Five minutes until Molech’s deadline.
The obscenity that was Livingston Tower loomed over the sedan, having turned from flat black to beet red since Zoey had seen it last (apparently the memorial service marked the end of the mourning period). It was frosted by the artificial snow, making the whole thing look like a cherry Popsicle that had just come out of the freezer. Will and Zoey were alone in the car two blocks away, close enough to see yellow caution tape had been stretched across the main entrance.
Will said, “We had them close the building under the guise of a bomb threat. Since it’s Sunday, our offices would have been closed anyway but there are five restaurants and three brothels up there, and that’s their busiest day. We can’t have people coming in and out, every random bystander adds another variable we can’t control. Molech could take a hostage, or even worse, someone could decide to play hero.”
Zoey brought up a video feed on her phone, coming directly from Armando’s glasses. At the moment he was on foot, a block away from his target. Through his eyes Zoey could see the derelict tower that had once been the Ice Palace hotel and casino, behind its faded black shroud. The view panned across the busy street, to the identical Fire Palace, the glass bridge undulating high overhead. Somewhere behind those walls, Zoey thought, was Molech. Hopefully.
The camera panned back to the Ice Palace and zoomed in toward the main entrance, which was being guarded by five shirtless men who were just barely pretending to be construction workers. And this, they had said, was the least guarded of the two towers.
Armando held out his hand, palm-up. Perched there was a black object that looked like a large insect—about the width of a half dollar. It whirred softly and levitated out of his hand, and buzzed off toward the derelict building.
Immediately the feed switched to the point of view of the tiny drone, bobbing through the air about ten feet above street level. It passed over the elaborate hats of three passing women in church clothes, then arrived at the Ice Palace and paused, hovering over the group of guards who were smoking and conversing in front of the entrance. Graphics flashed across the screen as it scanned the faces of the guards. Then one of the men turned to go inside and when he opened the door, the drone quickly ducked in.
The dimly lit lobby came into view, a vast expanse that apparently used to be the casino floor, before all of the slot machines and card tables had been ripped out. All that remained was a vast plain of stained carpet dotted with exposed electrical outlets. The drone performed some kind of scan of the room, a vertical blue line sweeping across the screen. It paused, as if doing some calculations, and then a series of floating red cone shapes appeared in various spots around the room. As the guard walked across the floor, one of the red cones moved with him, as if emanating from his eyes. Another came from a security camera on the wall.
Will said, “The drone is tracking the field of vision of every human and camera in the vicinity, in real time. So it can feed Armando the exact path of floor across which a person can pass unnoticed. He just has to avoid the red patches.”
Zoey said, “As long as he has quiet shoes. And doesn’t smell.”
There was, however, no such path through the four remaining armed men gathered around the entrance. That was an entirely separate problem.
Zoey heard Armando say, “Go.”
At that moment, a low, flat black car with tinted windows rolled past the Ice Palace entrance. Its engine growled with a primal sound from another time: the menacing rumble of a massive internal combustion powerplant, sixteen cylinders igniting gasoline in a symphony of synchronized thunder. The heads of the four males guarding the doorway turned to see a Bugatti Chiron crawl past, a legendary dream machine that, even in a city packed with gaudy automobiles, could drop jaws from a block away. It pulled up to the hotel next door and rolled to a stop. It revved its engine, and the pavement trembled in fear.
The driver’s-side door opened and a pair of bare legs swung out. A show-stopping blonde unfolded herself out of the car, an obscenely sheer red dress appearing to be her only item of clothing—it was either designed to give the illusion the wearer didn’t have on any undergarments, or else it wasn’t an illusion. The woman was Echo, under a blond wig and sunglasses, sucking on a lollipop.
Will said, “I want to just note that this was her idea.”
The plan had been for her to circle around the car and then bend over and look into the trunk, but it hadn’t occurred to any of them that this car didn’t in fact have a trunk. So Echo improvised and kind of just awkwardly leaned over the back as if to examine the engine, trying not to accidentally get too close to the manifolds and set her wig on fire.
On Armando’s feed, the red cones representing the field of vision of all four guards swung in the Bugatti’s direction, and locked in place. One of the men even got out his phone to take pictures. Armando, who was dressed in paint-splattered coveralls, simply walked up behind them and quietly slipped through the door.
He made his way inside to the empty husk that had once been the Ice Palace Casino, slipping between the red vision fields of two cameras, arriving near what had been the casino’s restrooms once upon a time. He pressed his back against a doorframe and waited for a guard and his red cone to walk past, then quietly slipped into a nearby stairwell.
Zoey tapped her phone and flipped over to the feed from her mother’s captor. The camera was advancing forward between pine trees to the soundtrack of shoes crunching through snow—the man and Zoey’s mom taking a leisurely walk through the woods. Her mother probably thought she was having a pretty nice Sunday. Sunny winter day, pristine clumps of snow dangling off pine trees, friendly new stranger with a car full of alcohol. Her captor muttered something and she laughed.
Zoey’s guts were in knots. She wished there was a bathroom nearby.
Will said, “Just breathe. Slow, even breaths, in for five seconds, out for five seconds. Breathe from your belly, like you’re making an air baby. Keep going over the plan in your head.”
“I’ve completely forgotten the plan.”
Will didn’t reply to that.
She glanced down at her mother’s feed again, then said, “Are your parents still … around?”
Will hesitated. “Father is. In Virginia.”
“Your mother passed away I guess?”
“She killed herself when I was sixteen.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
She flipped back to Armando’s feed. He was softly climbing the stairs, making painfully slow progress. Zoey noticed he had taken off his shoes. Still, one creaky floorboard and that would be that.
Zoey said, “Are you close to your father?”
There was a long moment before Will said, “No.”
Silence. Zoey looked out the windshield, scanning the pedestrians wandering around outside the entrance to Livingston Tower, looking for anyone who could be the Molech henchmen she was to meet.
She said, “I’ve always been close to my mom. She had me so young. I would say she was more like a sister, but most sisters I’ve been around don’t get along.”
“My father had a length of chain he would hit me with if my shirts weren’t pressed to his satisfaction. And he enjoyed it more when they weren’t. The first girl I ever brought home, he made her leave and told me I could do better. He told her she was too fat for me.”
“Ugh. I’ve been there. With stepdads.”
Will gave her a very brief look and said, “I know.”
Zoey said, “You wake up in the morning and dread going to school because the other kids torture you, then at the end of the school day you dread going back home, because of what’s waiting for you there.”
He nodded, almost imperceptibly.
On the screen, Armando was quietly but forcefully shoving open a roof access door. He stepped out into harsh wind and sunlight, the flickering torsos of Tabula Ra$a skyscrapers looming silently around him. The roof of the casino was dominated by a massive empty swimming pool, containing only puddles of melted snow and various debris that had blown in over the months. Zoey saw at least one dead bird nearby.
Will nudged her and she looked up from her phone. There was a commotion outside the main entrance of Livingston Tower:
Three men had pulled up, riding tigers.
Or so it appeared. As they got closer it became clear they were on customized motorcycles, each with a snarling tiger animated across the bodywork, their feet swiping the ground as they rolled along. Incredibly, these were only the fourth most ridiculous vehicles Zoey had seen since arriving in the city. The motorcycles ripped through the yellow caution tape and parked in nearly perfect unison. Three muscular, shirtless men in leather pants stepped off, each wearing motorcycle helmets that they did not remove as they strode up to the main entrance of Livingston Tower. The revolving doors were locked, but one of the men simply grabbed one and yanked it off its hinge, tossing the four attached doors out onto the sidewalk behind them, glass shattering on the black decorative stones of the entryway. The three men vanished into the lobby.
Zoey tried to follow Will’s breathing advice and said, “You never did show me that coin trick.”
“You should go. There’s no reason to keep them waiting.”
Zoey glanced down at the feed, one last time. Armando moved across the roof of the Ice Palace—alone, as far as Zoey could see. The view bounced along as he jogged toward the arched exit that led to the glass swim bridge, which would take him to the roof of the former Fire Palace and Molech’s HQ, about fifty yards away.
Zoey took a deep breath and said, “All right. Promise me that if I don’t make it back, you’ll take care of my cat.”
“I promise … I will hire someone to do that.”
Zoey stepped out, and tried to appreciate that she could be about to die in a way she never would have expected as recently as one week ago: spectacularly, and inside a skyscraper that she owned.