’t stir at all. She’s probably too used to Kieren yelling at her to wake up.
“Get Hailey and Rayna up and moving,” I tell him. “They have to come with us. They can return to Upsie after the heat has passed, but if they stay here and are taken in, it’s going to loop right back to us and impact our posting.”
I cross the room in a few strides, picking up the laptop bag that Hailey left by the coffee table. I take out the laptop. Then I bend it backward and snap it in two for good measure. They’ll still be able to confirm that it’s thedevice they’re tracking once they find it, but no harm in adding an extra roadblock. I shove the pieces into the laptop bag, then stash the bag in the closet.
By the time I turn around, Rayna’s on her feet already and pulling her backpack on, but Hailey remains groggily slouched on the bed.
“I literally can’t even see straight right now,” Hailey complains.
“When can you?” Kieren mutters. He’s fetched both their bags. While I grab the toothbrush in the bathroom and the pajamas I left on the floor, Kieren simply hauls his sister up over his shoulder, and she flops like a marionette, letting him carry her. Rayna opens her bag to gesture that I can add my stuff in. I breathe,“Thank youuuuuu,”and then wave her along after Kieren, into the hallway, to the stairwell.
“What’s happening?” Rayna hisses. “I was having such a nice dream.”
“Turns out Hailey might not have erased her handiwork all the way through.” I cast a glance over my shoulder. The elevator doors are opening. With a rapid intake of breath, I shut the stairwell door after us, hoping the officer didn’t catch sight of us leaving.
“And we’re fleeing?”
“Temporarily!” I insist. “Your survey wants every major city, right? You can always come back to Upsie later.”
Rayna yawns. She and I hurry down the stairwell in tandem behind Kieren, our feet synchronized. “Lia, if you wanted to hang out for longer, you could have just said so.”
I sniff with mock outrage, giving her an extra push out the door and into the lobby. It’s quiet. Kieren sets Hailey down with a warning that she better walk. I’m impressed he made carrying her look so easy. He’s hardly broken a sweat.
“I’ll walk,” Hailey says under her breath, “but where are wegoing?”
Great question. The first step is getting onto the street. Rayna loops her arm around mine, letting us appear to be on a casual stroll, maybe a group of friends heading to dinner in the city. A streetlamp blinks to life aboveus. It glows turquoise, matched to the night aquarium opening its doors to the right.
“Ward,” Kieren says lowly, turning over his shoulder.
Rayna and I both look up. He grimaces.
“I meant—Lia. The rail tickets aren’t in yet.”
“Even if they came in now, they’re for tomorrow morning,” I say. “We need a new escape route.”
“Are we going to call Kam?”
“No use. If she gave us morning tickets, that’s likely the earliest thing she could get her hands on with legitimate methods.” I open my display, poised over the browser. I’m not even sure what to search. We have to leave in a way that can’t be traced if we’re identified by the police back there. Railways and airlines are connected to our user IDs, as Kam said. We can’t do taxis, either—those are recorded. Precincts can run a facial recognition request through the systems, and the taxi company will tell them the exact route we took. The subway only goes as far as rural Upsie, too.
That doesn’t offer us many remaining options.
“We could always stay in Upsie and hide out somewhere, can’t we?” Hailey asks. She gestures for Kieren to return her bag now that she’s mostly coherent, and Kieren shoves it back at her.
“It’s dangerous,” he says. “Surveillance within a city is all fed back to the same place. It makes it easy for Medaluo to find us just by asking the cameras to be on alert.”
As opposed to lurking in Threto, before anyone knows we’ve gone to Threto. Medaluo’s federal agents aren’t going to run a facial scan on the entire country. It would take forever.
“At least for the night, then,” Hailey says. “Hole up and then take the morning train.”
“Where would we hole up?” Kieren asks. He doesn’t sound accusatory. It’s a genuine question that has no answer. There is nowhere that goes unwatched.
