Page 43 of Lay It Bare

Damn, the piece of shit was heavy. Sevastyan put a hand on the side of the nearest building and braced himself. Everything from now on had to do with timing. He started shuffling down the alley. The cameras were where he expected them to be. Ellisandre drove by at the exact moment he needed to cross the street and get up under the camera angles against the wall. He folded his climbing claws down over his gloves and started up the wall beside the dumpster.

Halfway up, the door beside the dumpster opened. Sevastyan froze, hoping he was high enough that the person below wouldn’t look up. Something heavy crashing into the dumpster raised a loud sound and then the door squeaked shut. Sevastyan drew a breath and kept climbing. On his back Kramer was absolutely still. He must have figured out what was going on and was scared of falling.

Sevastyan scowled. Fuck the godforsaken shit. He kept climbing, arms shaking with the burn of dragging so much weight. The roof couldn’t come fast enough.

Beside him, Ellisandre scaled the wall at twice the speed. He wasn’t going to ask how they got through the camera sightline on their own. He’d just trusted that they were going to, and they had. They made it to the top before him and turned back, giving him a hand over the lip.

Together, they unstrapped Kramer. Sevastyan lay in the snow, shaking with the build up of lactic acid in his muscles. It was a good sixty seconds before he could roll over and get up on his knees. Ellisandre was already working on the service door. It was just a hatch in the roof. They had a small computer balanced on their knees. Sevastyan recognized the device. It was top of the line and very illegal to own privately.

Sevastyan dragged Kramer over. It was snowing even more heavily now than before.

The latch clicked, released from the lock. Ellisandre shook out a tarp and knelt up, covering the future opening from the snowstorm. Sevastyan pulled the door open and propped it up. He lowered an endoscope through the hole. No one was in the space below, but there was one camera. It pointed down a back staircase, away from where they were about to enter. The area looked like a physical plant service space. Sevastyan dragged Kramer to the door. The pathetic excuse of humanity was shivering. Sevastyan dusted the man off. No point in dragging in snow that might melt and complicate the operation with wet floors and squeaky shoes.

Ellisandre lowered themselves into the room and signaled him to wait. The plan was simple. Ellisandre would go ahead, crawling along the ceiling above the vision range of the cameras, and set mirror screens up. The genius of the technology was that it didn’t require actually touching the cameras themselves. The screen would capture a static image of the camera view as it was put in place. The camera would relay the empty hall back to the monitoring station. While the camera would only capture the empty hall, anything could happen on the opposite side of the screen. Sevastyan felt some jealousy when Ellisandre unveiled the tools. “Where did you even get this?” he said in German.

Ellisandre replied in Russian. “It’s a prototype. One of Reevesworth Industries research labs has been working on it.”

“Reevesworth Industries?” Sevastyan raised an eyebrow. “Is this too . . .”

Ellisandre smirked and switched to French. “Government contract, and not the only application of the technology. My design. Tonight’s the first field test.”

Ellisandre went ahead.

Sevastyan waited with Kramer. Moments later, Ellisandre opened the door and motioned Sevastyan inside. He picked Kramer up and slung him over his shoulder, following his deux into the office hallway. Ellisandre walked straight ahead and turned into an open office space that was almost certainly used by a few detectives. Other parts of the building had soft buzzing noises of people moving around. They had somewhere between the rest of the night and no time at all.

Ellisandre pointed to one of the L-shaped desks. Sevastyan lowered his burden silently, arranging Kramer in a sitting position on the floor with his back against a stack of drawers. He wouldn’t be easily seen by someone coming in from the doors or the via the cameras. Ellisandre secured Kramer in place. Not that he could really move with how he was already taped up.

Sevastyan stepped back, checking their work. Kramer looked like a proper package, taped up to the point he couldn’t move, gagged into silence, and his genitals exposed and stapled to the laminated arrest warrant. His ID was still attached to his ear.

Ellisandre and Sevastyan’s eyes met. They nodded to each other. Sevastyan grinned behind his mask. This was a mission he could be proud of.

Ellisandre pointed him at the exit and they leapt up onto the ceiling. Better Ellisandre than him. There were many things he could do, but spider crawling wasn’t something he trained for. Sevastyan ducked back out through the hallways and up onto the roof. A couple minutes later, Ellisandre tapped the underside of the door and Sevastyan lifted them through.

Getting off the roof without an entire human’s worth of extra weight was much easier than climbing up. Together, they avoided the cameras and made it back to the van in only a handful of minutes. The snow was coming down hard now. Ellisandre opened the back of the van and jumped inside. Sevastyan swung in after.

As soon as the door shut, Ellisandre pulled off their balaclava, giggling. Sevastyan tugged his own mask away and fell back on the floor, a grin breaking out over his face.

“Three minutes.” Ellisandre pulled off their black gear as they crawled to the front of the van, opened the gate between the back and the front, and flung themselves into the driver seat.

“Three minutes?” Sevastyan tipped his head back to watch them from his place on the floor.

“Three minutes to park somewhere else.” Ellisandre turned on the engine.

Sevastyan pulled open the front of his coat and the first layer of his under clothes. “Too long.”

Ellisandre chuckled. “If I hadn’t already firmly committed to the gray side of morality, tonight would have finished the deal.”

“Why?”

“You tagged his ear like a cow.”

Sevastyan’s eyes widened. “Excuse me! You stapled his dick first.”

The van swung around a corner. Sevastyan let the centrifugal force slide him across the floor. His hand went out and slapped the side of the cabin. “Can I say we’re dating now?”

“I died. I didn’t break up with you.” Ellisandre swung the van into some space Sevastyan couldn’t see from where he lay and threw the gear shift into park. “We just committed breaking and entering. I’d call that still dating.”

They swung their feet around to the area between the two front seats, staring at Sevastyan from the driver’s seat. Sevastyan arched his back to be able to see them from where he lay on the floor, his head towards the front of the van. Ellisandre dropped to all fours, slinking towards him.