Chapter 15 - Down the rabbit hole

Posted on https://books.clockworkcaracal.com/dragons-heart/old-beginnings/ch15 - if you aren't there, this is a pirated copy!

Fang leaned back against the wall, a hood pulled over his head as he held an active v-cig convincingly close to his face for any disinterested passersby to dismiss him as taking a "smoke break". Getting through the security had been easy enough - it was all scanners and computers, so he'd just waved something that looked about the right size through and let his magic tell the system to let him through without leaving a record. But the market zone was on multiple floors, so he was taking some time to assess the main level while waiting for his back-up to get into position.

Vanessa was sending Jade in through "official" channels - as official as illegal black-market venues went, at least, which Fang got the impression was a slightly larger version of being on the list at an exclusive club. And managed with heavily secured computers instead of heavily muscled bouncers, which he considered a major bonus. It was much easier to fool a computer with a light touch of magic than to talk his way past actual people.

"All right! Jade's in." Trace's voice sounded abruptly in his ear, enthusiastic as always. "Tracker shows her through the security point you so helpfully pinpointed for me earlier."

"Is that sarcasm?" Fang murmured, pretending to take another drag from the v-cig.

"Let's keep the banter on hold until after the job," Vanessa cut in, her voice brisk and businesslike over the comm. "Everything's set. Fang, the initiative is yours."

Fang nodded slightly, clicking off the cig and tucking it back into a pocket, and took another look around the room. He was still on the entry level - a large, open hall, full of market stalls and stands of varying sizes, looking like some kind of crime convention. Roughly in the middle of the room was a large flight of stairs, one side sweeping up to a higher balcony level, the other disappearing down below the floor.

Down was where he had to go - down to get to the level with the elevator, and then take the elevator itself down, as far as it would go.

The crowds had thickened substantially since he'd arrived, which he'd been hoping for, with plenty of traffic going down. Stepping away from the wall, hood still up and hands in his pockets, he casually started strolling through the hall towards the stairs, pretending to look over some of the vendors as he passed.

Hoods weren't really his style - they were too obviously suspicious, usually. But this was the kind of crowd where it was more suspicious to not look suspicious. And the fewer people who got a good look at his face, the better.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Fang let himself smile - just a little - at the image of himself as the Wizard of Oz. A technologically gifted con artist? Could be worse.

The stairs going down were much less glamorous than the ones going up, but more popular, leading down into another high-ceiling hall - this one more of a hallway, with actual shop spaces along the sides.

After a quick glance down the row of storefronts, Fang concluded this was where the real money got thrown around. Multiple specialized armories, a robotics shop that he could feel the magic emanating from even at a distance, and several... less savory establishments he let his attention quickly skip over.

The magitech robotics shop, he found himself slowing as he walked past, glancing in at the wares and the spells he could not only feel, but see - probably grossly overpriced due to being sold in a corp building. As if that makes it safer to be obvious, somehow.

It was probably not that bad, really, but... compared to Cyan's work, it was crude and amateurish at best.

Fang picked up his pace, cutting that train of thought off before it began. No brooding on the job, he thought, then chuckled to himself in amusement. If Jade ever learns I described myself as brooding, I'll never hear the end of it.*

"What's funny?" Trace asked.

"Nothing," Fang murmured. "I should be close?"

"Yeah, it's to your, uh, left."

Fang casually glanced around, pretending to survey the nearby storefronts as he looked for any corners, hallways, niches, or other likely candidates for a secret elevator.

There was nothing.

Fang considered the issue, then sent a spark of magic into his phone, setting off the ringtone and giving him an excuse to pull it out and "answer" it.

"Oh, are we doing the fake call? I love the fake call."

"Hey." Fang paused a beat as though listening to someone, hiding an amused smile. "Yeah, I'm there. It's gonna take a while, though - there's a bunch more shops than I expected, not sure which one I'm supposed to check."

"Shops? Uhh, that's..."

"The entrance is in one of the shops," Vanessa translated. "Probably a back room."

"Yeah," Fang confirmed.

"Oof, inconvenient. Okay, I got your dot projected here, and the hole is right here, so you'll need to walk, where's the scale---"

"Can you just text me the place?" Fang interrupted. "That'll be easier for both of us."

"Oh yeah, I can totally do that." Trace paused, the comm falling quiet for a few seconds. "There, I sent a relative coordinate through your bug, just pick it up onto your phone and it'll show up on your map."

"Great, thanks, I'll be watching for it." Fang moved the phone away from his ear, "hung up", and sent the faintest spark of magic into Trace's tracking bug - deliberately hidden in his jacket lining, so the team could keep an eye on his movements in case of trouble, and also acting as a magically-bound encrypted relay for their communications. And, right now, holding a coordinate he needed onto his phone. (Fang never had figured out how Trace expected him to be getting the data, but he'd given up on worring about it years ago.)

The coordinate for the elevator shaft - or "hole", as Trace had put it - was further away than Fang had expected - far enough that he decided to check again for entrances, now that he had a better idea of where he was trying to go. Walking slowly along the shops, he peered back and forth at the windows (and, where they existed, signs) as though looking for a specific establishment. After a few minutes of that, this time, he spotted it - a large potted plant, one of those indoor tree-like things that were so popular in malls and offices, disguising a perfectly ordinary recessed door.

If he hadn't been specifically looking for a secret entrance, he would've dismissed it as a maintenance closet.

Step two, done. Fang sighed, rubbing at his head (without removing the hood) as though in frustration and made his way over to the plant.

A whisper of magic through the area confirmed that there were no security cameras inside the "crime mall" itself, as he'd decided to call it. Some of the shops had their own cameras and detectors, and there was definitely... something on the other side of his target door. Fang tried not to frown, stopping himself from reflexively pulling out more magic at the unusual - and concerning - presence of a shield that could deflect his magic.

Another glance around - no one seemed to be looking at him - and he casually slipped behind the plant, walking up to the door.

"I'm going in," he murmured, carefully trying the latch. To his surprise, it wasn't locked, and he quickly stepped through and closed it behind him.

The room - if you could call it that - probably had been a maintenance closet, from the size of it and the small, cheap overhead light fixture still in place. Free of shelves, it had only one notable feature - a smooth, featureless door directly ahead, immediately recognizable as an elevator.

"Found it." Fang grinned. "No guard, on the outside, and it's definitely an elevator door. No panel, though."

"I can't get you through," Trace grumbled. "Whatever controls it has, they're all completely disconnected from the rest of the network."

"I'll figure something out," Fang reassured them. "Just give me a minute."

"Take your time," Vanessa said.

"But not too much of it," Trace added. "The guards shift in two hours."

"If it takes me two whole hours to break into a single elevator, I should retire." Fang placed a hand against the wall next to the door, letting out just a little bit of his claws and feeling for the veins of electricity feeding into the system. The shielding was embedded into the walls, sending his sparks of magic skittering across the surface and dissipating. Frowning, he opened up a little bit more of his magic, ignoring the twinge down his back as he reached for the elevator, pushing through the shield until he finally touched on the elevator door.

Open, his magic whispered, and the doors slid open, revealing... an elevator shaft.

Fang sighed. Figures. Now I have to bring it up.... He leaned through the doorway, trying to get a sense for how far down it went - and swore, nearly jumping out of his skin as he passed through the shielding.

"What's going on, Fang?" Vanessa asked immediately.

"Nothing yet," he answered - which was technically true, and neatly avoided his abrupt discovery that the shielding was not, he suspected, to keep magic out so much as it was to keep magic in. "I got the door open, but I still need to bring the elevator up somehow. It shouldn't be a problem, though." As long as I don't get startled by another blast of ambient magic and fall down the hole, he thought ruefully.

"All right, keep us updated."

"Yes ma'am."

Coaxing the elevator up was easy, he discovered, as long as he was leaning through the doorway - and thus through the shielding. And by the time it was close enough to the top that it couldn't go further without squashing him, it was also close enough that he could manage to brute-force through the shield to bring it up the rest of the way. Even though it did need more magic than he liked to unfold, leaving the scar on his back burning painfully.

There was, of course, a camera inside the elevator, but a whisper of you can't see me took care of that and he stepped inside, fully through the shielding. The door slid closed behind him as he assessed the situation.

"I'm through the shields," he said softly. "Can you still pick up the signal?"

"Loud and clear!" Trace replied, their voice thin and staticky. *"Okay, more like quiet and a little fuzzy, but I hear you. No direct connection any more, it's coming in through Jade's relay point."

"Keep talking when you can, so we can hear if the connection starts breaking up."*

"Yes ma'am." Fang sketched a haphazard salute - not that Vanessa could see it, but it was the thought that counted. "I'm going to start heading down now."

There wasn't as much magic on this side of the shields as he'd initially thought. The startling part, he decided as the elevator followed the whisper of down, must have been the abruptness of the transition. Although there was something about the magic itself, what he could feel of it....

Fang shook his head, dismissing the feeling, and turned his attention back to the more immediate issue of the elevator's destination. "The ride down seems longer than the elevator up," he murmured. "Our secret facility must be underground."

"Makes sense," Trace said. "It'd be way harder to hide, say, a whole floor, than one skinny elevator shaft - and I bet that was hard enough."

"And it's not like MT has to worry about the city utilities finding out." Fang grinned. "What with owning them and all."

"Speaking of utilities, do they even have running water down there? There is nothing, and I mean nothing unaccounted for, not even a sewer line."

"If they can hide a whole elevator, I think they could hide a couple of pipes."

The comm was silent as the elevator slowed to a stop, just long enough that Fang started to worry he'd lost the connection.

"I cannot believe I didn't think of that," Trace finally grumbled. "And of course I don't have anything scanning the sewers. Next time---"

"I am not climbing down into the sewers just to plant a bug," Fang said. Firmly. "I'm at the bottom. Connection's still good enough."

"Not even if the job is actually in the sewers?"

Fang ignored the question, reaching to feel for any cameras on the other side of the door. One--- no, two. Closing his eyes, he let out just a bit of his claws and his magic, whispering to the closer camera, show me.

The camera seemed to be set just above the elevator, looking down a short and perfectly ordinary hallway. Two guards were stationed in the hall, one occupying the single folding chair. An identical whisper to the further camera provided the same information, but from the other end of the hallway, looking at the door.

Blinking his eyes open, Fang took a moment to consider the situation. I can take them both, if they don't alert anyone.... He sent another spark of magic out, this one finding any devices carried by the guards themselves, whispering turn off - and then, frowning in concentration, he turned his attention back to the cameras. It was more complicated than a simple you can't see me, but after a brief "conversation" with the cameras, his magic had them held in a seamless loop of the last few minutes of video.

Long enough to look real, short enough I can hold it. Fang pushed aside the brief wistful thought of how easy this would be, if only, and told the elevator doors to open.

"Hello!" He grinned cheerfully, still-clawed hands tucked in his pockets (he couldn't hold the camera loop if he put his magic away again), as the seated guard scrambled to their feet. "I'm looking for the bathrooms?"

"What---"

"How did you get down here?!" The formerly-seated guard seemed to be grasping the situation much faster than their companion, pulling something out of their belt - a handheld comm of some sort, not a gun. That'll make this easier. "We've got an intruder in the subbasement," they said into the comm. "...Shit, comms are down."

Fang grinned. Have you tried turning it off and then on again? "I must've gone---" he started, interrupting himself as the slower guard finally started reaching for their gun and launching himself at them. A quick chop on their wrist and the gun fell, skittering across the ground as he kicked it away. "--- down the wrong elevator," he finished.

Ex-sitter guard was taking the time to pocket their comm again as they reached for their own weapon, which meant they were still reaching when Fang spun around and elbowed them in the face.

"We have an intruder!" Second cop was shouting into their own comm, fruitlessly, as they backed towards the elevator - no, Fang realized, towards their gun.

Fang tsked, grabbing the folding chair. "Now that's just rude," he chided the guard, kicking their fallen coworker in the stomach to knock the wind out of them. "I have a name, you know."

The guard eyed him, eyed the chair, and dove for the gun, grabbing it - and coming back up in an impressive tuck-and-roll to aim it directly at Fang. "Put your hands on your head," they snapped. "Now."

Fang glanced down at his hands, lifting the one holding the chair slightly. "Should I put this on my head, too?"

"Drop the chair first, wiseass."

"Ohh." Fang drew the sound out as long as he could plausibly hold it, paused for a beat as he lifted his hands slowly, and then dropped the chair.

Drop-kicked the chair, directly into the guard's face.

They swore, firing, but the shot went wild and before they could aim again, Fang was on top of them, a fist slamming into their face and knocking them back with a broken nose.

Both still conscious, Fang noted, then tsked again. "I don't want to have to kill you," he informed the guard.

"I'd prefer you don't, also," Vanessa remarked.

The guard, unfortunately, was busy aiming their gun again, which didn't give Fang much of a chance to consider option. Grabbing their face, he slammed their head back into the floor, wincing. "Hopefully I didn't," he muttered, then glanced back at the other guard--- "Shit!"

The one remaining guard fired their gun, Fang noticing just in time to lunge to the side. The bullet grazed his shoulder, tearing a hole in his jacket and just barely missing his skin.

Not giving them time to aim, Fang darted forward, launching himself off the wall and over the guard's head as they fired again in an attempt to pin him down. Landing behind the guard, he grabbed their head by their hair in one hand, the back of their shirt with the other, and slammed them into the wall.

The gun fell from their hand, and a moment later they slumped over to join it.

"Guards are down," he muttered. "I'm okay."

"Are they dead?" That was Trace, of course.

"... I'm not going to check." Fang stepped over the unconscious guard, looking over the door. "It's locked with a pretty standard iris scanner," he narrated, for the benefit of his remote audience. "I can get through easily. Still no idea what I should look for on the other side?"

"None," Vanessa admitted. "Keep reporting, I'll let you know if it sounds promising."

"You're the boss." Fang whispered a tiny spark of magic into the door's lock, ignoring the scanner entirely, let me in.

A moment later, the door slid open. Fang reached out with his magic, searching for any other cameras or security devices - and paused, distracted momentarily by the feeling of the magic. There was something oddly familiar about it, like seeing someone who looked like someone you knew, but you couldn't remember who.... He grimaced, shaking his head to dismiss the train of thought.

No time for that right now.

"I'm going in," he muttered. You can't see me, his magic whispered into the cameras, and he stepped through, into a narrow, sterile hallway. Slowly, on high alert for any people, he walked down the hall, sending a constant current of magic through the walls, finding all the cameras and security sensors, I'm not here, you can't see me.

The hallway itself was utterly bare, the few doors equally bland and unlabelled. Fang paused at the first one, considering it, but that something in the ambient magic tugged at the edge of his awareness, leading him further down the hall.

Seven doors later, he found himself slowing to a stop. It was just like all the other doors he'd passed, but this one... Something was on the other side. The source of that not-quite-familiar feeling.

Fang reached out, placing a hand gently against the door. There was another shield on this room - not as powerful as the previous one, and he already had his claws out, so reaching through to the other side was just a moment's thought.

The feeling sharpened, a faint thrum running gently into his hand, a rhythm like a heartbeat.

Abruptly, he knew exactly what was behind that wall.

...Shit. Shit, fuck, shit.

"Talk to me, Fang." Vanessa's voice came quietly over his headset, and Fang realized he must have sworn out loud.

Taking a slow, deep breath, he reached his magic into the room, feeling for a camera or something that had a visual, anything that could prove--- there. Closing his eyes, he sent another whisper of magic to the camera - show me what you see - and let the data coalesce into an image of the room.

"... The job's off," he murmured, barely vocalizing, as the camera confirmed what he already knew. "Tell them we didn't find it."

"Fuck off," Trace swore. "There's no way that's not the right place. Look harder, or---"

"Fang." Vanessa, in contrast, sounded perfectly calm. "What did you find?"

"Wait a few days," Fang continued, ignoring both of them. "Tell them you tried, but it was already gone, some other team must've gotten there first."

"Gone? What do you mean, gone?"

"Fang, don't you dare---"

Fang clicked off the comm link - then, just for good measure, pulled it out and zapped it, the electrical magic slagging the insides beyond function as he did the same to the bug in his jacket.

His team would be fine; he didn't have time to worry about them.

He had a dragon egg to save.