Cursed

Five minutes passed. I was getting cold but didn’t let myself move, tensing and relaxing muscles to stop myself from stiffening up. Ten minutes. Looking into the future, I saw that the guards inside were gone. I pulled a pebble from my pocket, waited for the guard to glance away, and threw it into the darkness.

One of the funny things about divination magic is you can know something will work without having the first clue why. The pebble clinked off the rock and the guard snapped his head around as I’d known he would. He stood motionless for ten seconds, then crept down the stairs and slunk left along the wall, trying to blend into the shadows.

Why did he go that way, along the line of the wall, rather than towards the noise? I don’t know. I just knew that had been what I needed to do to make him turn his back. I moved quickly up the stairs, opened the door, and slipped inside.

The air inside Belthas’s manor was warm, the entrance hall panelled in wood with pictures on the walls. It looked expensive but rarely used. The murmur of voices echoed through the hallway—the doorway to my left led to a front room with four of Belthas’s men inside but I knew that for the next few seconds none would be looking at the door. I walked quickly past and up the stairs.

There were cameras inside too, and this time I didn’t try to avoid them. In stillness and darkness my mist cloak makes me all but invisible, but moving in the light is another story. Speed was my best chance now. The security station was on the first floor, and as I came up to the top of the stairs I drew my silenced pistol. The door to the security room was open, light glimmering from inside, and I went in with the gun up.

The room was filled with monitors, arranged in an arc around the room’s single desk. I could see the approaches to the house, the rooms inside. Pale electronic light bathed the man sitting in the chair. He had a red baseball cap pulled down over his eyes and his arms were clasped over his stomach as he slept. He wasn’t holding a weapon.

I aimed the pistol at his head, hesitated, then lowered it again and looked at the camera feeds. I counted at least ten guards plus the one in front of me and the two outside. There were views of a set of four reinforced metal doors in the basement level that looked a lot like cells. No inside view but if Luna and Rachel were here, that was where they’d be. There was a guard down on the basement level too … along with a slimmer figure whom I recognised by his hair as Martin. I narrowed my eyes. When I met Martin, he and I were going to have words.

There was a feed showing guards on the stairs leading up but the cameras on the second floor itself were blank. I guessed Belthas didn’t want anyone else watching his ritual. I looked under the desk but saw nothing except a bunch of cabling from the monitors feeding into the right wall, and I walked quietly out, keeping my gun ready. The man in the red baseball cap didn’t wake up.

The next door to the right opened into a small room full of humming computers. Perfect. I shut the door behind me, slipped off my backpack, and pulled out a block of an off-white, funny-smelling material as well as a pair of detonators.

I really don’t know anything about explosives, but being able to see exactly what will and won’t cause something to go boom makes demolition work a lot less stressful. I stuck the detonators into the block, tucked it behind the computer banks, backed off to the door, and looked into the future to see what would happen if I pressed the button on the detonator. Ouch. Okay, it was working. Mental note: one pound of plastic explosive makes a really big bang.

The next job was to find a way for Cinder to get in. The front door was still too crowded but as I moved to the rear of the building I saw that the back door was deserted except for the solitary guard outside. I stacked my other two blocks of plastic explosive against the door frame, set the detonators, then covered the whole thing with a coat someone had left on a stand. It would take out the door, the guard, the wall, and pretty much anything else.

I could hear voices from the front of the manor; the outside guard had come in and was talking to the ones in the front room. Couldn’t go back that way. Getting dangerous now—too many people, too many variables. I couldn’t predict everything. There was a back set of stairs and I moved down it away from the explosives, fumbling out my radio as I did so. “Sonder?” I hit the Transmit key. “Sonder!”

There was silence for a moment, then a hiss and Sonder’s voice came through, scratchy but audible. “Alex?”

“I’m about to be blown. Tell Cinder to go. I’ll open the back door.”

“Okay. Are you—?”

I shoved the radio back in my pocket and looked out along a ground-floor corridor. As I did, I heard someone call out, questioning. Damn, he’d heard me. I ducked into what looked like a dining room. The chairs were pulled out but no one was there.