Had this for awhile, found it, posted it for the heck. I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts, some familiar people should be arriving in the next chapter or so. Big thanks to takingoffmyshoes for being my beta for this chapter!
The nature of life can be summed up in two maxims: it can change in a moment, and when it does, it goes on. It's a scary concept when you really stop and think about it – in one brief instant, your entire understanding of how the world operates can be turned on its head, for better or worse, and then everything keeps on going without slowing the least bit down to let you catch up.
Even though some were subtler than others, Mal could point out most of these pivotal moments and, out of habit, would classify most of them as negative. If she really thought about it, she might point to the day that two very well dressed people asked her a very stupid question, or the day she defended something she wasn't sure she believed in while surrounded by people who made her feel more accepted than she ever had. If it were possible, Mal might have ironically counted her death among this collection of life-altering moments. However, the one moment that really changed her life – and certainly triggered the events that make up her story – was not quite something she thought of as the defining moment and, like most things in her life, was completely her fault.
Crouching in the dark was natural for Mal, the same way that staring down an obstacle right before tackling it head-first was. This time the obstacle was a cold slab of reinforced stainless steel that stood between her and another successful job. The thing inside was also one more thing destined to collect dust somewhere else, but that wasn't the part she cared about.
Even through the drop cloth beneath her and the denim of her jeans, the young woman could feel the scratchiness of the expensive carpet she knelt on. Pushed to one side of the room was a neat desk, devoid of all clutter but a tiny cat-shaped paperweight. It was an ugly brown thing with wide yellow eyes and poorly painted-on features. It'd had to be moved before beginning work.
Mal's green eyes swept over the sleek, high-end safe illuminated by the small penlight tucked behind her ear. The information had been accurate, she noted with approval. With the cameras and sensors down for another twelve minutes, her principal concern was the safe's relock system. Behind the solid steel door there was a panel of glass that, if cracked, would trigger a secondary locking mechanism that would reseal the safe and make opening it…difficult.
Mal kept her breathing smooth and regulated as she reached for [the tools that she had carefully selected for this job and arranged neatly on the floor beside her. She wrapped her fingers slowly around the handle of the drill and took time further inspecting her target.
A model like this one indicated an owner who was careful, paranoid, and nursing a big enough ego to devote an entire quarter wall of their office to a very obvious safe. Someone had something to keep safe and couldn't help but broadcast it. Pride goeth before a fall, she mused.
"Yo, Queen." A hard-edged voice that broke both her focus and the silence sounded from just outside the doorway to the inner office. "How much longer?"
"I asked for seven minutes," Mal returned coolly, not taking her eyes off of the safe. "We agreed to seven minutes, so it will take seven minutes."
Knight was a spotlessly groomed young man who kept his fair hair neatly trimmed and favored a nice dress shirt to set off the dusting of stubble on his sharp cheekbones, but his crisp appearance didn't make him any less of a threat. Mal was keenly aware that he currently held the strategically favorable position, standing behind her as he did while she knelt on the floor.
"You can't rush art," Mal told him, and listened for him to leave. When he didn't, she frowned. "Is there a problem?"
"Just wanted to see an artist at work," Knight returned easily.
Mal was stopped from retorting by the abrupt sound of quick footsteps hurrying towards them. She rolled her eyes – if there had been an emergency, it would have been communicated through the earbuds each of them wore.
Rook was an excitable newbie with bright blue eyes that just couldn't seem to stay still. He wore a black ski mask he had brought himself that now covered his bright red hair as a hat.
"You're cracking open the safe?" he asked, voice rising hopefully.
Mal sat back on her heels with a sigh, the drill resting in her lap. "Well, I'm trying to."
"Aw, does Queenie have stage fright?" Knight cooed.
"Go watch your window," Mal snapped back. They all had jobs to do, and his did not include being a distraction.
He finally left, muffled footsteps fading along with his chuckle. Rook laughed at the mild jab and trotted after him.
Free of her audience, Mal leaned forward again and placed the tip of the drill bit against the hard metal and carefully began to work. She hadn't wanted to take this job in the first place, but experience had taught her enough to realize that arguing was pointless.
If she had only been paired with those two because their codenames lined up in that order, she might have to strangle someone. But no, that couldn't be it, there was always more thought process than that.
Bishop, a stout, middle-aged man with thinning hair and squinty eyes, was down in the lobby at the security desk. He had been the one to reactivate the elevators and shut down the cameras.
In a getaway vehicle half a block away waited King, the mastermind of this job and their boss. His head was shaved down at the sides, and the longer hair on the top of his head was slicked back with gel. Like all of them, he wore dark clothes, but in his case the long sleeves served to hide his multitudinous tattoos, which complemented the piercing in his nose, the two in his lip, and the too many to bother counting in his ears.
This was the third job Mal had worked with King, and despite his appearance she had to admit that he was competent and professional.
The long bit tunneled deeper into the steel, sending shavings of metal flying back at her. She would have preferred to do this by touch, but the client had ordered a spectacle. They were meant to take what they came for and blow the safe, destroying everything else inside.
She adjusted the handle of the drill and caught a glance at the digital watch around her wrist, counting down her time in minutes, seconds, and milliseconds. Her seven minutes were coming to a swift end; she'd taken too long prepping her tools and deciding the drilling point.
She pressed the drill into the safe harder, trying to move the process along, and shouldn't have been as shocked as she was to hear the faint yet unmistakable crack. There went the glass.
She froze, shutting the drill off.
She glanced at the doorway, and unconsciously went to brush her hair back from her forehead. It was completely unnecessary, as her hair was tucked up under a dark beret, but she couldn't suppress the nervous habit, not even after years of being scolded for it. The most she could manage was to avoid actually touching her skin in the process, thereby keeping her disposable gloves free of sweat and the incriminating DNA it contained.
Mal had wasted too much time already and she flat-out refused to let such a straightforward job get the best of her. The glass panel had cracked, but it hadn't shattered, so the safety measures hadn't engaged yet. The safe was still openable, but there was no time to attempt to finish by touch, and using the drill was out of the question. She groaned with frustrated exasperation and strode forward forcefully. Her fist made contact with the solid wall, and then again and again, each blow as hard as the first.
A faint blue glow started to build around Mal's arms, and spread to cover the rest of her body. When she felt she was ready, she stopped, and pressed her fingertips against the safe. The exercise had raised her heart beat and sped up her breathing – combined with the mounting pressure of power and the time constraint, it was making it hard to focus.
The blue glow spread from Mal's skin to the safe door and she closed her eyes, picturing the inner workings of the safe, starting at the combination dial and visualizing the spindle that turned with it, running through the wheel pack to the drive cam behind.
Although it may look like a nothing more than a bulky hunk of steel, a safe is made up of many small pieces that fit together in a way that is beautifully intricate. There is no room for error, because if one little thing is off balance, the whole thing is failed. Inhale.
With her eyes closed, Mal envisioned all these components suffused with her blue light.
Exhale.
Through the metal against her fingertips, she could feel the parts inside begin to shift, and the soft click as the first tumbler fell into place.
Inhale.
Mal could vaguely sense the glass and the hairline fracture running through it, could feel the empty space of the safe's cavity beyond the section she was working on, and was aware of the blunt drill bit that felt even more out of place in her mind's eye than it looked visually. The next tumbler clicked.
In the quiet split second between exhale and inhale, Mal sensed motion, not from the safe, but from behind her.
Whipping her head around to look over her shoulder, she found Rook standing open-mouthed and wide-eyed. One arm hung by his side, as slack as his jaw, while the other held his phone with the camera lens pointed directly at her.
Mal froze, but the blue glow tightened around her and the safe. A loud crunch sounded as the glass panel shattered completely, followed by the metallic thunks of the steel bars sliding firmly into place.
Almost without thinking, Mal stepped back and threw her free hand out toward Rook, then pulled both arms to her side as forcefully as she could. Rook was yanked forward and tossed to the floor in front of her, mouth held shut, arms and legs pinned together, vision obscured by blue.
At the same time, the solid steel door of the safe tore out of the wall with a deafening groan. Once again on instinct, Mal leaned into the projectile and braced herself. Instead of pancaking them, it merely bounced off of the blue light surrounding her, more like a softly tossed pillow than anything, and crashed to the floor.
Dust billowed up around them and bits of debris peppered the room with dull taps.
Mal tried to relax, but the surge of kinetic energy that had come with the impact was too much to simply stifle and walk off. She would have to deal with it later – she didn't have much time before Knight came running, since he would have to be Deaf to have missed the ruckus she'd caused even if he was sopped to be several floors down by now. But than again so was Rook.
Rook's blue eyes were so wide Mal thought they might pop out of his head. His eyebrows high with suppose and his expression was pitched up tight in fear, or horror, or both. She forced her grip of the blue glow to relax, but did not let go completely.
They were way past 'you didn't see anything' and Mal knew there was no reasonable explanation she could offer that would satisfy Rook. She was in so much trouble.
"Impressed?" Mal asked instead, planting her foot on his chest, the corner of her mouth pulling up. She felt energized enough to run a marathon, but even to her own ears she sounded breathless enough to have just raced one.
"If I can do this," she began, gesturing to the wreckage of the room and then to the hole in the wall, "to that, imagine what I could do to you."
Rook wiggled a bit, as if testing the strength of the bonds.
"You were seeing things," Mal went on. "This was the explosive, nothing more, understand?" She loosed her hold on Rook's head, and he nodded franticly. As a final threatening display, his cellphone flew from his hand and into her own.
"Good boy." She nodded in approval, and squeezed until the phone screen cracked and put the wreckage in her back pocket. "Now, not a word to anyone. This never happened."
She released her hold and spun back to the hole in the wall where the safe door had been. She grabbed the box that they'd been after, set the real explosive charges, and walked briskly back to where Rook was just starting to sit up.
"Come on," she snapped impatiently, hauling the man to his feet and all but dragging him out the door with one hand.
Rook sputtered, his brain apparently catching up and processing what he'd seen. "Wait! You – The – How – How are you doing this?"
Mal groaned aloud. She was doomed.
It was a long, tense drive back to her drop-off point, at least for Mal. Knight had called shotgun and King was the designated driver, which left her in the back of the van. Rook kept throwing nervous glances in her direction with no trace of tact or subtlety, and it was getting on her nerves. Luckily it was just the two of them and Bishop, and he was too preoccupied with the copied files from Genesis Tech's computer system to pay attention to anything around him.
It wasn't Rook so much as the pressure deep inside, left over from the blue glow, that was making the drive seem so long. King was a fairly good driver and so there weren't many bumps or sudden stops to worsen it, but the vibrating engine was a steady supply of mounting anxiety that was amplified by Rookie's scrutiny
Trying hard to ignore her watcher, Mal fished an over-sized purse out from under her seat and pulled out a blue pea coat and brown ankle boots. She stripped off her black shoes and black jacket, stuffed them into her bag, and put on the less conspicuous clothing. She peeled off the dark beret and a light brown braid dropped on her shoulder, stray curls too short to stay secured instantly starting to puff up again.
"Here's your stop, Queen," called King as the van pulled to the curb.
Mal opened the back doors of the commercial loading van and hopped out, bidding everyone a polite goodnight, then caught Rook's gaze and added, "Don't do anything stupid."
"Likewise, Queen," Knight returned, twisting around in his front seat to show his teeth. It wasn't a smile, but it could pass as one. "Careful walking home – there's a lot of unsavory characters out this late."
Tired, and not willing to waste her energy on him, Mal bit her tongue and slammed the doors shut. Small talk was discouraged, anyway. No contact outside of work and no names other than their designated chess pieces. It was a lonely way to run a crew, but it was logical, and more importantly, it was efficient.
The walk to the bus stop, the bus back to her apartment building, and the elevator ride to the fourth floor were without incident, and soon the thief was unlocking her front door. She did little more than toss her bag to a corner and strip off her shoes and coat before falling into bed.
The next afternoon, Mal was trudging through a crowd of people on their lunch break with take-out for two under one arm and her large purse under the other.
Her alarm clock had woken her up two hours before and she had promptly slammed her fist down on the snooze button and rolled over, defiantly burrowing deep under a fluffy comforter. The snooze button had taken two more hits before she was ready to get up. A morning routine, one mandatory pit stop, and a brisk walk later Mal was ducking into a shop tucked down a less crowded dead-end street. She pushed the door open and was greeted by cheerful bells and the smell of old things.
The antique shop was filled to the brim with miscellaneous things that were all neatly arranged in no obvious order. Off to one side sat a glossy white piano, topped by a wire tree covered in all styles of hats from bowlers to newsboy caps. Behind it were woven carpets draped over a stand climbing up the wall, and on the opposite wall were four mismatched bookcases pushed together, shelves stuffed alternately with books and small knickknacks. Snow globes, glass figurines, and fine jewelry were displayed in every way imaginable. Large pieces of furniture, paintings, sculptures, safes of various sizes, glass display cases, and various clocks took up the space in the middle of the shop. Near the back of the room was a large oak counter, varnished a glossy brown, guarding a swinging door with no handle that led to the back room.
"Just a minute," called a smooth voice, deepened with age, from behind the swinging door.
"It's just me, Bennett," Mal answered back, unpacking the take-out. She placed one of the boxes on the counter in front of the soft leather swivel chair and the other to the right of the first, then picked a wooden stool from the shop's collection and sat down to wait, back straight and hands resting in her lap. She glanced idly at the chessboards set up on any flat surface clear enough for one. Mal counted six, all in different stages of the game.
Her eyes jumped to the door at it swung open, her posture straightened slightly more.
"Good afternoon, Mallory," Bennett greeted her. He unbuttoned the sleeves of his white shirt and rolled them up as he sat down in his chair. "How did last night go?"
"It went well," Mal said after returning his greeting. "We got what we were there for."
Bennett took a bite of his sandwich and Mal took the opportunity to start on her own food. "Please tell me more," the old man requested after swallowing, so Mal did.
As always, he wore a light dress shirt and a dull-colored vest with matching slacks that made the neat red tie stand out nicely. There were prominent wrinkles around his mouth and temple where his dark complexion contrasted with his hair, now more white than grey. Bennett had the look and mannerisms of a gentleman of high social standing, but Mal knew better.
Bennett listened patiently as she told him almost all of the details of her night, leaving out anything involving the blue glow. Mal also knew better than to bring it up after being told for years how important it was for her to be…discreet about her abnormality, and she didn't feel like a lecture.
"And the blast from the explosives wasn't too much for you?" Bennett asked when she had finished.
"No, I was fine," she answered evenly, packing up the remains of her lunch.
"Well done, Mallory," Bennett said, rising.
Mal stood as well and thanked him. They shared a nod, and then Bennett went back through the swinging door to resume his work. The praise, however small it may have seemed, made Mal puff up with pride because she had simultaneously managed to fib to and get praise from her mentor. She was walking on air.
The bell over the door jingled, and she turned with a genuine grin towards the costumer. But it wasn't a costumer. Mal's smile vanished along with every pleasant feeling that had just accumulated because in the doorway, looking equal parts lost and nervous, was Rook.
Just as Mal thought she was facing the biggest threat to her existence, the real damage had already been done. Buried deep in LexCorp's encrypted files was a new video uploaded from one of their minor branch corporations. It showed her blue glow, moving safe and cellphone alike, from the perspective of a tiny camera hidden inside an ugly brown cat.