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“Fucking kick me out,” she said cheerfully.

“I don’t care.” She looked around. “But everyone else here will treat this tech like a toy to destabilize events literally no one will give a shit about in a single news cycle.” She pointed at Mirabel’s stupid face.

“My dad didn’t send me. I edged him out with a set of steel basement window bars, a few friends who have automatic weapons and poor impulse control, and genuine millennial ambition, which is a combination of astrology and white-hot rage at the capitalistic, heteronormative, boomer-bred patriarchy that forces us into anxious complacency.

I’m here because I want to burn it all down.

The question is, are you ready for a new world order? ”

“Yikes,” Yardley breathed.

KC was gratified to see rage flare in Mirabel’s eyes. She did have a gift for repelling male dominance. He reached into an inner pocket of his suit coat and pulled out the micro drive, hushing the ring of buyers at the dais. Still looking at her, he slammed it on the pillow and strode away.

“Can you—” Gramercy’s voice.

“She’s already on it,” Yardley said. “Don’t bother my protégé.”

KC sidestepped, mashing the toes of a woman who’d made the mistake of wearing sparkly high-heeled sandals, and got to the pillow first. She put her hands on her hips, elbows wide enough to play defense against anyone who might be thinking of pushing her out of the way. Then she took a look.

Shit.

She strode off the dais.

“Tech requests another few moments with the device,” Gramercy said.

“That’s not it.” KC stalked away, waiting to say more until she’d found a spot close to the windows where she could contemplate the view unobserved. “I was really, super hoping for Plan A.”

“Tech didn’t quite—”

“The material that kind of drive is made of is an old-school casein-based plastic. It looks a way. The sage green color is distinctive. I didn’t touch it, but I know that if I had, it wouldn’t feel right. It’s a dupe.”

“You’re going by color and… anticipated feel of the drive case?” Atlas broke in.

“I have been looking at buying one of those adorably minuscule drives to play with for two years, but the agency doesn’t pay me enough. I know what’s in my unpurchased online shopping cart. Those are sacred items.”

“Affirmative,” Yardley said with a satisfyingly stern tone. “Plan B it is.”

Plan A had been straightforward: KC would win the bid.

The U.S. government would transfer whatever obscene number of dollars KC spent, or convincingly pretend to—that was for the money guys, not KC’s department—and she’d put the drive in her briefs, tuck herself into the back seat of the agency’s car, and hand it off to someone who she would advise to take it to a secure room and incinerate it in a small, security-cleared kiln.

Simple.

Plan B was a lot more like trying to knock a hornet’s nest off the shed on a hot day while covered in pancake syrup.

“Please take your seats.” The blonde with the sparkle shoes was circulating through the crowd. Portuguese accent. Lorena Fonseca. “The sale will begin in twenty minutes.”

“No updates from the analysts on the location of the safe,” Yardley said. “Still a toss-up between the carriage house and the master suite, so you’ll have to go by your gut and be ready to pivot.”

KC mingled her way toward the Portuguese woman. Fonseca had been deep in the hacker scene for the Russians a few years ago, and her code was enviably efficient and flawless.

“E aí?” KC asked. “Tudo bem?”

Fonseca narrowed her eyes. “Your accent isn’t bad. Nanny?”

“One of them.” KC had actually honed her Portuguese to a fine point during a lonely period her first year of college.

She’d run across an access door to stream the Portuguese telenovela Ajuste de Contas and had gotten hooked after watching a few episodes and catching a blistering parasocial crush on the actress Paula Neves, who she’d wanted to be able to talk to on Tumblr.

“We begin in twenty. Why are you bothering me, vagabunda?”

“If you wanted to transfer seven hundred Bitcoin over a firewall that Kate ‘The Hackmistress’ Mason built around the National Australia Bank,” KC asked, leaning in close, lowering her voice, “and your cover was to powder your nose during a weapons auction, what power outlets would you use in this house? I don’t want to flip a breaker. ”

“Why are you little pestinhas like this? This party is for grown-ups.”

“I know, I know. But I really like the sensation of my face attached to my skull, and I don’t want to look at it hanging from some guy’s finger just because a teeny-tiny item on my pre-auction to-do list slipped my mind.”

“Caralhos me fodam,” Fonseca swore. “Mirabel has a private grid on the carriage house. After ten minutes, I’m sending someone to tie you to a chair and throw you in the canal.”

“Perf! Brigadinha!”

“This is why you send tech into the field, ladies,” Yardley said as KC hustled to the patio. “They can go on more than their gut.”

“I hate this view,” KC said as soon as she’d made it outside. There were quite a few people on the patio, most of them men clumped in small groups, smoking and trying to impress each other. “Dudes in formalwear, dark as fuck, slippery surface—it’s like homecoming all over again.”

“I went to queer prom,” Yardley said. “Lots of light and color. Gramercy, do we have anything decent from the cloaked drone you can give her?”

One of KC’s contact lenses showed her an image of the grounds from the air. She had to blink and take a moment to adjust, but she’d practiced with this tech, so her brain only glitched for a moment. “Much better. How live is this feed?” She made her way toward the edge of the patio.

“Bit of a delay,” Gramercy said. “Five to seven seconds.”

“I’ll let you know if anyone’s coming,” Yardley assured her.

“Copy.” After checking the feed one last time, she slipped off the porch and onto the damp lawn. The cold raised chill bumps over her bare arms.

“There are seven armed guards along this pathway. Copy?” Yardley’s speech had sped up, but it remained unbothered, like she trusted KC to handle the guards. It warmed KC’s muscles up without stretching.

“Yep.” She scanned the landscaping along the path, checking it against the drone feed. “It might be nice if our Canadian buddy made himself useful and distracted those three clustered together at five o’clock closest to the French doors.”

“Copy,” Atlas replied. “We’ll get that done.”

KC went still until she heard what she assumed was the Sister’s voice greet the three guards, asking for a light and making a gross joke about the champagne fountain attendant.

As soon as she saw the group move off, she somersaulted between two trimmed shrub rows that had guards on either side, her focus moving down to what felt like one vibrating point.

She moved up to a crouch and made a standing jump onto a stone pillar that put her body above the last guard she had to pass, standing only a few meters away.

Before he could turn around (in the event he heard the soles of her Docs hit the granite), she crouched and leaned toward the carriage house until her palm hit rough wooden trim, then swung her body in a tight circle to the small side vestibule over a door.

“ Parkour ,” Yardley whispered.

Smiling, KC reached into a slit in the leather of her boot to pull out a lockpick set.

“I’m going to need help with the alarm system.

I can see the light bank through the door window.

It’s a KorenSur 30x, so we don’t need to get fancy, we can just jam the fuck out of it.

Tell tech to use the two-step code I wrote, but not the new one.

We want that sweet vintage version that’s all power and no finesse. ”

“Copy,” Gramercy said, with a smile in his voice. After a few seconds’ delay, he reported back. “We’ve got it running. You’re good to proceed.”

Most of the other students in KC’s training cohort at Langley had been recruited through the traditional channels, and none of them had picked a lock prior to their arrival in Virginia. It was one of the few units KC had completed in her training with top marks.

“Gramercy issued that acknowledgment,” Yardley said, “because I was still recovering from the sweet move off that pillar. I had to dump a bucket of ice over my head.”

KC’s cheeks were hot when the tumblers fell.

She reached up as she opened the door and, before the tongue could disengage from the strike plate, pressed down on the button on the top of the door that would’ve sounded an onsite alarm if she hadn’t.

After three seconds, she let go, held her breath, and finally exhaled when she did not, thankfully, hear the piercing wail of a siren.

She was glad for the platform soles. Without them, she never would have been able to reach the button.

She watched the KorenSur’s light bank until all the lights had blinked from green to yellow, then stepped into an open-plan room containing a lot of antique Scandinavian furniture painted with flower motifs.

“I need a power scan—” KC stepped forward into the room and heard, from the light bank of the KorenSur, the soft, nearly inaudible click of a connecting circuit. “No.” She bit her lip.

“No, you don’t need a power scan? Confirm?” Yardley asked.

“I do, but first I have to know if there is a laser field or a heat-sensing field in this room before I take another step. You probably have another twenty, twenty-five seconds to figure it out.”

“Copy,” Yardley said, and then, a second later, “Both. What do you need?”

“I’m going to have to finish tripping it, and what I want tech to do is just silence the alarm and block the notification to whoever has it set up on whatever device. This is KorenSur’s app-based system. Kind of cheap on Mirabel’s part.”

“Like what Tabasco did for me in Berlin a couple years ago?” Yardley said.