Nyx’s hand left his sleeve.
That was the first warning.
The second was the shift in her weight, her center of gravity dropping forward by the smallest fraction, oddly resembling a large cat ready to lunge. The chro fanatic was fifteen ters away and closing with every display case he smashed, and she had made her decision about that. The decision, apparently, was that twelve rounds should suffice.
Proxy got both arms around her from behind and backed her through the service door.
She could have stopped him. They both knew it. What stopped her was the sa thing that always stopped her in that exact situation, which was that his arms were around her and the part of her got tangled in sothing else entirely, costing her about two seconds of intent.
He used those two seconds to get her through the maintenance door and shut it.
The latch clicked.
Through the door, the fanatic hit another case. Glass spilled across the museum floor.
Nyx stood in the maintenance shaft with his arms still loosely around her and turned her head just enough to look at him over her shoulder.
"I had it," she said.
"You had twelve rounds and a man made mostly of chro."
"Twelve would have been enough."
"For what, exactly, would twelve rounds fired at chro have been enough?"
She considered that.
"I would have found the non-chro parts."
He let go of her and reached through the network into the casino, because the service door was handy but the fanatic’s path would put him at it in under one minute, and Proxy wasn’t certain he wouldn’t kick it down.
The casino screens had powered back on when the electricity returned, a row of them along the walls, cycling corporate screensavers with audio output he now had access.
He found the output and turned every screen to full volu at once.
The dead luxury brand’s ambient music filled the casino at a volu fit for a much larger room.
Through the door, the destruction stopped.
A pause.
Then heavy footsteps, changing direction. Back the way they had co, toward the casino, because the fanatic’s thod of searching was basically following disturbances, and Proxy had just made the largest one in the building.
"You could have just let deal with him," Nyx said, listening to him go.
"You’re welco," Proxy said, and started down.
The maintenance shaft was vertical and narrow, with ladder rungs set into concrete, pipes running the walls, and the sll of insulation, rust, and the trapped air of a space that had not properly circulated in decades.
Proxy went first.
Nyx ca down behind him without trouble.
They reached the bottom, a service room with loading equipnt long since rotted into irrelevance and a heavy exterior door with a crash bar that had not been used since the resort closed.
He checked the exterior cara.
The garden was empty.
He pushed the door.
The outside hit differently from the building, with its warm morning. The sll of old stone and green things overtaking the old maintenance sll.
They stepped out, and Proxy took two seconds to simply look at what the resort had apparently spent a great deal of money creating before forgetting about it.
The garden was the sort of thing built to prove the people who commissioned it had enough money. That didn’t require the garden to make sense.
Large abstract sculptures in chro and concrete occupied the area in positions that suggested so sort of artistic, so two ters tall, so three, their surfaces catching the morning light in ways that had probably been discussed at length during the design phase.
Between them there was white gravel paths colonized by weeds pushing through the gaps.
A water fountain, dry, its abstract concrete basin now ho to a small determined tree that had decided the basin was its problem.
And the gravel was everywhere.
Nyx lifted one foot and looked at it.
Then at him.
"Don’t," he said.
"I wasn’t going to."
"You were thinking about it."
"I was not thinking about skipping through the garden while singing. Not at all."
He stepped off the path and onto the strip of grass between the nearest sculpture and the hedge line. She followed without making a sound, which was the point, and they moved into the garden using the sculptures as cover.
With calm, because rushing across grass that might hide soft spots near the old irrigation system risked a noise.
And not lingering, because one of them had a window overlooking this space and Proxy was watching that feed with the attention it deserved.
He was facing the stairwell door.
He had not looked at the window.
Nyx paused behind a large chro abstract piece, shoulder against it, and regarded it with genuine interest.
It was shaped like sothing that was slightly indecent.
She tilted her head.
"Don’t," he said again.
"It’s interesting."
"It’s a distraction."
"Art is supposed to be a distraction."
She fell into step beside him.
"This one reminds of us."
"Should I take that as a complint or as an insult."
"I would prefer if you took it as reality."
They moved through the sculpture garden midst the banter. The gravel paths were everywhere, and they avoided every one, choosing the route that stayed on grass and in the shadow of the abstract forms, each position selected against the windows Proxy was tracking in the feeds.
Behind them in the building, one more had appeared on the ground-floor cara and was opening doors in sequence, working his way toward the exterior exit they had used.
He had not reached it yet.
The shimr of the stealth operative was still unlocated, which was the variable he liked least, because not knowing where she was ant accepting she could be anywhere, which was its own exhausting problem.
And underneath all of it, steady and patient, the viral-hack netrunner was still inside his network.
She had been redirected twice now and each ti she had recalibrated and co back from another node.
She was learning his access, cataloguing the nodes he was using, building a map of him from what he had touched.
He was managing her the way one manages a slow leak, aware, and patching what he could.
He told Nyx this in a murmur, moving between a tall concrete abstraction and a hedge that had grown into an approximation of sothing organic.
She considered it in the way she considered anything that was not imdiately punchable.
A brief, focused pause.
Then a question.
"How long?"
"Before she finds sothing she can use? An hour, maybe less. She’s good."
"Can you be better than her?"
"I can be more familiar with this system than she is. That’s not the sa thing as being better, but it’s the advantage I have."
She was quiet for a mont, shoulder close to his arm as they moved.
"What happens when she has enough of the map?"
"Maybe she cos at us herself, maybe she sends our location to the others. Who knows."
Another pause.
"I really could have just shot the chro one," she said.
"That beca impossible when I locked us in a maintenance shaft."
The ornantal wall at the far end of the garden was low, decorative in a way that suggested the garden budget had ran out at so point.
Beyond it, through the cara at the exterior corner, the tree line was clear and near.
He checked the window feed.
The one there still had not turned.
He checked the other feed.
Still inside.
Still opening doors.
He looked at the wall.
Nyx was already beside it, and she put her hand out to him.
Not because she needed help over it, which they both understood.
But because it was offered and she wanted to see what he would do with it.
He took it and they went over together.
Which took longer than necessary.
Entirely her fault.
He chose not to say so.
Because they were in a stealth situation.
And a discussion would have been louder than the gravel.
They dropped into the undergrowth on the other side.
The jungle received them the way places that do not care about you receive things. Which felt close enough to welco under the circumstances.
The resort was behind them, its caras pointing inward, the building’s network already thinning at the edges of his range as the foliage thickened around the signal.
Nyx crouched in the undergrowth beside him, shoulder against his arm, looking back through the leaves at the white ornantal wall.
"We’re outside," she said.
"We’re outside," he agreed.
She turned to look at him, her face very close, damp morning air on her cheeks and the warm, certain patience she always had with him.
"I still think I could have shot the chro one."
"Are you for," he sighed.
"We’ll think about it again if he et him in the jungle."
She smiled.
Sowhere in the resort’s network, the viral-hack netrunner found a node he had touched an hour ago and paused there, reading the tistamp, beginning to understand the direction.
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