Page 39 of Rebel
A guard turns the corner. I drop first, silent and fast, kick his knees out from under him, and stab a knife through his shoulder. Carter catches the man before he hits the ground and eases him down like a professional apology.
“Forty seconds.”
The crawlspace grate is half-rusted, half-welded. Carter wrenches it free with a grunt, muscles straining. “Ladies first.”
“Go to hell,” I hiss, crawling through. The tunnel stinks of rainwater and rust. I keep my pistol forward, flashlight tucked tight to my wrist as my heart tries to beat its way out of my chest.
“Thirty.”
The gunfire above fades to echoes. Boots thunder across the floor we just left. Light slices through the cracks, but no one looks down far enough.
Carter follows behind me, movements precise, deliberate. At the junction, we drop into a runoff trench that empties behind the plant’s loading yard.
“Ten seconds,”Divine warns. “Then I’m cutting power and sending them a nice fake heat signature.”
We sprint the last stretch through shadows. The alley yawns open. A skeleton of chain-link and fog. Iris’s van idles with the headlights off, back doors open. French leans out, grinning like a thief.
“Field trip’s over, lovers. Get in!”
We tumble inside as Iris guns it. Tires screech. The vanfishtails, then bites asphalt. Behind us, the plant lights die as Divine kills the grid.
I stare out the rear window. The guards swarm the wrong side of the complex, chasing ghosts Divine built from old camera feeds. No one sees us slip away.
Inside the van, it’s all panting breaths and silence. Carter wipes blood from his forearm. It could be his or it could be someone else's. I taste copper and adrenaline.
“Nice timing,” I say.
He smirks. “You doubted?”
“I doubted everything.”
He laughs once, low. “Smart.”
We don’t go back to the clubhouse. Instead, Divine reroutes us to a safehouse on the outskirts of Koreatown. A shuttered print shop doubling as a data cache for one of the Vultures’ shell companies. Divine found some information we need to pull from their computers to shut this shit down.
French drops us off, her grin fading when she looks at me. “You sure about this, babe?”
“No,” I admit. “But I’m going anyway.”
Carter loads a fresh mag. “I’ll cover you.”
Divine’s voice hums in my ear.“Server room’s in the basement. You’ve got a two-minute window before their motion sensors reboot. Try not to get shot, I just fixed the firewall.”
We slip inside through a service door. The air hums cold and sterile. Rows of servers line the basement, blue light blinking like veins under glass. The hum is hypnotic. The kind of place that hides sins behind spreadsheets.
Carter checks the corners, pistol drawn. “You do your thing. I’ll make sure no one interrupts.”
I kneel by the mainframe, fingers flying across the keyboard. Divine’s script runs clean, backdoor access, shell trace, and mirror pull. Data floods the drive, lines of code cascading like rain.
“You’re pulling too much,”Divine warns.“Keep it under the radar.”
“I need everything,” I whisper. “I’m not missing another piece.”
A soft click echoes behind us. Carter’s voice tightens. “Rebel.”
The lights go red. Alarms scream. “Shit.”
Carter grabs my arm, yanks me up. “We’re blown.”
