LITMIR.BIZ

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At some point, the locks changed abruptly. I stopped, skidded back a couple of bins, and took another look. Judge Hawthorne made a face, as though my change of pace inconvenienced her.

      “Well?” she said impatiently.

      How was she not out of breath? I was fairly gasping. “Hang on. I’m trying to plan.”

      “It doesn’t strike me as your strong suit.”

      It was official: I didn’t care much for Judge Hawthorne. “Oh, I don’t know, Your Honor. I’d say I’m doing better now than I was twenty minutes ago. Now move.”

      From where we stood, maybe a fifth of the way into the area, it appeared that the hold was divided into two kinds of locks. It’s the kind of thing you might not notice if you weren’t trying to break into something, but everything near the Remnant was one kind of tech, and this part of the hold had a wave of older-looking locks.

      “What’s going on here?” I waved an arm back toward the new locks.

      “Lockies,” she said. “Command sends out a team every day. So do we. The cargo hold is demilitarized as part of the ceasefire agreement between Central Command and the Remnant, but they still try to keep us out of as many bins as possible. We do the same.”

      “By… what, changing the locks?”

      She nodded. “They’re children, mostly. The governments make the locks, of course.”

      That meant that I had a significantly reduced set of options. I couldn’t possibly get past the newer mechanisms from either government. Older locks it was.

      By some miracle, we’d stayed a few aisles ahead of the advancing guards, who made no attempt at staying quiet. Why would they? The hold was huge, but the aisles were straight. It wouldn’t take long to clear them. Our lead was draining gradually away, like sand.

      We waited in silence for the row of soldiers to pass the aisle with the door, then slipped around the corner and doubled back. Judge Hawthorne made a fair companion. She kept quiet and moved fast in spite of her age.

      I fumbled the return to the door, hitting the aisle slightly too soon. But the pair of guards I’d been avoiding didn’t look back once they’d cleared the space, and I was granted a few short seconds with the lock.

      There was no possible way to break it.

      I had a gun, but its bullets only penetrated flesh, not the components of the bins, as I’d learned too well during a previous excursion to the area.

      Good thing I had a Guardian Level access card. Being a criminal had its benefits on occasion, not least of which was that I had yet to miss an opportunity to pick the pockets of whichever guardian was escorting me at the time, assuming they were slow enough to let me. Normally, Jorin Malkin, the Commander’s lieutenant, would be out of my talent range, but someone had knocked him unconscious during the prisoner exchange, and I’m not the kind of girl who lets an advantage like that go to waste. Besides, I liked to think it caused him at least a little inconvenience when he noticed it was missing.

      If the Commander were smart, the card would be monitored instead of deactivated. I yanked the front of my shirt out and slid the card from the band of my undergarments. The judge gave me a dirty look, which I ignored. The lock popped open on the first swipe, and I threw open the door, marked “North America/Sector 7/Cargo Level/Bin 23/Generators.” We were greeted by metal boxes stacked floor-to-ceiling, with only a few inches between stacks. We didn’t fit.

      I grunted in frustration, pressing Hawthorne down the aisle to the next bin. The heavy footsteps halted, then resumed at a fast pace, looming closer. They’d heard me.

      The judge chewed the side of her face, looking nearly as nervous as I felt. It hit me that the sound of boots was as clear as glass, and I turned around.

      They’d found me.

      Four men at my six, with ten yards to spare. My heart thumped almost hard enough to make my hands shake with the mere force of its pressure, but I had years of practice with adrenaline like this. Experience won out, and my first swipe was good. The flimsy door sucked open. I swung Judge Hawthorne through by the arm and slammed my fist into the doorpad, then the keypad, in a single, frantic motion. There was a heavy wham as the lead guard hit the door an instant too late.

      I touched the lightpad and tried to take stock of the bin, but my nerves were getting to me. I couldn’t afford to keep breathing so hard. It showed weakness, and I had to stay in control.

      Breathe, Char, Breathe. Just not so hard.

      This bin was a sight better than the last and might even prove useful. Smaller crates lined a series of built-ins, and irregular wooden boxes were strewn around the floor. I wasn’t beaten yet.

      I turned to the judge, who was cradling her arm pointedly, an accusatory look on her face. From what I knew of her, she had nerves like boiled leather, and a brain to boot. If she were twenty years younger, I’d have had a problem on my hands. “Hide in the back,” I told her.

      “Oh, hiding? In the back?” she said. “What an impressive plan.”

      I smiled in spite of myself. Maybe I liked her a little.

      “You can’t shoot them all,” she said, clambering past the crates.

      “I’m not going to shoot any of them,” I muttered back. “And keep your voice down.”

      “It’s over, honey. They’re just gathering the rest of the troops.”

      “This card is monitored. Central Command will send a team now, too.”

      “So you are one of them.”

      I looked at her. The suggestion was absurd, but I couldn’t prove it now. It was probably better to bluff, anyway. So I raised an eyebrow and motioned for her to get down behind a crate. I didn’t know if the Remnant would try to blast their way in or something. She complied, but not before shooting me a look so disapproving it could churn butter.

      The lock on the door clicked softly a few times, but the door didn’t open, a process I found unnerving. Why didn’t they try to break the lock? Or the door?

      It didn’t even matter. It wasn’t like I could go anywhere.

      “Okay, we got her,” the guard in the aisle said finally. “Call it in.” Then he raised his voice to a shout, so that it was unmistakable through the thin tin and plastic walls of the bin. “Hope you’re comfortable in there. Might be a while.”

      A while until what?

      “I got nothing but time,” I shouted back. I thought I heard a snicker, but the door stayed shut, and Hawthorne stayed mercifully quiet, having made her mind up about me before we’d even left the courtroom. I settled down in the bin to wait.

       Five

      Time flies when you’re spending your last moments of relative freedom locked in a stuffy cargo bin with an equally stuffy elderly judge who’s looking forward to your execution for high treason, but has mercifully decided to stop berating you over your questionable life choices in the meantime.

      Before I knew it, there was a rustle in the aisle outside the bin, then another click on the lock.

      I considered threatening to shoot the judge, but to be honest, I didn’t have much of an endgame in mind, and I was a little sick of having her as a hostage anyway. Maybe I’d just threaten the next person to enter the bin and call it even.

      “Don’t shoot.” I knew the voice before he spoke the second word. It was low and confident and laced with some emotion I couldn’t place. “I’m coming in, Charlotte. I’m unarmed.” Wait. Was he smiling?

      I lowered the gun. “I’m not going to shoot you, Isaiah.”

      He

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