Page 57 of A Barista's Guide to Love & Larceny
“Get in, babe,” she said. “We’re on a tight schedule.” She reached out, grabbed Dani by the arm, and yanked her inside—or tried to. Dani tripped on the way in, scraping her shin and nearly bowling McKenna over in the process. Two sets of hands grasped her by the arms and hauled her up to standing.
“Thanks,” Dani said, smiling when she saw it was Oliver who’d stepped in to help. She hadn’t seen them much the past two days, as they’d been busy in the greenhouse and the arcanobotany labs. It seemed like blending DreamLite with their handpicked plant medleys was still working reasonably well.
“You’re late,” said Katya from the left side of the van. “Again.”Dani turned toward where she was half standing, half sitting on a stool in front of a wall of monitors, hands alternating in a hectic dance between an enormous keyboard on the desk in front of her and a laptop balanced next to it. She had headphones on with one ear exposed and was loudly chewing a piece of gum.
“Oh, hush,” McKenna said in her direction, putting out a hand to catch Gingerbread as he dove inside. “She’s here now, isn’t she?” The crow shimmied up her arm and nuzzled under her hair. “And Itoldyou he would come in handy.”
Katya rolled her eyes. “It’s still inappropriate to bring a raven to a stealth operation.”
“He’s not a raven,” McKenna snapped. “He’s a crow.”
“Same difference.”
“It isnot—”
“An argument for another time, perhaps.” Silva was standing with her hip against Katya’s desk, bent over so that her head just brushed the roof of the van. “Thank you for joining us, Miss Lionet.”
The professor was surveying the monitors, which displayed the exterior of OneiroLabs from various angles in grainy black and white. The biggest screen in front of them showed the service entrance, which Dani recognized from her last visit, when Max had smuggled her and Oliver out. A guardhouse stood beside a plain black gate, its bars webbed with woven fibers of white light. As she watched, a car rolled up, paused at the guardhouse, then proceeded as the gate tilted inward. The light-web remained, passing over the car like a scanner.
Silva caught Dani watching. “Katya has managed to hack into the external surveillance. Everything you’re seeing is what security at OneiroLabs is seeing right now.”
“So we’re really doing this,” Dani said.
“Hell yeah we are.” Wyatt’s voice caused her to pivot, and she felt a new wrinkle form in her brain from the cognitive dissonanceof the sight that met her. The person sitting on the bench across from the monitors looked more like a nerd from the transmutation department than frat boy Wyatt, his muscles slightly deflated and a pair of glasses balanced on his nose. He was inspecting himself in one of McKenna’s compact mirrors. If she didn’t know it was him, she wouldn’t have recognized him at all.
“How do I look?” he asked. “Still hot?”
“Still douchey,” Katya said without turning her head.
“Budge up,” McKenna told Wyatt. “Make room for Dani.” She bustled over and flapped a hand at him until he scooted, then ushered her friend into the vacant spot. “Hold still,” she said, and before Dani could utter a word of protest, McKenna reached out and gathered her purple curls in her hands. Her eyes fell shut and her lips began to move in a mumbled incantation as she rubbed something into Dani’s hair—cocoa butter laced with some kind of resin, judging from the smell. After a moment, a wintry brown spread from McKenna’s fingers and dug into Dani’s roots—her natural hair color, which she hadn’t seen in years. “Don’t worry, you can wash it off at the end of the night.” McKenna handed her a hair tie. “Ponytail it so I can get started on your face.”
Dani obeyed, her hands shaking. “So what’s the plan?” she said. “We’re still going in as test subjects?”
Silva pushed away from Katya’s desk and turned to face Dani. “Correct. You and Mr. Shalhope are scheduled for an overnight clinical study starting at ten—under invented names, of course.”
“Our contact set it all up,” Oliver said. “He won’t be there tonight, but he got you registered at the front desk.”
“And then what?” Dani said. “Once we’re in there, what do we do?”
“Miss Novak and I will be guiding you every step of the way,” Silva said. “In that vein—Miss Novak?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Katya gave the keyboard a break andspun on her chair, coming to a stop across from Dani. She held up her hands, equipped with long false nails, the same shade of silver as her hair. “You’re going to need one of these.”
“A fingernail?” Oliver asked.
“A skeleton key,” Katya said with a rare smile. She peeled the nail off her right ring finger and passed it to Dani. “These bad boys aren’t even legal here. They’re basically parasites—if you stick one in, or even on, any of their tech, I can use it to hack in remotely. They’ll even self-destruct if I tell them to—and fuck up their system in the process. They’re quite versatile and virtually undetectable.”
“Sounds pretty cool,” Wyatt said.
“Prettycool?” Katya shot at him. “I had to trade someone on the dark web my blood for these. I think they’re more than pretty cool.”
“Hecate’s bones,” Dani said, looking down at the unassuming object. “That’s intense.”
“Intense, but worth it,” Katya agreed. “That right there is how we’ll be able to get access to the security override function. Once you’re inside the building, you’ll need to find a place to put it. Ideally, we’d deposit it straight into their security control panel, but Professor Silva and I agree that it’s highly unrealistic to expect you to gain access to the control room, and too dangerous to try. It’ll work if we put it in anything that’s connected to the security system, though—it’ll just take me longer to get fully tapped in, but that should be no problem with the gala being so far out.”
“Okay.” Dani slid the silver nail into her pocket, then cursed—McKenna had stabbed her in the eye with a makeup brush. “Hey, can you go a little lighter on that spellshadow?”
“Sorry,” McKenna said, then proceeded to impale her again.
