Finally Mizzy entered, bearing one of the team’s rugged laptops. She tossed a data chip to Abraham, who plugged it into the imager.
“This isn’t going to be pretty, guys,” Mizzy noted.
“Cody is on the team,” Abraham said. “We are accustomed to things that are not pretty.”
Cody tossed the broom at him.
Abraham engaged the imager, and the walls and floor went black. A three-dimensional projection of Ildithia appeared on them, but one drawn as a red wireframe. We seemed to be hovering above it.
At one time this had been disorienting to me, but I was used to it now. I leaned forward, peering down through the floor toward the large city. It seemed to be growing and disintegrating at an accelerated rate in this illustration, though the details weren’t terribly specific.
“It’s a time-lapse computer model from Tia’s data,” Mizzy said. “I thought it was cool. The city moves at a constant rate, so you can predict what its shape and look will be for any given day. Apparently whoever controls the city can steer it using a big wheel that grows in one of the buildings downtown.”
“What happens if it hits another city?” I asked, uncomfortable. In the time-lapse model, the city looked alive—like some kind of crawling creature, buildings shooting up like stretching spines.
“Collisions are messy,” Abraham said. “When I scouted here years back, I asked that very question. If Ildithia intersects a city it grows into the cracks, buildings squeezing between buildings, streets covering streets. In times past, people got trapped inside rooms while sleeping and died. But a week later the salt crumbled, and Ildithia moved on basically unaffected.”
“Aaanyway,” Mizzy said, “this ain’t the ugly part, kids. Wait until you see the plan.”
“The plan looked well developed when I glanced at it,” I said, frowning.
“Oh, it’s developed,” Mizzy said. “The plan is awesome. But we’re never going to pull it off.” She turned her hand, using the motion to zoom us down toward the wireframe city. In Newcago this had all been done with cameras, and it had felt like we were flying. Here it seemed more like we were in a simulation, which made it a lot less disorienting.
We stopped near the downtown, which was—in the simulation—currently on the growing edge of the city, fresh and new. A particularly tall building sprang up, cylindrical, like a giant thermos.
“Sharp Tower,” Mizzy said. “That’s its new name—used to be some fancy hotel in Atlanta. It’s where Larcener made his palace, and it’s where Prof has set up. Upper floors are occupied by whatever lackeys are most favored at the moment, with the reigning Epic living in the large room near the very, very tippy top.”
“They climb all those steps?” I asked. “Prof can fly. Do the rest take the stairs?”
“Elevators,” Mizzy said.
“Made of salt?” I asked, looking up.
“They swap in a metal one and use new cables—salt ones don’t work, go figure—and bring in a motor. The shafts are perfectly reasonable though.”
I frowned. Still seemed like a lot of work, especially since you had to redo it each week. Though a little slave labor and heavy lifting for their minions was hardly a bother.
“Tia’s plan,” Mizzy said, “is pretty good. Her goal was to kill Prof, but she had decided she needed more intel before trying that. So the first part of her plan includes a detailed plot for infiltrating Sharp Tower. Tia intended to raid Prof’s computers to figure out what he was up to in the city.”
“But we,” I said, “can use that same plan to rescue Tia instead of raiding his computers.”
“Yup,” Mizzy said. “Judging by the signal from the broken mobile, Tia’s been stashed near the top of this building, on the seventieth floor. She’s in some kind of old hotel room. It’s a nice suite, judging by the maps. I’d have expected something more prisonlike.”
“She said Prof would at first try to persuade her he was rational,” I said, feeling cold. “Once she refuses to give him the information he asks for, he’ll grow impatient. That’s when things will start going badly.”
“So what is this plan?” Megan said. She was still leaning against the wall, which was obscured by the imager’s blackness. We hovered, looking up at the red lines of Sharp Tower. A stupid name, since it was basically round and had a flat top.
“Right,” Mizzy said. “Two teams will run the mission. First one will infiltrate a party at the top of the building. Larcener let one of the town’s most important people—an Epic named Loophole—throw parties in Sharp Tower. Prof hasn’t stopped the tradition.”
“Infiltrate?” Abraham asked. “How?”
“Heads of important communities in the city get an invitation to Loophole’s parties in exchange for sending specialist workers to help throw the shindig,” Mizzy explained. “Tia planned to join with members of the Stingray Clan who were already attending.”
“That’s…going to be tough,” Abraham said. “Will we be able to do the same? We don’t have the trust of any of the clans.”
“It gets worse,” Mizzy said pleasantly. “Watch.”
“Watch?” Cody asked.
“There are animations,” Mizzy said. A group of people—represented by bouncing stick figures—hopped along the road and joined a larger group thronging the tower. The two “teams” were represented in blue. One group bounced their way into the elevators at the rear. Another team slipped in through a back door and entered a different elevator shaft. They somehow shot up along the shaft, toward the roof.
“Huh?” I asked.
“Wire climbers,” Mizzy said. “Devices you hook to a cable, then ride up by holding on. See, there’s a service elevator, since the reaaal important folk need other folk to do stuff for them. And who wants to ride up in the elevator with stinky servants, right? The second team sneaks up that shaft to position themselves on the top residential floor.”
“And we get these wire climbers…how?” I asked.
“No idea,” Mizzy said. “There certainly aren’t any for sale in the city. I think the community that took Tia in must have been planning to buy them somehow.”
I sat tight, seeing what Mizzy meant by “ugly.” When we’d departed the Stingray Clan, Carla and her companions had been very clear in explaining to me that they wouldn’t help rescue Tia. They were too frightened by their close call with Prof, and were determined to get their people out of the city. Over the next week, they’d covertly pull out of Ildithia and run.
“That’s not the whole of it,” Mizzy said. “To pull off Tia’s mission, we’d need a whole ton of other stuff. Advanced hacking devices, parachutes, kitchen mixers…”
“Really?” Cody asked.
“Yup.”
“Sweet,” he said, settling back.
It didn’t seem sweet to me. I watched the plan play out, as animated by the little bouncing figures. Two teams, operating independently to distract, infiltrate, and steal—all without Prof knowing what had happened. It was a good plan, and we could use it to get to Tia instead of the computers.
It was also impossible.
“It would take months to gather this equipment,” Abraham said as we watched figures parachuting off the building. “Assuming we could pay for it.”
“Yeah,” Mizzy said, arms folded. “Warned ya. We’re going to have to come up with something else—and we have less time and fewer resources. Which sucks.”
The simulation of stick figures ended, and the building hovering in front of us eventually reached the edge of Ildithia and disintegrated, melting away like a lonely ice cream sundae with nobody to eat it.
We don’t have time to come up with something better, I thought, glancing at the list of required and suggested supplies that hovered in the air nearby. Or even something worse.
I stood and walked from the room.
Megan was first to chase after me, and she caught up quickly. “David?” she asked, then scowled as she saw that her jacket was covered in salt from leaning against
the wall. She brushed it off as we headed down the steps to the second floor.
The others followed as well. I didn’t speak, leading the group to the first floor. Here, we could hear voices from the buildings next to us. Our neighbors were moving out in preparation for their homes falling apart.
I turned and walked into Larcener’s room, where the Epic was sitting wrapped in blankets, though it wasn’t that cold, in a chair beside a fireplace—which he hadn’t lit.
I needed to play this cool, careful, like a true leader.
I flopped down on one of Larcener’s couches. “Well, it’s over. We’re totally screwed. Sorry, great one. We failed you.”
“What are you babbling about?” he demanded, perking up in his blankets.
“Prof captured a member of our team,” I said. “He’s probably torturing her right now. He’ll soon know anything he wants about us. We’ll all be dead by the end of the day.”
“Idiot!” Larcener said, standing up.
The rest of the team gathered outside the room.
“You might want to simply kill us yourself,” I said to Larcener. “So that you get the satisfaction, instead of Prof.”
Megan gave me a What are you doing, you slontze? look. I was pretty used to that one.