Chapter 30: The Union Hall Reckoning
The union hall loomed before them, a hulking artifact of a more optimistic era. Its stone steps were worn concave by decades of trudging feet. The promised door—a heavy oak slab banded with iron—was indeed slightly ajar, a dark inch of invitation. No light spilled out. Liam pushed it open, the groan of its hinges echoing into a vast, hollow darkness.
The air inside was tomb-cold and tasted of dust, old paper, and the faint, sweet decay of forgotten lunches. Fading daylight from the high, grime-caked windows cut weak shafts through the gloom, illuminating floating motes and the outlines of stacked chairs. The space was a cavernous auditorium. At its center, a single, brilliant spotlight stabbed down from the ceiling, illuminating a worn leather armchair. It sat on the empty stage like a throne in a deserted theater.
A voice, amplified and disembodied, echoed from the shadows of the rafters. It was calm, digitally smooth, devoid of origin. “Welcome. Please step into the light.”
They exchanged a look. Trap. Always a trap. But they walked down the center aisle, their footsteps unnaturally loud on the hardwood. They stopped at the edge of the circle of light.
“The rules are simple,” the voice said. “You are here to demonstrate compliance. To prove you understand the new hierarchy. Remove your clothes. Everything.”
Liam’s jaw tightened. Evie’s breath hitched. This wasn’t about sex. This was about dismantling them, reducing them to raw material in front of an unseen audience.
“Do it,” the voice insisted, a hint of impatience bleeding through the modulator. “Or the photograph of the pier goes to the Chronicle in sixty seconds. Senator Riggs’s career ends, but so does any chance you have of walking out of this city.”
Liam reached for the hem of his sweater. He pulled it over his head, his movements stiff. His skin prickled in the cold air. He unbuckled his belt, let his jeans and boxers fall, kicking them aside. He stood naked in the light, his body a map of recent violence, his expression shuttered.
“Evie,” the voice coaxed. “Your turn.”
Her fingers felt numb. She unzipped her dress, the sound obscenely loud. The fabric slid from her shoulders, puddled at her feet. She stepped out of it, then removed her bra, her panties. The spotlight was a physical weight, a microscope lens. She crossed her arms over her breasts, not from modesty, but from the sheer vulnerability of being observed so clinically.
“Don’t hide,” the voice chided. “Arms at your sides. Let us see the merchandise.”
She forced her arms down, every muscle screaming.
“Liam, sit in the chair.”
He did, the leather creaking under his weight. The spotlight haloed him, glinting off the scar on his ribcage.
“Evie, kneel before him. Take him into your mouth. Show him your… gratitude for his protection.”
Her eyes locked with Liam’s. In his, she saw a fury so deep it had crystallized into a dark, accepting ice. He gave a minute nod. Do it. Survive.
She knelt on the hard, dusty stage floor. The cold seeped into her knees. She leaned forward, her curls brushing his thighs. He was soft. The clinical absurdity of it almost made her laugh, a hysterical bubble in her throat. She took him in her hand, feeling the latent weight of him. She bent her head, her lips parting.
She started slowly, a flat, wet swipe of her tongue from base to tip. She tasted skin, salt, the faint, clean smell of him that was so inherently Liam it hurt. She took the head into her mouth, suckling gently, using her hand to coax blood into the tissue. She felt him thicken, responding not to desire but to her touch, to the terrible intimacy of the command. Her other hand gripped his thigh for balance.
“That’s it,” the voice murmured, a connoisseur’s tone. “Work him. Make him hard for you.”
She hollowed her cheeks, sliding deeper, taking more of his length. She used her tongue in firm, circling presses along the sensitive ridge. His hand came to rest on the back of her head, not forcing, just anchoring. His breathing deepened. She felt him fully engorge, his cock becoming a rigid, heated weight on her tongue. She moved her head in a steady rhythm, her saliva slicking the way, the wet, rhythmic sounds amplified in the silent hall.
“Good. Very good.” The voice paused. “Now, Liam. Stand her up. Bend her over the arm of the chair. Take her from behind. Do it like you mean it. Like you’re claiming what’s yours in front of God and everyone.”
Liam’s hand tightened in her hair, gently pulling her off him. He stood, his erection jutting aggressively. He took her elbow, lifting her. His touch was firm, impersonal. He turned her, pressing her torso down over the wide, cold leather arm of the chair. Her cheek pressed against the smooth grain. He positioned her hips, spreading her legs wider with his knee.
The voice was a whisper in the dark. “Fuck her, teacher. Show us how you punish a dirty mouth.”
Liam’s hand landed on her ass, a sharp, stinging smack that echoed. She gasped. He guided himself to her entrance, rubbing the broad head through her wetness, which was a confused mix of arousal and terror. He didn’t tease. He pushed.
He entered her in one long, relentless drive, filling her utterly, a stretch that bordered on pain. She cried out, the sound swallowed by the leather.
He set a punishing pace from the first stroke. Each thrust drove her body forward against the chair, the hard edge digging into her hips. There was no tenderness, no romantic pretense. This was pure, raw catharsis—a fuck that was anger, defiance, and a twisted show of unity all at once. His pelvis slammed against her ass with a wet, meaty sound.
“Harder,” the voice commanded, thrilled.
Liam obeyed. His fingers dug into the flesh of her hips, holding her in place as he pistoned into her. The chair scooted forward an inch with their force. The air left her lungs in punched-out gasps. The sensation was overwhelming, a brutal friction that ignited her nerves. Despite everything, a deep, unwanted heat coiled in her gut.
He leaned over her, his chest hot against her back, his mouth at her ear. His whisper was for her alone, a raw thread beneath the performance. “You’re mine. Only mine. This is ours. Fuck them.”
His hand snaked around her hip, his fingers finding her clit. He rubbed rough, urgent circles. The dual assault—the deep, brutal penetration and the sharp, focused friction—tipped her over an edge she hadn’t known she was near. An orgasm ripped through her, violent and silent, a seizing internal clench that made her vision whiten at the edges. Her cunt gripped him like a fist.
Feeling her climax, Liam lost his last shred of control. A guttural groan tore from his throat. He buried himself to the hilt and pulsed, his release hot and endless inside her. He shuddered through it, his full weight pressing her down into the leather.
For a moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing.
Slow, deliberate applause echoed from the darkness. One person. Clap. Clap. Clap.
The spotlight abruptly widened, illuminating a section of the front row. A man sat there, in a fine wool coat. He held a small device—the voice modulator. In his other hand, a tablet. It was Deputy Chief Corrigan. His face, so righteous on the news, was placid, intelligent, and utterly cold.
“An admirable performance,” Corrigan said, his real voice a bland baritone. “Adequate proof of concept. You can get dressed.”
They separated, the movement clumsy. They gathered their clothes, pulling them on with trembling fingers, not bothering with modesty. The fabric felt like a feeble shield.
Corrigan watched, tapping his tablet. “The pier photos are quite dramatic. The senator is a clumsy, desperate creature. Useful, but weak. You, however… you are adapting.”
“What do you want?” Liam’s voice was hoarse.
“I want you to understand the architecture, as my email said. You have a key. The drive. I have the gates—the operational security, the political cover, the entire apparatus that makes Facility A-17 function.” He stood, walking up the steps to the stage. He was taller than he seemed on television. “You thought you were exposing a secret. You’ve just applied for a position within it.”
Evie felt cold. “We’re not joining you.”
“Of course you are. The alternative is the photo, a scandal that buries Riggs and paints you as his accomplices—a graphic designer and a teacher running a blackmail scheme gone wrong. You’ll spend decades in prison, where my colleagues will ensure you have a very memorable stay.” He smiled. “Or, you become assets. You’ve demonstrated resourcefulness, nerve, and a certain… moral flexibility. Traits we value.”
He held up the tablet. It showed the security footage from the pier, frozen on the image of Evie on her knees.
“This is your signature now. This is the price of admission. We own this moment. We can weaponize it, or we can let it be the last ugly secret you ever have to keep.” He lowered the tablet. “Your task is simple. Retrieve the drive you so cleverly hid. Bring it to me. That is your act of faith. Then, we discuss your roles. Evie, your eye for aesthetics could be useful in our… client presentations. Liam, your talent for instruction could be applied to training our acquisitions in compliance.”
Liam took a half-step forward. Corrigan didn’t flinch.
“You’re talking about slavery,” Liam said.
“I’m talking about systemic efficiency. Everyone has a function. You’ve just proven yours.” Corrigan checked his watch. “You have six hours. Bring me the drive. Meet me at the old water filtration plant on the industrial spur. Come alone, together, I don’t care. But if you don’t, or if you try to copy the data, the pier photos launch, and a team will be sent to collect you. The collection process is not gentle.”
He turned and walked back down the aisle, his footsteps echoing. At the door, he paused. “Six hours. The clock starts now.”
The heavy door thudded shut behind him, leaving them alone in the silent, spotlit auditorium, the scent of sex and dust hanging in the air between them. The leather chair bore the imprint of their bodies.
Evie looked at Liam, her voice a whisper. “The bench.”
He nodded, his face grim. They had hidden their only weapon, and now they were being ordered to hand it over to the enemy. But Corrigan had made one mistake. He’d shown them the architecture. And in any structure, if you own a key, you can find more than one door.
The door’s echo faded into a thick, swallowing silence. Dust motes danced in the harsh spotlight, the only movement in the hollowed-out hall. Evie stared at the space where Corrigan had been, her mind a static blur.
Liam bent, retrieving his sweater from the floor. The fibers felt alien, scratchy against his skin. He pulled it on, hiding the map of bruises, the physical evidence. “We can’t give it to him.”
“Obviously,” Evie snapped, the word cracking. She winced, immediately shaking her head. “Sorry. I’m just… He has photos. He has everything.”
“He has a photograph,” Liam corrected, his voice low and focused. He stepped closer to her, out of the light’s center, into the cooler dark. “He has leverage. We have the actual goddamn root system. The drive isn’t just a key, Evie. It’s a bulldozer.”
She finally looked at him, really looked. His eyes weren’t just furious. They were calculating, the history teacher piecing together a corrupt timeline. “He wants us to bring it to him. That means he doesn’t have it. That’s our advantage.”
“A six-hour advantage.” She hugged herself, the ghost of his body still pressed against her back. “What’s the plan? We run? We copy it and send it to the news now?”
“And die in a manufactured scandal,” Liam finished. He ran a hand through his hair. “Corrigan controls the narrative. He’d spin it. We’d be killers, blackmailers, Riggs’s deviant accomplices. No one would even look at the files.”
A violent shiver racked her. It was the cold, the adrenaline crash, the violation. “Then what? We just do what he says? Become ‘assets’?” She spat the word.
“No.” Liam’s hand came up, cupping her jaw. His thumb stroked her cheek, a startling contrast to the brutality of minutes before. “We do what he can’t predict. We use what he showed us.”
“Which is?”
“His face. His voice. His confidence.” A grim, determined light entered Liam’s eyes. “He thinks we’re scared rabbits. He just gave us a full profile of the man at the gate. We study the enemy.”
He leaned in, his forehead touching hers. Their breath mingled, warm in the dusty chill. “But first,” he whispered, his voice rough. “First, I need to erase the feeling of his eyes on you. I need it gone.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a shared necessity. The performative horror of the staged act had left a toxic film over them both. They needed something real, something frantic and theirs, to scour it clean.
He kissed her. It was nothing like the container. This was devouring. His tongue plunged into her mouth, claiming, and she met him with equal hunger, biting his lip, sucking on it, a feedback loop of raw need. Her hands clawed at his sweater, yanking it up until he broke the kiss long enough to tear it over his head again and throw it aside.
She pushed him backwards, toward the stacked wooden chairs along the stage wall. He stumbled against them, a sharp crack echoing as one toppled. She dropped to her knees before him, her fingers making quick, ruthless work of his belt and fly. She pulled his cock out, already hard, and took him deep without preamble.
She fucked him with her mouth, a relentless, sloppy rhythm driven by pure catharsis. She used her hand at the base, twisting on the upstroke, her other hand gripping his thigh hard enough to bruise. “That’s it,” he groaned, his head thudding back against the wall. “Suck me clean, Evie. Get his fucking voice out of my head.”
She hummed around him, the vibration making his hips jerk. She could taste the remnants of herself on him, the mingled scent of their earlier fucking thick in the air. It was messy, possessive. She dragged her teeth along the sensitive shaft, not enough to hurt, just enough to make him gasp.
“Enough,” he growled, pulling her up by her hair. He spun her, bending her over the stack of chairs. The rough, splintered wood bit into her palms. He yanked her jeans and underwear down to her knees in one brutal tug. He didn’t bother with gentleness, didn’t check if she was ready. She was dripping wet for him, always for him.
He spit into his hand, slicking himself, and then drove into her with a force that knocked the breath from her lungs. He filled her completely, a burning, perfect stretch. He set a punishing pace immediately, each thrust slamming her hips into the unyielding chair rungs.
“This cunt is mine,” he snarled, his hand fisting in her curls, pulling her head back. “You hear me? Mine. Not for show. Not for him.”
“Yours!” she cried out, the word breaking into a moan as he angled deeper, hitting a spot that made her legs tremble. “Only yours, Liam, fuck, only ever yours!”
He released her hair, his hand sliding around her hip, fingers finding her clit. He rubbed tight, furious circles, the pressure almost painful. The twin sensations—the deep, pounding invasion and the sharp, precise friction—coiled a wire inside her, tighter, hotter.
“I’m gonna come,” she whimpered, her voice ragged. “I’m gonna come on your cock, please—”
Her orgasm tore through her, a silent, seizing rupture that clamped her around him in violent waves. She shook, a cry strangled in her throat, her vision spotting.
Feeling her convulse, he lost his rhythm. With three final, ragged thrusts, he buried himself to the hilt and came. A raw, broken sound ripped from his chest as he pulsed inside her, his release hot and seemingly endless. He collapsed over her back, his weight pinning her to the chairs, his breath scorching her neck.
They stayed like that, glued together by sweat and come, until their breathing slowly calmed. The silence of the hall felt different now. Not oppressive, but charged. Theirs.
He softened, slipping out of her. They righted their clothes with silent, practical movements. The heat between them cooled into a sharp, clear focus.
“The bench is a dead drop now,” Liam said, buckling his belt. “He’ll have it watched. He’s expecting us to go there.”
Evie nodded, zipping her jeans. “So we don’t go there. Not for the drive.” She met his gaze. “We go to the source. The facility. A-17. You heard Corrigan on the video. ‘Your personnel will use code-seven clearance.’ He gave us a key and the door. We don’t bring him the drive. We use the drive to walk right into his operation and burn it down from the inside while he’s waiting at the water plant.”
A slow, grim smile touched Liam’s lips. It was the first real light she’d seen in his eyes since the pier. “We need the codes on the drive to get in. Which means we need a copy. A place to look at it, somewhere he’d never think to look.”
Evie’s mind raced, then clicked. “The school. Your classroom. It’s Saturday. The building will be empty. The district’s internet is a locked-down fortress, totally isolated. No outside signals. We can use your projector, see everything, and he can’t remotely access it.”
Liam picked up his sweater. “Then that’s where we go first. We retrieve the drive, but we don’t bring it to us. We go to it, copy what we need, and leave it hidden. It stays our insurance.”
“And then we go to Facility A-17,” Evie said, the plan solidifying, giving her a terrifying kind of strength. “We use their own codes. We walk in like we belong.”
“And we get proof that even Corrigan can’t spin,” Liam finished. He took her hand. His was steady now. “We get faces. We get victims. We get the whole story, not just files, but the people. Then we unleash it all at once, to so many outlets that even his union can’t contain it.”
They walked out of the union hall, leaving the spotlight blazing on an empty chair. The cold evening air felt like a baptism. They didn’t have six hours. They had less. They had a path, dangerous and narrow, that was entirely their own.
They had a key. And they were going to break down every single door.
And they were going to break down every single door. The riverfront park at dusk was a different creature altogether. The forgiving mist of morning had burned away, replaced by a brittle, observational twilight. Every rustle in the rhododendron bushes felt deliberate. Every distant car horn was a potential signal.
They didn’t approach the bench directly. They became spectators of their own dead drop, circling the park from opposite sides, two shadows studying the geometry of the space. Liam watched from behind a vandalized kiosk, his eyes tracing the paths. Evie pretended to tie her shoe near a overflowing trash can, her peripheral vision scanning the parked cars along the street. The bench sat empty, innocent, the water behind it a shifting sheet of dirty steel.
“See anything?” Liam’s voice was a thread in her earpiece, a cheap pair they’d bought from a corner store.
“No static. No vans. Just a guy walking a dog that keeps trying to eat goose shit.” She stood, brushing grit from her knee. “It feels clean. Too clean.”
“That’s what worries me.” A pause crackled through the earpiece. “He’s arrogant. He gave us a time limit. He might think watching the plant is enough. I’m going in. Cover me.”
Evie watched as Liam detached from the shadows. He moved with a casual, unhurried stride, the kind worn by men heading home after a long day. He walked past the bench, dropped a crumpled coffee cup into the trash can beside it, and without breaking rhythm, sat down. He stretched his arms along the back of the bench, a man enjoying the view. He let his right hand drift down, fingers trailing along the weathered wood beneath the seat.
His heart hammered against his ribs. His fingertips probed the gap, the space he’d stuffed the chip bag into. They met empty, damp wood. A jolt of pure ice shot down his spine. He forced his breathing to remain even, his face placid. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and pretended to check his phone.
“It’s gone,” he said, the words low and flat.
“What?” Evie’s breath hit the microphone.
“The drive. It’s not here.” He fought the urge to wrench the bench apart with his bare hands. “The bag is gone.”
A silent scream of frustration locked in Evie’s throat. They’d been outmaneuvered. Corrigan had known. He’d played them, let them have their defiant plan, and plucked their only weapon from the field before they could even reach for it. The architecture had a hidden door they hadn’t seen. The park seemed to tilt, the shadows deepening.
Liam stood, his movement stiff. He walked away from the bench, back toward the street, each step feeling leaden. “We need to abort. The plan is ash.”
“Wait.” Evie’s voice was sharp in his ear. “Look down. At your feet. Near the trash can.”
He stopped. There, half-trampled into the mud and discarded cigarette butts, was the empty, grease-stained chip bag. His chip bag. It was ripped open, cleanly, as if by a blade. Litter, unnoticed by the city cleanup, by the dog-walker, by anyone. Except them.
“He took the drive,” Liam whispered, understanding dawning cold and hard. “But he left the wrapper. He’s tidy. Or he wanted us to know he was here. A show of dominance.”
“He has the drive, but we have six hours until the meeting,” Evie said, her mind racing off a new, desperate cliff. “He’s expecting us to show up empty-handed and desperate. He’ll have the facility on lockdown. Our codes are useless now.”
They met two blocks away, in the dripping alcove of a closed laundromat. The neon sign buzzed overhead, painting their faces in sickly pink. The failure was a physical weight.
“We run,” Liam said, but the words had no conviction. “We take the pier photo scandal, we try to survive it.”
“No.” Evie grabbed the front of his jacket. Her eyes were wide, not with fear, but with a feverish clarity. “He’s tidy, Liam. You said it. He took the drive, but he left the wrapper. What if he didn’t check the wrapper?”
Liam stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“The decryption key was on the drive. But the roster. The list of names and codes. It was on paper. A folded sheet of paper. In the briefcase.” Her grip tightened. “Did you see him take a piece of paper from the chip bag?”
Liam replayed the mental image. Riggs’s briefcase. The single drive nestled in foam. The folded sheet of paper beside it. He’d placed both in the bag. The drive was a slim, black rectangle. The paper was a bulky fold. “No,” he breathed. “No, he wouldn’t have missed that. It was right there.”
“Unless he was in a hurry. Unless he saw the drive and assumed that was everything. He’s a digital man, Liam. He thinks in files, in data. A piece of paper is… archaic.” A wild, reckless hope flickered in her gaze. “That bag was ripped open. What if the paper fell out? What if it’s still there, in the mud, under the bench?”
It was a thread so thin it was nearly invisible. But it was the only thread they had. The alternative was surrender.
They moved back toward the park, this time as a unit, no pretense. The night was fully fallen now, the park pools of ink between weak streetlights. The bench was a dark shape. They dropped to their hands and knees in the damp grass and mud beside it, ignoring the cold seeping through their clothes, the grit under their nails.
They scraped through the detritus with frantic, silent care. Cigarette filters, a bottle cap, a moldering leaf. Evie’s fingers brushed something thick, slick with mud. She pulled it free. It was the folded sheet of paper, sodden and filthy, its corner torn from where it had been caught in the torn plastic of the bag. It had been stepped on, ground into the earth.
She carefully, so carefully, unfolded it. The ink had run in places, blurring names. But the alphanumeric codes, printed in a crisp, bold typeface, were mostly legible. Facility A-17. Code-Seven Clearance. Client Delta Access Protocols. It was all there. Corrigan had the drive, but they had the map.
Liam let out a shaky breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “He’s not tidy. He’s blind.”
Back in the stolen car, heat blasting to fight the chill in their bones, they spread the damp paper on the dashboard. The interior light was weak, but enough. The school was still their destination. They needed context, a safe screen. But first, the relief was a physical tremor passing between them. It needed an outlet.
Evie reached across the console, her hand finding the back of Liam’s neck. She pulled him to her, their mouths meeting in a collision that was pure, unadulterated victory. It tasted of mud and fear and a desperate, giddy hope. Her tongue pushed past his lips, demanding and possessive.
“We have it,” she muttered against his mouth, her hands already pulling at his belt. “We have the fucking map.”
He helped her, yanking his jeans open, shoving them down his hips. The car was cramped, fogging rapidly. She climbed over the center console, awkward and urgent, settling into his lap facing him. Her own jeans were shoved down, bunched around her thighs. She was already wet, a heated, ready slickness that had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with the visceral thrill of defiance.
She guided him inside her, sinking down onto his cock with a sharp, gasping cry. He filled her, a solid, anchoring presence. She braced her hands on the steering wheel behind his head, her body a tight arc over him.
“Ride me,” he growled, his hands gripping her ass, fingers digging into the flesh. “Fucking ride me like we just won.”
She moved, a fierce, grinding rhythm, taking him deep with each drop of her hips. The car seat squeaked in protest. Her forehead pressed against the cool window. Each thrust was a punctuation mark to their stolen victory. His mouth latched onto the side of her neck, sucking a bruise into her skin, a brand of their alliance.
“You brilliant, ruthless woman,” he breathed, his own hips rising to meet her plunges.
“Fuck yes,” she chanted, the words bouncing with their rhythm. “Our map. Our way in.”
The climax took them both roughly, a shared convulsion that had little to do with tenderness. He came inside her with a stifled groan, his body bowing up against hers. She clenched around him, her own release a sharp, bright burst of sensation that left her seeing stars against the fogged glass. They slumped together, a tangled, sweating heap in the front seat, the precious, filthy paper crumpled safely in her fist.
After a minute, Liam reached down, pulled a fast-food napkin from the door pocket, and gently cleaned between her legs before tending to himself. The act was intimate, practical. They rearranged their clothes.
“School,” Evie said, her voice raw. “Let’s go see what our tickets look like.”
The vacant halls of Millard Fillmore High School echoed with a profound, watchful silence. The linoleum gleamed under the emergency exit lights. Liam’s classroom smelled of whiteboard markers and the faint, sweet dust of chalk. He locked the door behind them, then shoved his desk against it for good measure.
He powered up the aging projector, its fan whirring like an anxious insect. Evie smoothed the damp paper on his desk, using textbooks to hold down the corners. He typed the codes, one by one, into his offline desktop. The system on the drive was gone, but the access codes were the skeleton key. Public property records, cross-referenced with the facility designations, gave them an address. An old, repurposed biomedical research lab on the industrial spur, not far from the water plant where Corrigan waited.
Security blueprints, submitted for city approval under a shell company, loaded on the screen. They studied the sightlines of cameras, the noted locations of biometric locks, the staff entrance used for “code-seven personnel.”
“We walk in like we own the place,” Liam whispered, tracing a route on the screen. “We use their own protocols against them.”
“We need more than codes,” Evie said, her designer’s eye analyzing the layout. “We need a story. We need uniforms.”
A ghost of a smile touched Liam’s lips. He navigated to a different, internal server—the school’s maintenance portal. He typed in a supervisor password he’d overheard years ago. The inventory list loaded. “Facilities has contractor gear. Electrician coveralls. Badge clippers. It’s not tactical, but it’s plausibly boring.”
They moved through the dark school again, a place turned alien in the night, to the maintenance bay. The lock on the chain-link storage cage was a simple thing, defeated with a wire clip from Evie’s hair and sixty seconds of Liam’s focused pressure. Inside, they found two sets of grey coveralls, still in plastic wrapping. They took utility belts, empty tool pouches, and a hard hat.
Changed in the shadows of the bay, they looked at each other. The transformation was unsettling. They were now anonymous, ghosts in the machine they intended to sabotage.
“The water plant is a trap,” Evie said, stuffing her clothes into a trash bag. “He’ll be waiting. With men.”
“Which means his attention is there,” Liam replied, shouldering a heavy battery drill he’d taken from a locker. It was a prop, a weight. A weapon. “Not at the real front door. We have three hours until the deadline. We go to A-17 now.”
They left the school through a rear delivery entrance, melting into the network of alleyways that fed into the industrial spur. The coveralls made them invisible. The drive was lost, but the paper in Evie’s inside pocket was a burning coal. They had a map, a uniform, and a furious need to witness the truth firsthand.
They had no drive to retrieve. But they had a facility to burn down.