Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(19)

I turned on my heel and strolled back the way I’d come, trying to look casual. The only flaw in my plan was the second guard coming up the corridor from the other direction. I clamped down on a swell of panic. Only a clear head was going to get me through this. I tried to keep the cubicles between the first guard and me as I crossed the department, looking for a way out.

One of the data-entry guys was surfing the web on his PC, looking up last night’s scores with a half-eaten McMuffin sandwich at his elbow. I cleared my throat. He jumped, and the web browser became a spreadsheet in the blink of an eye.

“Sorry,” I said as he swiveled his chair around. “Need to update your antivirus. It’ll take about ten minutes.”

“Again?” he said. I kept a casual hand over my employee badge. I was from another department, an invading tribe. As long as I didn’t say or show anything to make him question it, he’d accept that I was another tech monkey here to make his day difficult.

“Sorry. Just ten minutes, I promise.”

“Okay, okay.” He pushed himself up from his chair and ambled toward the door. I ducked down behind the fabric half-walls and rummaged through his desk drawer. In my mind I was already sinking, falling into a waking trance, as my body moved on autopilot. My hands closed around a pad of yellow sticky notes and a marker. Gray would have been best, but black ink was fine.

The problem with doing magic under pressure is that the pressure drowns out the flow, the rhythm. It’s like trying to play jazz with a gun to your head. I focused on my breathing. The handler and his hellhound made a slow sweep of the room, passing the cubicles one by one, letting the dog get a good sniff. My pen flowed over the sticky notes, drawing sigils of the moon, of silver and silence, flooding them with energy.

I slapped the notes up on the cubicle walls around me, building a cocoon of spiritual darkness. I was silent, shadowed and gone, invisible. My refuge only had three walls, though. I rummaged in the paper sack next to the previous occupant’s breakfast and found a tiny paper packet of salt. Perfect. Crouching low, I drew a hair-thin line of salt across the blue carpet from one side of the cubicle’s opening to the other.

The energy fired down the line like a circuit closing, a loop of power that shrouded the cube in anonymity. Now I just had to hope it was good enough. I sat down and typed gibberish into the open spreadsheet, trying to look like another cog in the machine.

The handler and his dog rounded the corner, working this last row. I fought my instinct to turn and look, distracting myself with a stream of numbers, trusting the impromptu spell to hold. The muscles in my neck tightened as footsteps approached from behind, then paused.

I held my breath.

The footsteps kept walking.

When I finally had to exhale, I dared to peek. The guard was leaving the department the way I came in, leaving me with a clear run at the other door. I tore down the sticky notes and shoved them in my pocket, scuffing the salt with the toe of my shoe on my way out.

The server room wasn’t far. Like Pixie had predicted, it was right next door to the IT department’s lair. I waved my cloned passkey over the magnetic lock, listened to the satisfying click, and let myself in.

I wasn’t expecting the two guys I’d passed in the hallway to be in there, hunched over the exposed guts of a computer along with three of their friends.

“Help you?” one of the IT guys said, glaring. They were clearly having a bad day.

“Oh, uh, hi,” I said. “I’m having a…problem. With my computer. Upstairs.”

“Submit a ticket, and we’ll get to it when we get to it. Don’t expect anything before tomorrow afternoon.”

“So you guys are gonna be in here all day, then?”

One of them shot me a withering look. Departmental tribalism, again, and this time I was the barbarian trespassing on sacred land.

“Until we get this box working again,” he said as if explaining something to a five-year-old, “which might take a little while, as you can probably see.”

I apologized and let myself out. I needed a different strategy.





Ten

I wandered the back hallways, as far as I dared with those hellhounds on patrol, and found the closest emergency exit. I called Pixie.

“You see how the parking lot makes an L-shape? Move the van around the corner, but keep to the far side of the lot. Server room’s occupied.”

“What are you going to do?”

I looked both ways, making sure the hall was clear. Then I pulled the fire alarm.

“That,” I said as sirens squalled.

The IT crew grumbled as they marched out of the server room. I slipped inside behind their backs and let the door swing shut behind me, leaving me alone in the windowless, cold clutter. Entombed behind the heavy server-room door, the fire alarm outside was muted to a dull squawk. Lights glowed green, amber, and red from the brushed-metal faces of a dozen server racks.

“Talk me through it,” I told Pixie, “and fast. In about five minutes there’s going to be nobody left in the building but me and security, and getting caught would be a really, really bad thing right now.”

“Look at the servers. Are they labeled? I’m looking for a serial number.”

I craned my neck, looking on both sides of the closest rack. Each pizza-box-sized machine had a hand-lettered label on the side with a string of numbers.