The Stolen File Progress

Malia's POV

"Who has half the key?" I said.

Wren couldn't stop shaking. We were in the corridor again, the three of us pressed around the cart, and the screen's blue light made her look drowned. "I don't know. I can see another session open on the server. Someone's pulling data in real time, copying it as we decrypt it. They're not breaking it. They're riding behind us."

"Can you kick them out?"

"I could try. But the link's already unstable. If I cut the wrong thread, the whole decryption collapses." She looked at the number in the corner of the screen. "We're at eighty-five percent."

"Eighty-five," Jarrah said it flatly. "How long to a hundred?"

"At this speed? An hour. If the link holds." Wren winced. "It won't hold. The dishes are the problem. Snipers keep hitting the satellite array on the tower, and the one remaining dish is out of alignment. Somebody has to climb up and turn it by hand."

I was already looking out the window. Through the grimy glass, at the far end of the yard, the communications tower stood against the sky, a lattice of rusted steel sixty metres high, its dishes pointed like white blossoms at a sky that was supposed to carry our signal. One was cracked down the middle. The other hung crooked in its frame.

"I'll do it," I said.

"No," said Jarrah.

"You can't climb with that shoulder, and Wren's too light for the winch. Pike's got the dock. I'm the only one who knows which dish does what."

"You've never been on that tower."

"I've read the schematic. I read it three times in the van." I met his eyes. "It's a fifteen-minute climb. I'll be up and down before the next wave."

"There is no next wave if you're dead."

"Jarrah." I made my voice softer than I felt. "If that file gets copied by whoever's riding behind us, the whole night was for nothing. Everything I walked away from, everyone you lost this week. For nothing."

He didn't answer. A muscle jumped in his cheek. Somewhere on the far side of the yard, a single shot rang out, bright and clean. He flinched. So did I.

"You'll have cover," he said at last. His voice sounded raw. "Me. I'll be on the roof of the generator shed. It's a hundred and eighty metres to the base of the tower. I can reach it from there."

"All right."

"If I tell you to come down, you come down. I don't care what's left to fix."

"If you tell me to come down, I'll come down."

"Say it like you mean it."

"I mean it."

I didn't, and we both knew it. He closed his eyes for the length of a breath, then opened them and picked up the sniper's case without another word. He'd learned enough about me in six weeks to know that arguing was a waste of time I couldn't afford.

We crossed the yard in the dark, a shaky relay of crouched runs from container to container. The air tasted of cordite and rain and something burning. A man lay face-down near the gate, an arm folded under him in a way arms shouldn't fold, and I forced myself to look away. At the base of the tower, I stopped and tilted my head back. The steel rose into the black, rungs gleaming wet, bolted to the frame with rust.

Jarrah caught my sleeve.

"Wait," he said.

"I need to go."

"Two seconds." He pulled me against the nearest strut, out of the line of the floodlights, and pressed something into my hand. A small flat torch, no bigger than a lipstick. "Red light. Don't use white; it'll draw fire. Turn it on if you need me to see where you are."

"Okay."

"And this." He took his own earpiece out, held it a moment, then put it in my palm. "Yours is dead. Use mine. I'll switch to Pike's frequency."

"Jarrah, you need"

"I need to hear you," he said. "I need it more than I need the radio."

I looked at the earpiece. It was still warm. I put it in my ear and felt his heartbeat in the plastic, or imagined I did.

"Right," I said, and my voice wobbled. "I'm going."

"Malia."

"What?"

"Don't look down."

I almost laughed. Instead, I turned and started to climb.

The first ten metres were easy. Rungs bit cold into my gloves, and rain ran in my eyes, but the tower sheltered me from the wind and the steel held. I counted rungs the way I'd counted shots. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Somewhere below, a rifle cracked, a different rifle, and a bullet sang off the lattice a metre beside my hip.

"Left," Jarrah's voice said in my ear, calm as a man reading a weather report. "Sniper at the harbour edge. Hold still."

I held still.

A second shot, from behind me this time, and then a thin cry across the yard. Jarrah breathed out. "Clear. Keep going."

"You sound very relaxed."

"I'm furious," he said. "It just doesn't come out in my voice."

I laughed, a short, startled gasp, and it nearly cost me my grip. Up I went. Twenty metres. Thirty. The wind picked up as I rose above the shelter of the buildings, and the tower began to sway, a slow, terrible lean I felt in my stomach. My gloves were soaked through. I wedged a boot into a cross-brace and hung there a moment, breathing hard, fighting the roar in my head.

"Talk to me," Jarrah said.

"I'm fine."

"That's not talking."

"You're asking a lot of women on a tower in a storm."

"Tell me something real."

I thought about it. A rung. Another. The cracked dish loomed above me, wide and white and ruined. "When I was little," I said, "my father would take me up to the watchtower on the Kilsyth boundary at night. He said a person who could look down at everything she owned without being afraid would never be afraid of anything again."

"Did it work?"

"I was terrified. I pretended otherwise. I did it for years."

"And now?"

"Now I'm terrified, and I'm not pretending." I reached the platform at last and hauled myself over the lip on my elbows, gasping. "I think it's better this way."

Silence on the line. Then, low: "Yeah. I think so too."

The dish mount was bigger than it looked from the ground, a ring of corroded steel with a hand winch bolted to its base. I wedged myself behind it and went to work. My fingers had gone numb. I jammed a wrench onto the first bolt and strained, and it didn't move. Wind howled through the lattice. A flare burst somewhere over the harbour, a hard orange light, and for a moment I saw all of Terminal 2 spread beneath me like a toy model. Cranes. Containers. The tiny dark shapes of men hunched in cover. Beyond the gates, the water, black and enormous, patrolled by the faint slow beams of the Kilsyth boats.

"Eighty-eight percent," Wren's thin voice said in my ear. I hadn't realised she was on the line. "It's climbing. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it."

"I'm not doing anything yet. The bolt's frozen."

"Hit it," Jarrah said.

"I'm hitting it."

"Harder."

I swung the wrench against the rusted metal. The bolt gave a shriek and a spray of orange flakes. The next one came easier. I got three of them free before the shot came.

It hit the dish an arm's length above my head. Glass and metal burst outward in a cloud, and a sliver of casing cut across my forearm, hot and sudden. I flung myself flat on the platform with my heart trying to climb out of my throat. A second round slammed into the mount. A third. They came fast, a hard chattering line.

"Malia!" Jarrah's voice cracked down the line, all the calm gone. "Report!"

"I'm hit. It's my arm; it's nothing; it's a cut." I pressed my sleeve against it. The cloth turned warm and wet. "They've got a new position. East side. They know I'm up here."

"Stay down."

"I can't fix it from down here."

"Stay down." I'd never heard him raise his voice to me. It scraped through the earpiece like tearing cloth. "I'm moving. Don't you dare move."

I lay on my stomach on a sheet of steel sixty metres above the ground, listening to bullets hit metal inches away, and for the first time that night I let myself be afraid. Not pretending. Not counting. Just afraid, the old animal kind of fear that lives in the back of the throat. I thought about my mother. I thought about whether anyone would find the torch in my pocket. I thought about Jarrah's hand against my sternum on the stairs.

Down in the yard, a rifle spoke, flat and deliberate. One shot. A silence. Another.

"Jarrah?" My voice came out thin.

"Sniper one down," he said, breathing hard. "Two to go. Stay put."

"I can see them. Third container from the east gate, on the stack, there's a flash. Left of the red crane."

A pause. "I see it."

The shot cracked. The flash vanished.

"Last one," I said. "Top of the pilot house, north corner. He's using the reflection off the water."

"Got him."

And that was the end of it, quick as a door closing. The firing stopped. Rain fell on the platform in a thin steady hiss. I lay there until my breath came back and my arm stopped screaming, then pushed up onto my knees and looked down at the yard, at the dim shape on the generator shed roof where Jarrah crouched with the rifle at his shoulder.

He raised one hand. I raised mine.

I picked up the wrench with my good arm and finished the last bolt. The dish swung toward the southern sky with a groan, creaking on its mount. I braced against it, both palms against cold metal, and held it steady until the winch caught and the arrow on the dial slid into the green.

"Locked," I said.

Wren made a noise somewhere between a sob and a cheer. "Link's stable. Ninety-one percent. It's running. It's actually running."

"Good." My legs were shaking so badly I had to sit. "Good. I'm coming down."

"Take it slow," Jarrah said.

I took it slow. The descent was worse than the climb, every rung a negotiation with my wounded arm, and by the time my boots touched concrete, my whole body had turned to water. I made it three steps before my knees buckled. Hands caught me from behind.

I'd expected Pike. It was Jarrah. He'd run the whole way from the shed. His chest heaved against my back and his arms locked around me hard enough to hurt, and neither of us said anything for a long, long time.

"Don't do that again," he said finally, into my hair.

"I'll try."

"You'll try." A shuddering breath. "You are going to be the end of me."

"That's the nicest thing you've ever said."

He turned me in his arms. His face was inches from mine, rain-slick, wild, scraped raw by something that wasn't weather. He looked at my bloody sleeve and then at my eyes, and I watched all the sentences he couldn't say go by behind his face.

"Let me see the arm," he said instead.

"Later."

"Now."

I let him. He peeled the fabric back with surprising gentleness and tied a strip of cloth around the cut, pulling the knot tight with his teeth. Then he held my forearm in both his hands and didn't let go.

"Ninety-one," I whispered.

"I heard."

"Nine more. Then we'll know what he did."

"Then we'll know," he agreed.

Behind us, Wren's voice crackled in both our ears, so high it cracked.

"Jarrah, Malia. The file just flagged something. A tag in the metadata, right at the top. It's an address." She swallowed. "It's your house, Malia. Your father's study. The file was written there."