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  “Oh of course,” Asher nodded, swallowing nervously, “there’s a long list of things somebody with that sort of insider knowledge could do, and you can’t let the other gangs think you’re weak or anything.” He didn’t like the way Smog was looking at Ruth.

  “Now, on the other hand, if somebody like, I don’t know, you wanted to, hypothetically,” Smog added in quickly, reminding Asher that nothing being said was firmly set in stone, “abandon a time-sensitive mission that you had already agreed to take, I could be convinced to be lenient.”

  Asher did his best not to breathe a sigh of relief on the spot.

  “However,” Smog quickly added, before giving anyone else the chance to speak up, “there would need to be repercussions.”

  Both brothers looked to each other and swallowed nervously before looking back to Smog, who had taken yet another drag off his cigar. There was an errant smile on his face, almost as though he was taking some sick sort of pleasure in this.

  “What sort of repercussions?” Asher choked, the words nearly getting stuck in his throat as he tried to hide how nervous he was feeling.

  “Well, hypothetically speaking of course, there would be three,” Smog began, holding up three fingers. He then lowered two fingers, until only one remained. “The first is fairly straightforward: you would not receive full payment for Shimmerscale. Part of the agreement for the job was that you would be paid the rest if I could be convinced the spell functioned as intended, and since you, hypothetically, would be backing out of said deal and not providing me with a proper demonstration, I would not be obliged to pay you another cent.”

  Asher nodded, wincing a little bit as Smog added extra emphasis to his words. There was no doubt in his tone that nothing being said was hypothetical, but he was keeping up the pretense that Asher had yet to actually back out of the deal.

  Smog turned to Asher again, and raised a second finger. “Secondly, I would expect something of value in compensation. Maybe a discount on future commissions, or perhaps a new spell, completely gratis. You have to understand that if you were to hypothetically,” this time the word came out almost like a low hiss, as Smog’s brows furrowed into a frown and his lips pulled back into a sneer, “abandon this mission, I would have to scramble in order to see it done, and the least you could possibly do is give me a bit of a hand, no?”

  Asher nodded, a bit more violently this time. That seemed perfectly reasonable. He wouldn’t be happy to hand over Looper, but if it meant he didn’t have to steal an orb, he was willing to do it.

  Smog turned once more to Ruth, narrowed his eyes and raised a third finger, before finally speaking again. “Lastly, your brother would be made an example of what happens to those who back out of my deals. Have to preserve appearances and all that, I’m sure you understand?”

  Both Asher and Ruth’s eyes shot open wide. “What?!” Asher growled, clenching his fists.

  “Oh, come on, Asher, this all hypothetical!” Smog grinned maliciously before taking another long drag off his cigar. “You know I can’t afford to have you killed, you’re too useful to me. I don’t even care that you play all sides, I have more than enough manpower to make up for it. But your brother?” Smog laughed, pointing his cigar at the bulky red drake who was trying to shrink into his chair. “Everyone thinks your brother is the muscle between the two of you, but I know better. Ruth is your conscience, Asher,” Smog grinned, grinding the cigar out into the ashtray before snipping off the tip and placing it back into the box, “and I like you better when you don’t have one.”

  Ruth gulped audibly but remained silent, looking away when Asher tried to meet his gaze.

  “Hypothetically, of course,” Smog added, grinning down at the pair of drakes. “Now then, Asher, this game has been fun and all, but was there a point to all of it?”

  Asher licked his lips and looked away for a moment, staring out the window as he tried to process everything. He had known this is what Smog would threaten. If the Mountains came for Ruth, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to protect him. The first two repercussions were almost nothing in comparison to the third. He could live with them, but sacrificing Ruth? He had taken the job in the first place so he could afford to keep Ruth housed! His younger brother wasn’t able to afford a place to live on his own, had nowhere else to go. He’d end up on the streets, and bad things tended to happen to homeless drakes.

  “No, sorry to waste your time,” Asher finally said, once again meeting Duncan’s gaze, “just wanted to let you know that I made a new spell for the heist, one to mess with security cameras. When this is all over, I’ll be happy to sell it to you.”

  Smog grinned and nodded. “Good boy, Asher. You have around three days left. Meet me at Club Erebor around five pm once you have the orb. Be sure you steal from Pylon Three, that’s the one with the most depleted orbs. Good luck, gentlemen.”

  With that, the call died, and the windshield ceased being a screen. Fresh sunlight flooded into the car, and the brothers were momentarily blinded as their eyes adjusted to the difference in light. Ruth put a hand over his eyes, and Asher slumped against the scratched up headrest of his seat, a hand to his chest. His heart was racing, and he hadn’t even realized how fast it was pounding in his chest until everything had already been said and done.

  “That,” Ruth finally said, after a solid minute of silence had passed, “went way better than I was expecting.”

  “Yeah, I was worried he’d kill us through the call or something,” Asher grumbled, desperately trying to get a handle on his own fear. “Dammit, Ruth, I’m sorry I got you involved in this. I should never have agreed to take the job, I should have just taken his thousand dollars and walked away.”

  “Can you pull it off, though? Now that you’ve cased the joint, do you think you can steal an orb?” Ruth asked, leaning forward in mild expectation. Asher had all the info he needed, plus the skills to code any spell he’d need to break his way in. Ruth didn’t know if he’d have enough time to code the spells he’d need, but his brother had pulled all nighters before to finish less important spells, and now that their lives were on the line and he was under pressure, Ruth was slightly eager to see how fast his brother could work.

  Asher called up his holodisplay and quickly sifted through the information that popped up. His phone’s battery was running low, around 48 percent with a symbol indicating that it was charging, but a different number next to another icon, one that Ruth didn’t recognize, was flashing a brilliant 100.

  “She shouldn’t have let me into her security system,” Asher smirked, pulling up the diagnostic report he had compiled of the facility’s spell network, “I know more about Patel’s whole network than anyone who works there. I know every flaw in its design, I know every bug in their code. With enough prep time, I could tear this whole facility apart and nobody would be able to stop me.”

  “But can you jack an orb?” Ruth asked again, this time clarifying the specifics of the question.

  “Not only can I do it,” Asher grinned, looking up at his brother, “but I think I can get away clean.”

  Chapter 9

  Asher and Ruth returned to the facility a few minutes before 11pm, that same evening. Asher had changed into a pair of jeans and a black t-shirt, opting for a more subtle dress than his usual late night attire. Ruth had spent the evening napping in his jumpsuit, choosing not to bother changing before his third shift in 48 hours, while Asher had spent the time analyzing the data he had gathered from the spell network. His information wasn’t particularly detailed, but it gave him a starting point, which would save him valuable minutes when it came to coding ways around the system.

  While Ruth ran off towards the janitorial closets to get himself ready, Asher was directed to the IM department by a small drake in her early twenties who had taken over operation of the front desk. Even in comparison to Asher’s runty stature, the tiny blue drake barely reached up to his shoulder, and had no horns to speak of, a trait that was about as common among drakes a
s red hair was in humans. Asher thanked her for the directions and watched her wander back out to the front desk, making sure he was completely alone, with only the whir of the ventilation system to keep him company. He eyed both ends of the hallway, before looking up at the ward module mounted above his office door, a small blue hemisphere that glowed with soft light. When detection wards pulsed fast enough, it was difficult to tell them apart from light bulbs. With a slight, knowing chuckle, he pulled the metal door open and stepped inside his office, shutting the door behind him.

  Office, of course, turned out to be a huge exaggeration. Much like Rita Patel’s office, Asher’s was roughly the size of a supply closet, with a rickety folding table pressed up against the wall and a compact computer plate sitting in its centre. In the middle of the room, eagerly waiting for him to have a seat, was a reinforced ergonomic chair covered in a black, plush fabric that disguised the heavy steel skeleton within. There was a single security camera in the entire room, located just above his desk and pointed at the door, which meant that anything he did on his computer would be completely out of sight from it, hidden within an all-too-convenient blind spot. Asher sighed as he took a seat in the chair, and winced as it creaked under his weight.

  As soon as he pulled up to his ‘desk,’ the compact computer flared to life, calling into view a few screens and a holokeyboard for him to work on. The first thing he noticed was an email sent directly from Patel. He chuckled a little bit, pulling his phone out of his pocket and setting it on the table next to the computer. His phone wasn’t much smaller than the compact computer, although it was shaped like a rectangle instead of a square and instead of shiny silver metal it was encased in matte black plastic, with a glass screen. As soon as he took his hand off his device, it immediately began to interface with the computer, sharing data and networking so they could access each other across long distances.

  “Your priorities for today are to start fixing the modulation matrix, followed by security network maintenance. Any computer troubles experienced by coworkers will also be directed to you,” Asher read, imagining Rita saying every word, wagging her finger at him and looming over him with her imposing figure. He shuddered as he imagined her standing over his shoulder, pointing at all the different applications and spells his computer could run.

  Asher cracked his knuckles and grinned as he got to work. His claws flew over the keyboard, lightly tapping at the floating buttons as he did a full network scan of every single spell and system that let the facility operate. He found the security network, the system of spells that kept the wards functioning, and subtly began to work on their source code. It was a simple matter of reprogramming the wards, since he wasn’t changing their overall functionality nor was he changing anything about the way they operated, but rather he was setting them up so that, at his command, they would begin ignoring mana signatures.

  His signature, specifically.

  Each individual person left behind a unique trail of mana as they moved through the world. Much in the same way a fingerprint could be used to track and ultimately locate humans, a person’s mana signature was a way to track them, and was easier to use than other biometrics since drakes and humans were both guaranteed to have them. The whole concept of wards was built around the idea that a mana signature could be located, identified, and logged. In a place like a mana station, however, where the manaflux was at its most potent, it would be almost impossible for any living creature, drake or otherwise, to leave behind enough of a signature that could be traced after a crime was committed.

  Asher quickly swiped through some files on the screen called up by his phone, until he came across the copy of his own mana signature that he kept for just such a reason. To the untrained eye, the image he opened looked like a jumbled mess of static and shapes, but to Asher it was a unique pattern that represented the wake he left in the world. With a grin, he got to work hammering out the code that would make him invisible to every ward in the facility.

  It wasn’t necessarily a difficult change to make. He had written enough wards in college that he could modify them in his sleep, and given how little attention he was paying to his code he might as well have had his eyes shut. He hid the function under layers of clauses and nested loops, ensuring it was sufficiently buried and undetectable to anyone not intimately familiar with the system. While his code was functional, it wasn’t necessarily the most elegant solution to the problem. In an ideal world, with more prep time, he would have preferred a spell that tricked the wards into not seeing his signature, but between Shimmerscale and Looper he knew there was just no way he could code a spell that could do so efficiently. At least not within the next couple days. Running too many spells at once just made them cost more mana, without fail.

  He quickly coded a new application, one which saved a backup of the ward code from before he edited it, as well as the edited version. It didn’t take a lot of work, but now at the push of a button on his phone, Asher was able to command all of the wards in the building to ignore him completely, and when he was done nobody would even know that there was an edited version of the code in the first place. Asher did a quick test, running the application and noting that the ward network flickered for a moment, before the ward just outside his office started pulsing at 50pps instead of its normal 200. As quickly as he triggered it, he turned it back to normal, and was pleased to find the ward was once again detecting him.

  Asher spent the next few hours alternating between sabotaging the system to make it easier for him to break in later, while simultaneously making subtle improvements that wouldn’t undermine his heist. He found an undamaged copy of the modulator spell and reverted the broken and corrupted version to the previous update, which he quickly backed up to his personal cloud server before editing in some functions to hopefully prevent further errors in the system. Roughly ten minutes after he had made the change, he got an email from one of the generator workers letting him know that their mana output levels had returned to normal, and that whatever the hell he was doing in there was helping a lot. He found some recordings of the generator room, where the mana orbs were held on spinning pylons, and quickly downloaded a few minutes of loopable footage onto his phone; Looper could generate footage by itself, but it paid to be careful and have a backup just in case the spell proved too costly on his resources.

  As he worked, he completely lost track of time, and didn’t realize his shift had ended until Rita Patel carefully pushed his door open and found him hard at work, scanning the entire facility’s computer network for viruses while fixing a bug in their ward array. She told him to head home, and that his next shift would be in a few days, so they could get him onto the daytime schedule.

  As Asher stepped out of the building, Ruth came up beside him, and they walked towards the car together.

  “So,” Ruth said, once he was sure they were out of earshot of the building, “any good news?”

  Asher grinned up at his hulking mountain of a brother. “They’ll never see me coming.”

  Chapter 10

  Asher did one final check of his gear to make sure he was completely ready. He wore his pair of mana powered watches, one on each wrist, each loaded with a dedicated selection of spells. On his left wrist he had his lockpicking spell, his personal shield, and the good old classic Magic Missile. On his right he had Looper, a force blast spell, and a couple of his more combat oriented spells, which he hoped he wouldn’t need to use. His phone had been cleared of unessential applications and data, so that the only things present were the application he had coded two days earlier to trick the wards, Shimmerscale, a mana vision spell that would allow him to see mana signatures even through walls, and Fixit. His phone was hooked up to a chunky external mana battery that hung off the belt on his hip, which he hoped would give him another hour of sustaining the pair of spells.

  He was dressed in tight-fitting clothing, to avoid anything getting caught on protrusions. A black vest that zipped up at the front and left his arms expos
ed, as well as leggings made from a similar fabric that had been an actual nightmare to pull over his clawed feet. He felt a little silly, being dressed in what amounted to scale-tight spandex like some old time superhero, or villain, he figured, since he was about to become a robber. Just in case somebody was able to see his silhouette through Shimmerscale, his vest was also equipped with a hood that slipped over his horns. His pliable crest was bent to one side, further disrupting the shape of his silhouette. He hoped that it would be enough, between a spell designed to make him functionally invisible and his efforts to make himself unrecognizable, that people wouldn’t suspect him as being the thief.

  He had parked his car a few blocks away from the mana station, deep under the cover of some decrepit old buildings. He had casually worried that somebody would try to strip his rust-bucket for parts while he was gone, but he quietly reassured himself that his car was worth less than the effort needed to take it apart, and that if anybody wasted the time to steal it they would more than likely need to spend more money to fix it than they’d earn from selling it. It was, after all, only his spell that kept the broken machine from falling to scrap metal halfway down the road.

  With a deep breath, Asher stepped out of his car and stood out in the cool evening air. This part of the broodtown stank of ozone, the telltale smell of mana permeating every particle of air. He held the polluted air in his lungs, before exhaling and calling up his personal display. With a flick of his wrist, he activated Shimmerscale, and watched as his body and everything he was wearing disappeared from view. When he was sure he couldn’t be seen, he reached back into his car and pulled out a bag, which quickly melted into the air as Shimmerscale incorporated it into its range. He quickly slung the bag over his shoulder, before ducking through the alleys as he made a direct line to the mana station.