Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
“Can you give me a piggyback on the internal cam system? Just the low-level stuff. Nothing fancy.”
“Why?”
“No reason.”
“Lark.”
“Arrow.”
I hear him sigh. “Okay, you’ve got a visual relay. But if Knight asks, I didn’t help.”
“You are an angel and I appreciate your moral flexibility.”
The tablet fills with grainy, slightly skewed footage—inside the warehouse. Crates. Dust. Stacks of unlabeled boxes. A shabby office in the back with a cheap metal desk and a wall safe.
And Knight.
Moving through the shadows, hugging the walls, pausing whenever he hears something.
A guard walks past an interior window, and Knight freezes, blending into the darkness like he was born there.
I stare, a mix of pride and worry twisting in my chest.
He’s so controlled it makes my teeth ache.
My gaze flicks to something else in the feed—little blinking blue lights above some of the interior doorways.
Huh.
“Arrow,” I say slowly. “Those aren’t just regular cams, are they?”
“Define ‘regular.’”
“The ones above the office doors. That’s not basic security hardware. That’s… higher-grade. Facial mapping, maybe?”
More keyboard clacking.
“Shit,” Arrow mutters softly. “Yeah. That’s not warehouse-level. That’s darknet surveillance gear.”
My spine goes cold.
“Why would a trafficking middleman need black-market facial ID?” I ask.
“To keep receipts,” Ozzy chimes in over comms. “You film the deals, you keep everyone’s face on file. Makes it easier to blackmail clients or sell identities to the highest bidder.”
Arrow adds, “Some of these rigs auto-backup to off-site servers on the dark web. Even if you smash the local drives, the footage lives on.”
“And we just walked Knight into that,” I say.
Silence.
On the tablet, Knight slips past a camera, hugging the thirty-degree blind angle.
He thinks he’s invisible.
He’s not.
The camera lens blinks. A small red light goes from steady to pulsing.
“Arrow.” My voice is sharp. “That light—tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
He swears creatively. “Someone just switched the system from local loop to live feed. Those cams are no longer dumb. They’re sending to a remote server.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet. Give me a second.”
Knight’s voice comes over comms, low and calm. “What’s going on? I’m inside the office corridor. Looks clear.”
I press my lips together.
He doesn’t know.
He never likes not knowing.
“Just local interference,” Arrow lies badly. “Stay on target.”
My brain races.
If those cams are doing any kind of automated facial mapping and selling to a client list, then Knight’s face is about to become digital merchandise.
And if he keeps going deeper, there’s a chance that feed doesn’t just map him—it flags him.
I don’t think.
I move.
“Lark?” Ozzy says. “What are you doing?”
“Just stretching my legs,” I say, flinging my door open.
I tuck my tablet into my jacket, shove the bat under my arm, and slip into the alley shadows, keeping low.
Static in my ear explodes. “Lark. No,” Knight growls. “You stay in the car.”
“Can’t hear you, connection’s bad,” I whisper. “Try again later.”
I jog down the alley, sticking close to parked cars until I’m tracking the back side of the warehouse fence line. There’s a sagging section behind a dumpster—classic lazy maintenance.
I wriggle under.
Inside the yard, it’s quieter. Just the distant hum of the highway and the drip of some mysterious liquid from a busted gutter.
I skirt the outer wall, tablet in one hand, bat in the other. The nearest camera is about eight feet up, bolted near a floodlight. I can’t reach it. But I can find its power.
Utility conduits run along the wall, snaking down toward a junction box near the ground.
“Arrow,” I murmur, “if I kill the power to their grid, does that also kill your access?”
“Yes,” he says tightly. “And it might tip them off.”
“Okay. Plan B.”
I crouch near the junction box and jack into the nearest wired connection with a portable adapter. My tablet screen flickers, then fills with a prompt.
Hello, little camera.
I tap commands fast, fingers flying. This system is high-end, but someone lazily left a default manufacturer password on one node. Idiot.
“I’ve got access to the cam network,” I say. “Sending a loop of the last clean ten minutes. Can you piggyback, Arrow?”
“On it,” he says. “Okay, I see the feed. I’m lacing in false timestamps. You’ve got… maybe five, ten minutes before the system self-checks and realizes it’s lying to itself.”
“Plenty.”
On the tablet, the interior view rewinds and starts looping. Knight moving down the hall. Then Knight moving down the hall again. And again.
I look up at the real camera.
“Bite me,” I whisper.
“Lark.” Knight’s voice is ice now. “Where exactly are you?”
“Improving your odds of not becoming famous,” I say. “You’re welcome.”
He mutters something that sounds like, “I’m going to handcuff her to a chair,” which does things to my brain I don’t have time to unpack.
“Focus, Knight,” Arrow says. “You’re clear for now. Get what we need, then get out.”
Knight grinds out, “Copy.”
I slip back along the wall, but before I go, my gaze catches on something near the corner of the building—a second junction box I didn’t notice before, tucked half behind a stack of busted pallets.