some of Red’s people stood in that crowd, pushing for a look at their own handiwork. Soo-hyun wouldn’t be there, though, they were smarter than that. Or if not smarter, more experienced.
JD shook his head for effect. “Such waste.”
“Got it, bro.”
JD turned and limped away.
Ok-bin called out behind him: “Cleaner.” JD turned and saw her holding her phone, glancing between it and him. “There’s no record of your limp; did you hurt yourself?”
“It is an old injury—always plays up when it rains.”
“But it’s not raining,” she said.
“Then it is about to start. You can take my word on that.”
He turned slowly, waiting for another question.
“You should submit a new photo,” she said; “this one is too dark.”
“Yes, of course,” JD called out over his shoulder, waving in dismissal. If she’d been of African descent, the heist would have been a bust, but authorities are notoriously bad at differentiating between people of another race.
When he heard the guards chatting among themselves in quick Korean, he spoke to Khoder: “Have you got the interior cameras tied down?”
“Two-minute loop of empty hallways on every screen, bro.”
“Perfect.”
As soon as JD turned the corner he ran, swinging his right leg out so he could move quickly without needing to bend his knee. He had only a limited window to use the key cloner—if Shin used her credentials elsewhere in the compound, the system would flag the discrepancy and lock him out. He reached the elevator and hammered the button, willing the doors open.
JD rode up. When the doors opened at the fourth floor he exploded out of the elevator. He raced around the corner, too fast on the freshly polished surface. The worn sole of his ocean-plastic sneaker slipped over the tiles, his leg bending unnaturally as it went out from underneath him. The floor shot up and slapped JD in the face.
JD stayed on the ground, spikes of pain shooting from his knee in both directions. The pain rushed and thrummed through his veins, so sharp he thought he might vomit. He breathed hard, pushed himself up, and stood slowly, wincing when he put his weight on his right leg to test it. Nothing serious. Nothing snapped or broken. He walked slow at first, then began to pick up speed—but still he didn’t let himself run.
He reached the skybridge, where the four robots were still cleaning. He paused to stretch his leg, mentally cataloguing all the disparate hurts. A sheet of rain hit the window and JD flinched, stepped back, and nearly tripped over one of the bots. Water rippled down the window, city distorted, bent through an imperfect lens.
He hit the follow button on each of the robots and led them the rest of the way across the skybridge and into the Building Two elevator. The bots whirred and chirped as they ascended, and JD watched the numbers over the door climbing until they reached level eight.
The robots followed him through the short warren of hallways to Lee’s apartment. He set them to “Clean Area”—keeping them within a five-meter radius so he wouldn’t lose track of them—and reached a hand into the pocket of his coveralls. He checked his other waist pocket, then both breast pockets, then the cargo pocket at his left knee. He found his phone—sans battery, of course—Omar’s van keys, Soo-hyun’s taser, but no key cloner. He checked his pockets again, pulling each item out just to be sure.
The key cloner was gone. JD covered his mouth with his arm and screamed a string of profanities that would have made his mother blush.
His mind raced, the security desk, the brush with discovery, the elevator—the fall. It must have slipped out of his pocket. He left the robots where they were and limped back to the elevator, cursing under his breath the whole way. He hit the button and waited.
The elevator doors parted. Instead of his reflection staring back at him from the rear wall, JD came face to face with the long-haired guard. The key cloner rested on the man’s palm, gently clasped like a baby duck.
Time stood still and JD’s stomach sank. Unbidden, his hand reached into his pocket and his fingers closed around Soo-hyun’s taser.
“Did you drop this?” Long Hair asked.
Too late to stop, the taser was out of JD’s pocket, clutched tight in his hand. Long Hair’s eyes shot wide and JD lunged forward. The taser crackled as he jammed it into the man’s throat and hit the trigger. Long Hair crumpled to the ground, splayed across