Uptown wasn't walled off from inner Terrace as such, but neither was it easily accessed. The wealthy traveled by aircar and rarely had any reason to come see where their goods were made. Hence, the bright and clean towers that began rising from the dirty three-story streets twenty-five miles from the city's center rarely had doors at ground level, or even windows that would look out onto the relative squalor.  Heavy-duty airtrucks had reduced the need for shipping tunnels beneath the street, too. The tunnels that were left were old and poorly maintained, such as the one the burglars took early in the morning the next week.
As promised, they moved separately. There were six cars in total, bringing a team of fifteen.  The tunnels were tight and round like sewer pipes, and dove deep from the surface roads to meet the towers at their roots.
The zoans had new wristbands that were controlled by Palmer's man, by which he coordinated them.  No communication with the other teams, though the security and infiltration teams would move together once inside. The shaven-headed human repeated their instructions on the drive, as their car lurched between cargo trucks from one junction to the next. Their job was the simplest.  They would escort Team I through the loading dock, where the staff would be distracted and facial recognition briefly offline.  They would get into the HVAC center, where a service elevator would take them to the residential floors. Other teams would be interfering with anything that could stop or detect them, and Palmer's man would alert them of anyone that got through.  They needed only to ride, get in, and stand guard.
Geir had been involved in heists before the Mover. They had been small teams, carefully and cooperatively coordinated, messy and hard-fought, the take apportioned among conspirators. This was something else entirely. This was someone with a lot of money looking at something, asking it, and their staff acquiring it near-frictionlessly. It would have been done entirely by computer if the money hadn't been in cash, just a deposit made to the owner of an intruder AI and a large return minutes later.  Either the take was astronomical, or the job was meant as a thumb in the eye to its holder.
The car let Team S off at the loading dock, a metal hatch at the end of a concrete bulb at the end of a tunnel, among an endless line of trucks. The hatch opened without their needing to do anything, only stand with the three humans of Team I and wait a matter of seconds. Someone on the other end was working it.
The intake room was wide and harshly lit with cheap LEDs, seemingly miles of skate wheel conveyor tracks snaking across it. There was still a skeleton crew there, passing packages along in weary boredom. If they noticed the six intruders, they were too busy to care, or else disinterested.
All of them were zoan. Workforce volunteers, most likely, sacrificing eleven to fifteen hours a day for enough to pay for a place to sleep the rest of the time. Like Geir with the Mover, but without the fresh air and open sky. The vulture didn’t like to look at them.
The HVAC center was the size of the building that housed Grouch’s complex, and had its own dedicated geothermal plant. The air was thick with chemical scents, and the din of turbines of different sizes spinning at different speeds, of percussive clanging and metal-on-metal grinding. All that to provide total climate control in the thousands of rooms and halls above. There was an alert on readout screens, which Palmer’s man told the team to ignore; that was another team’s work, and the reason there was no one here.
The doors to the service elevator were open when they found it. It was wide and linoleum-tiled, badly scuffed from years of having heavy equipment dragged through it. Palmer’s man gave them the code that would bring them up to the residential floors.
Geir had never been in a building meant for luxury. It had him nervous: in his experience, wealthy humans defended their spaces with burning zeal. The humans were a little on edge too; Left and Right were calm, even bored. Maybe being dazzled by lush carpet and high ceilings and inviting light was Housie shit.
The residential floors were also where the real danger was. Once they were out of the HVAC node on the target’s floor, they were at risk of being seen and reported by the tenants. There were police housed on every third floor, and the thieves looking like they didn’t belong may already be enough to get them called. Geir and the others had to hope staff walked the halls enough to desensitize witnesses to the sight of Terracers and zoans.
The halls were wide, their carpet thick and the doors widely spaced. What struck Geir most, though, were the pleasant cool and the even, neutral lighting. The slightest breeze in his feathers, just enough to keep the air from feeling still. The carpet—he had to wonder if it had been produced in the factory above the fighting ring—had an easy quarter-inch of give under his weight. Scarcely recognizable as the same kind of place as the dim, green, and stuffy apartments he raided daily.
The target’s door was opposite the HVAC node, a long walk they would have to make a second time. Team I followed directions from their wristbands, while Team S kept watch ahead and behind. Only a few times did a door open and a tenant step out, to shrink at the harsh look given by the huge zoans passing them. Any one of those could have reported it, but if they did, the police didn’t come immediately. Somewhere, another team was diverting them.
The doors weren’t numbered, but bore screens that displayed whatever information their tenants wanted to share. Names, titles, professional certificates. Short looping videos of families in nice clothing at a summery location, with kids and dogs. The occasional zoan, either the resident or an employee. Sometimes only a blank screen with a code for trusted visitors to scan.
That was the case on the target door. A small rectangle in the center of the door was filled with minute, multicolored, moving particles, which one of the infiltrators scanned with her wristband. The door unlocked: someone, somewhere, had gotten them access.
"Team S," Palmer's man said through their wristbands.  "Station one at the end of the hall. One of the vocal ones.  The other two go in ahead of Team I to make sure it's clear."
Left agreed to be the lookout, and Geir slowly nudged the door open.  No traps or extra locks, no one standing on the other side with a gun.  But there was a gun.
A whole cache of them.
The door opened onto an entry hall perpendicular to it, classic brick and mortar with spaces, currently unoccupied, for signs and pictures.  The guns were to the side, stashed under an empty coat rack.  Rifles and pistols ready to be grabbed on short notice, extra magazines on a shelf above them.  It must have taken some doing to get those in here unnoticed.
"Don't touch those," Palmer's man said.
Creeping down the entry hall, it became more and more clear that this wasn't a home, or wasn't only one.  The decorations that had come with the apartment were stacked against the half-wall between the hall and the kitchen, and equipment cases of various size were scattered throughout.
"Come back to those."
There was no one in the kitchen, or hiding in the closet beside it.  Behind the brick wall was a large living room, with a split-level floor, couches at its sides and a red-and-black rug, huge television on the wall surrounded by empty bookshelves.  Couches covered with recently-thrown-off blankets and changes of clothes.  The far wall was entirely glass, and looked out over the breathtaking outer city and the mountains beyond.
While Team I looked in silence for any sign of the money, Geir checked the bathroom and closets along the other wall.  He moved aside the blankets from the couches.  One of them, he realized, wasn't a blanket, but a banner.
It said, in crude paint on linen: ZF.  Despite himself, Geir smiled.
Right went directly to the glass wall and stood with his hands braced against it to look out.  The alligator may never even have ridden an air car, to see this kind of view.  Geir gestured for Team I to allow it.  He moved on to the bedrooms.
There was nothing identifying in any of them, but Geir already knew: whether this was her home or the staging point for a cell of her splinter-ZF, he was here to steal from Sike.  Whoever Palmer was, he knew about her stash and had discovered its location.  Maybe he had even maneuvered her himself, put her on the run so that this Uptown safehouse would be the best hiding place for it.  Or maybe he had a dozen teams like this one, striking a dozen of Sike's strongholds, knowing only one would succeed.  It cost him nothing, after all.
But it was right there, at the bottom of the closet in the smallest bedroom.  A pair of duffel bags with a cheap retina scan lock on a loop between their zippers.  Keeping the camera on his wristband pointed away, Geir crushed that easily between the tips of his talons and unzipped one.
Paper money was rare, generally reserved for important but vulnerable exchanges between banks or governments.  The most Geir had ever seen was one million, in the back of a secure aircar he'd helped ground once, in ten stacks of one hundred thousand-dollar bills.  This duffel bag was stuffed to bursting with stacks like those, in twenty-thousand-dollar bills.  It had to be hundreds of millions of dollars.  Maybe billions.
Geir took off his wristband, and stomped on it.
The muzzle of one of Team I's pistols poked in through the bedroom door.  Geir flattened himself against the wall until the human was inside, clapped a hand over her mouth and clubbed her with the butt of her own gun.  He sat her down carefully on the side of the bed less visible from the door, and tossed its sheets over her.  The duffel bags were heavy but manageable, one over each shoulder.  Geir made a break for the entry hall, while the others of Team I were in the other bedrooms.
Right was in the entry hall, keeping watch.  His eyes fixed on Geir's cargo.  He hadn't had an alert from his wristband yet, but he understood.
The vulture froze.  It wouldn't do any good to slip the alligator a stack of cash out of one of the bags.  Right–Manny; it was safe to assume Geir was officially out of Grouch's employ now–had nowhere to go but back to the compound, where anything he had would be taken away anyway.  Geir sighed ruefully and shrugged, settling into a defensive stance.  Manny growled.  He had his fingers ready to tap the alert button on the wristband.
But he didn't do it.  He dismissed the alert, and turned to let the vulture through.  There was nothing for him in return but an apologetic nod.
There was no avoiding Left's–Darius's–view out in the hall, so Geir ran, as fast as he could while balancing the duffel bags, in the opposite direction.  He didn't hear anything, but he was able to see when he turned the corner that the other two humans were coming after him.  By now Palmer's man would know, and would be frantically looking for ways to unclear the path that had gotten the two teams this far.  Would he risk letting Geir get caught, and the money seized?  Probably not.  The path would be clear, back the way he'd come.  He would
have an easy, unguarded escape route.
And he did. There was evidently nothing the rest of Palmer’s team could do to stop him that wouldn’t forfeit the operation or worse. The shaven-headed human had counted on total loyalty, to him or to Grouch.
That, and the assumption that none of Grouch’s underlings had anywhere to go with that kind of money. He might have foregone trying to catch the bird and turned straight to fences and banks, expecting to get it back as soon as Geir tried to exchange it. They probably thought he wanted it for himself.
There was probably plenty of security footage of him sneaking back out through the HVAC center and the loading bay, but once he was out on foot in the tunnels he was gone. He took random turns, hugging the curved wall to avoid the endless crush of huge vehicles, got himself well and truly lost, so no one following would find him.