landed the Black Crow in a thick copse of trees near the edge of town, next to the white-and-blue SolarBeam delivery van he’d procured on an earlier trip back in time.
“Damn thing took forever to find,” he’d complained bitterly. “I had to hack into old Craigslist ads going back over two years before I found someone looking to unload one. Craigslist, Dorothy. The user interface alone made me want to kill myself.”
Dorothy had rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Do you know what this is?”
Roman’s face had darkened. “Don’t.”
“It’s the world’s smallest violin playing just for you.”
After the van, everything else was relatively easy. Uniforms were ordered from a wholesale retailer with same-day delivery, and they’d picked up the clipboards while they were in the 1990s, from a place called Target, which had delighted Dorothy endlessly (they sold bananas and arm chairs and trousers all in the same place!). And then it was simply a matter of storing their finds in a safe place until they needed them.
Now, Dorothy unbuttoned her cloak and tossed it in the back seat, revealing her SolarBeam uniform: navy-blue polo shirt, dark trousers, and silver windbreaker. She hid her hair beneath a head scarf, and then slid a SolarBeam baseball cap on top, lowering an eye patch over her ruined eye.
“They’re going to think you’re a pirate,” Roman said, tucking his own polo into his trousers.
Dorothy checked her appearance. The scarf hid her white hair, but Roman was right, the eye patch was a problem. It made her memorable. Memorable was bad.
“Next time, we should try pulling off the glim dropper.” She pushed her door open and a blast of chilly, November air swept over her, raising the hair on her arms.
Roman’s eyebrows went up. “Excuse me?”
“It’s like the fiddle game, only it involves a man—or woman, in our case—looking for her glass eye. My mother and I never tried it because it requires a one-eyed person to pull it off.” She adjusted her eye patch. “Now, that wouldn’t be an issue.”
Roman only shook his head, snickering.
They loaded up the SolarBeam van and drove to Beacon Hill, a neighborhood south of the city that had been hit hardest by the earthquake. Everything they stole today would’ve only been destroyed in the aftermath of the storm, so it wasn’t really stealing at all.
It was more like . . . misplacing.
At least, that’s what Dorothy told herself as she knocked on the door of the first house.
An older woman with white, dandelion-puff hair and a bulbous nose answered. “Can I help you?”
“Hello, ma’am, my associate and I are from SolarBeam. We’ve had a few complaints in the neighborhood about panel failure. Would you mind letting us in to check your units?”
Dorothy nodded at her clipboard. Smiled. Behind her, Roman was making some very manly noises as he loaded a few large boxes into the back of the truck.
The boxes were empty. They’d unloaded them just seconds before, figuring the whole con would seem more believable if they were already packing up a few “faulty” units in need of repair.
Sure enough, the woman squinted at Roman and fumbled for the glasses hanging from her neck. “Oh dear. What seems to be the problem?”
Roman had finished loading up his empty boxes. He wiped the nonexistent sweat from his brow, and said, “It’s hard to say, ma’am. If the panel’s failed in a way that still allows an electrical current to pass through, the other panels on that string won’t be negatively impacted whatsoever. But if one of its bypass diodes has been affected, well, then the current can’t flow through it, and the bad panel might actually take down its entire string.”
It’d taken him hours to memorize the most boring section of the SolarBeam instruction manual they’d found online, but his hard work paid off.
The woman just stared at him, blinking. “Oh?”
“It would be best if you let us take them in to be . . . recharged,” Dorothy finished. She thought she saw Roman cast her a look—the word recharged must’ve been incorrect—but she didn’t bother meeting his gaze. The old woman noticed nothing.
“By all means,” she said.
She led them out back, to where the SolarBeam units were propped up in her yard. The units were very small, about the size of paperback books, and there were twelve of them in total, gathering sunlight that they would turn into enough electricity to power her small house for a month. Roman and Dorothy gathered all but two.