Back in meatspace, Glitch opened her eyes. Roughly two and a half minutes had elapsed since her departure. Her eyes were level with Wingz’ wrist, and she noticed for the first time that he was wearing a holowatch, capable of projecting small doses of information, or pictures on a flat surface. Odd, she hadn’t pictured him as the sort of guy to have keepsakes or schedules on him. Glitch unplugged and her jack-in cable started auto-spooling back through her ponytail. Her counterpart twitched and N4nobytes returned to consciousness as well.

“You!” he sputtered as soon as he’d reclaimed his body. “I’ve seen you!”

Glitch frowned at him. “You got dump-shock or something?” she asked. She reached for her jack-in cable again to go pacify whatever ICE he’d upset.

“No, I saw your avatar in there!” N4n0bytes voice peaked. “You played for MALf(x). You’re Glitch!”

Wingz stared at him like he’d taken serious brain damage. Jones turned around long enough to give him a warning growl. Glitch’s stomach did a summersault and she cursed biospace mentally. She could have sworn he said he watched trad-sports, not esports. Maybe she hadn’t been listening closely enough. Shit.

“Yeah, we exchanged handles two weeks ago, kid,” she said, getting up. “If you’re that slow, you should go wait in the chopper while the adults handle this.”

“That’s so hyped! My brother used to watch you!” N4n0bytes went on, not taking the hint and shutting up. “I thought you were just a fan!” Now he was on his feet, crowding into her space. “You know, cause you’re a girl, and stuff.”

Glitch tried to shrug him off. “I am just a fan. Names and avatars are easy to come by.”

Wait, if she were actually a fan impersonating herself, should she admit to it? Should she be claiming to be herself right now? Was it too late to act otherwise? Drek, she hated dealing with people.

“No, I recognize the cat-glitch,” N4n0bytes enthused, getting even closer. “At first I thought-”

Glitch put a hand on his chest and shoved him hard enough to make him stumble back a few steps. Before he could regain his balance, she closed the distance, getting up in his face, near enough that she could tell when he stopped breathing. Her hand found her baretta and she pushed the barrel against the soft fabric across his stomach. She had no intention of using it – the safety wasn’t even off – but she was counting on him not thinking of that in the moment.

“You thought wrong,” she said in a low voice. “So shut up and focus.”

She took a big step back, putting space between them.

“You handle security ok?” she asked more loudly, holstering her gun. Both Wingz and Jones were staring at them.

“Yeah, yeah,” N4n0bytes struggled to pull himself back together. “We, uh, we got lucky actually.”

Glitch pressed her lips together to keep from cursing him out. She was done wrangling the new kid; it was someone else’s turn now. “Lucky” was a word newbies and tenderfoots used right before they fucked up bad enough that people started dying in messy ways. This kid was going to get them all killed.

“Lucky?” Jones echoed gruffly.

“Meat-side of security got called in to deal with some sort of an irregular delivery down in the lobby,” N4n0bytes reported. “I set cameras to loop empty feed on the roof and our target – no one knows we’re here.”

The three veteran runners exchanged glances.

Luck was a lie, but sometimes a bug in someone else’s system was leverage for their own. Jones looked at Glitch.

“We good?” he asked.

Glitch nodded. “Vent fans are down till the end of the cycle. System resets in twenty-three minutes and forty-three seconds.”

She wasn’t sure if that was the question he’d been asking, but sure as betas had bugs, it was the one she was answering.

“You heard her, let’s move,” Jones ordered. “Absolute silence once we’re inside. That floor is supposed to be deserted.”

Glitch tried not to look relieved. She saw Wingz eyeing her sideways, favoring her with the look he usually reserved for N4n0bytes. She’d need to get clear of this team as soon as the job was done, maybe lie low for a bit. Or take a job without any JACKasses on it.

Focus.

Focus on today’s job, not tomorrow.

Hold it together until she could get back to the Matrix, where the sick feeling in her stomach wouldn’t matter anymore.

They found the building’s air intake and N4n0bytes produced a small tool kit. A few moments later, the vent cover was pried off and set to one side. Glitch flexed her fingers, rolled her shoulders and then climbed in after Jones, feet first. Time for the tricky part.

Jones led them through a metallic maze of crawl spaces, ladders, and the occasional, heart-stopping drop through stretches of darkness and stale, recycled air. No one noticed the temperature change, so they dropped out of the wall onto worn carpeting next to the elevator instead of being ground up by an industrial strength fan and being cleaned up by the janitor in the morning. Their choice to come by way of the roof was rewarded: the servers and the bounty of data they contained were a hundred and eighty-nine floors up, but only eleven floors down.

A maze of cubicles stretched before them, like the labyrinths that guarded the Pharaohs of old. The dividers between desks bore an art deco Egyptian-style print instead of the normal gray-brown cloth covering. It looked like the result of a committee’s attempt to make the space feel less “corporate”, whatever that meant. Glowing posters on the wall advertised Eyes-In-the-Sky slogans:

“Watching Out for You”

“Intel from Above”

“In the Know”

They were paired with stylized falcons, the Eye of Horus, pyramids, and vast stretches of golden, glowing sand. The posters cast weird colored light across the workspace and pressed shadows under the desks and rolling office chairs. The servers they sought were entombed at the center of all this behind thick, plexi-glass walls.

At a gesture from Jones, they all moved forward. The big man tapped Glitch on the shoulder as they approached the server room. He pointed at the unblinking eye of a camera overhead, then at one of the cubicle computers. Glitch nodded. At least one of her crew still trusted her to do her job.

She split off from the rest of the crew and slipped into the nearest cubicle block. Inside its pseudo-walls, she pushed aside the chair and crawled under desk. It took a few moments in the darkness to find the right cords to unplug so she could jack straight into the network. Her cable was already in hand when the bark of a gun violated the silence.

Glitch froze. A second gunshot followed on the heels of the first. Glitch scrambled out from underneath the desk, drawing her gun as she went. From her knees, she peered out across the sea of cubicles as best she could. Another burst came from the direction of the elevator, followed by a return shot from Jones’ louder, heavier gun. Glitch pointed her baretta in the general direction of the elevator and squeezed the trigger, to draw security’s, or whoever it was’, fire. Make them have to watch their flanks.

Nothing happened.

Glitch dropped to the carpeting inside the cubicle again. She turned the gun over in her hands. The safety was still on. An amateur’s mistake. Fuck.

She flicked the switch and popped up again just in time to see something about the size of her fist arc through the air. The light of the posters reflected across its shiny, rounded surface. The thought flashed across Glitch’s mind that she’d never seen a real grenade before. A heartbeat later, it exploded.

The shock wave slammed through every fiber of her body, as though she’d been smashed into a wall. The sound eradicated everything but itself from her mind. Glitch realized a moment later she was on the floor, hands over her head in a useless, instinctive act. For an instant, she thought a wall had come down somewhere, and then realized it was just the cheap, cubicle siding collapsed on top of her. She pushed it off without noticing the weight. Glitch wasn’t strong, but adrenaline was a wonderful drug.

Someone was yelling nearby, but she could only catch the odd word through the ringing in her ears.

“~~~the fuck~~~a grenade?!”

“~~destroy ~~~ anyway.”

“~~~~AFTER we~~~”

Neither voice sounded familiar. Glitch raked the hair out of her eyes. She peered through the settling smoke in the direction of the blast. She couldn’t see much through the mess of overturned office space, but someone should have been screaming from injury. Jones should have been shouting orders. Or returning fire. Or… anything. But the ringing in her ears died away to silence. The smoke cleared and she saw something dripping from the ceiling. Drek, that was a lot of blood. Her heart sank. Numbness enveloped her.

She was alone.

“Stop whining,” a faint male voice said somewhere across the wreckage. “We didn’t get shot. They all got dead. It’s fine.”

“Yes, transforming the server room into a scrap yard is an absolute turn-on,” a silky, feminine voice replied. “Well fucking done.”

Not completely alone.

Not alone enough.

Glitch dropped into a low crouch against the worn carpet. Using her hands to balance herself as best she could, she hustled away. The voices were between her and the elevator, so she fled deeper into the cover of still-standing cubicles.

“I’ll set up some surprises for security when they get here,” the male voice said. “Check the server room – see if anything can be salvaged.”

“I really think we’ve had enough surprises for one outing, don’t you?”

Once Glitch had put a few rows of corporate drudgery between herself and the voices, she broke into a run. The vent shafts were in the ceiling over here, out of reach, and even if they hadn’t been, the fans were all back on by now. She was hoping for a bug in the building’s design – a fire escape or a side door that didn’t make sense.

The building made perfect sense.

Fuck.

A moment later she left the last wall of cubicles and halted in front of floor-to-ceiling windows. They provided a panoramic view of the skyscraper opposite them and the several hundred feet of empty air between the glass and the ground. Pretty, yes, but not exactly a view worth dying for.

Glitch looked left, right, and then back into the darkness.

She was trapped.