Finding purchase with her hands on the ledge above her, Alice went up on her toes, shifting her weight to her hands briefly while she walked her legs up the sides of the windowsill. She braced one foot after the other as high as she could manage, wedging the toes of her shoes into the mortared space between the stone blocks that made up the building’s facade. She had to stop halfway, so she could give her aching fingers a rest. Alice felt perfectly calm, hanging there above the sounds of horns and sirens, the wind whipping through the gap between the buildings, coming off the Atlantic and achingly cold. Alice couldn’t remember much, but she knew that she hated New York. She’d felt it since she arrived, the day before yesterday.
Of course, the view of the city she’d gotten wasn’t exactly the most flattering.
She’d come directly from Central, so the first few hours she spent scoping the rough area outlined by the dossier that Alistair had implanted before she’d left, and caching portions of the gear she’d brought where she thought it might prove the most useful, in case what she had on her person turned out to be insufficient. She’d found everything to her liking, as much as possible when she was in Manhattan, so she navigated the surprisingly dim subway system to Brooklyn to a club that Rebecca had told her about. It was a metal bar supposedly; Emperor blaring in her ear buds as she walked past the eclectic crowds of hipsters, Orthodox Jews, black teenagers and homeless people, to get her in the mood. It turned out to be more of punk bar that played metal-inspired hardcore, but Alice made the best of what was at hand. She had four drinks and was hit on three times. The second guy was the cutest, but the last one had managed to make her laugh, and that seemed more important, that night. She decided to forgive his spiky hair and bad tattoos. She let him buy her another drink, and then went back to his flat somewhere in a dilapidated warehouse loft a few blocks away. Alice spent most of the night with him, returning to her hotel in the early morning, tired, disheveled, and thoroughly pleased with herself.
She had harbored secret anxiety for weeks that she might have forgotten something important about that stuff too, but it all came back to her as soon as her clothes came off.
Alice spent the day taking naps and short walks, reading over files and deciding between her three potential targets. Whichever one she picked, she knew Alistair would throw Xia and Mitsuru at the other two if it looked like she wasn’t in trouble, and probably the new girl he was holding in reserve too, the vampire. She didn’t know where Alistair had gotten such excellent intelligence lately, but she didn’t worry much about it. Killing Witches was her thing, even she could remember that. Eventually, Alice picked the hardest target with the prettiest face. She liked it better when they were pretty.
The afternoon had stretched out interminably. New York was muggy, and she felt listless. She’d ended up watching four hours of the Discovery channel. Some guy named Mike Rowe, whose warm voice she found soothing, narrated every show she watched. Nearly everything she learned was new to her. When the sun finally consented to set, she pulled out her hardbound diary and jotted down notes from the day, just in case, and then showered, leaving the door to the bathroom wide open behind her. Since Rebecca had found her, she had weird anxiety about small, tiled spaces. She dried, dressed, and double-checked her kit, confirming everything was in order.
The subway was nicer than she remembered it being, and she felt pleased with herself for remembering. Midtown was wrapped in weeknight quiet, so she saw only cops, service workers in orange vests, and ragged homeless people. She’d climbed by hand, because she was worried that an apport would rile the Ether, letting the Witch know she was there before she announced herself.
Resetting her grip, she pushed off with her feet and pulled with her hands, jumping for the handhold above her. Her fingers caught and then, for a long moment, she was certain that her grip was bad, but her fingers held, and she wriggled her way up on to the ledge, standing on the balls of her feet to make the most of the narrow space. She clung to the side of the building as she shuffled, painstakingly making her way over to the corner of the building where the target had her offices. The lights were still on, just as they were supposed to be, the blinds were closed the way they always were, according to surveillance. Attaching the rig to the office window was trickier than she had anticipated, and it took almost half an hour of fumbling before the suction cups latched on correctly and the electronic fuse activated. She retreated around the corner to the office’s other window, then took a flashlight from her bag and taped it to the wall beside her, so that she was spot-lit by the powerful Xenon bulb, her shadow vivid and black.
Alice took a series of deep, timed breaths. She shook out her hands, and hugged them underneath her arms until her fingers were no longer numb and cold. She extracted a black matte H amp;K USP Elite and a phosphorus flare from her bag, and wished that it had been practical to carry a shotgun across town and then up the side of a building. Alice stared into her shadow for what seemed like a long time. When she was sure she was ready, she hit the button on the detonator and then let the shockwave push her from the ledge, as she fell backwards through her shadow.
She hit the carpeted floor of the office hard; physics demanded it. It was undignified but necessary. Alice rolled hurriedly to her feet and found that things had gone better than anticipated. The charge had been shaped to spray the interior of the room with broken glass as well as a load of metal-tipped fletchettes, and it had done its job well. There was one man down roughly in the center of the room, with another in a suit bending over him and talking rapidly into an earpiece, while a third approached the shattered window cautiously, his gun drawn and held close to his body. Her target huddled behind a desk with a fourth security guard standing protectively over her, covering the guy advancing on the window with a snub-nosed Israeli submachine gun. Everyone in the room was looking the wrong way, so no one noticed her arrival until she moved.
Alice being Alice, that was too late.
The Witch noticed first, of course, because she could feel the distortion in the Ether that the port caused. She raised a barrier instinctually, but that actually made things easier on Alice. She had to take out the guy with the submachine gun anyway, and the barrier simply meant that she didn’t have to worry about any strays hitting the Witch.
She and Xia had done rock-paper-scissors for assignments back at Central, and he’d won, rock smashes scissors, so he got the kill order. They’d given the other kill order to Mitsuru, because it would be her first Witch, and it was about time the girl was officially baptized as an Auditor. That meant that Alice had to bring her date back home with her tonight.
She dropped the flare behind her, and then raised the gun and fired three times, aiming for the head, wishing again that she had a shotgun loaded with solid slugs. She didn’t know if the guards were human or Weir or what, so she had to assume the worst. The H amp;K fired. 45 caliber rounds, and she’d loaded it with these horrible explosive Tungsten bullets called ‘Fang-Face’, designed to tear big fucking holes in flesh. If they were Weir, she’d need them, too.
His head exploded like a jack-o’-lantern with an M-80 inside, so she shelved any further worries about his species. She squeezed off a couple more rounds in the direction of the two remaining guards, by the window, more to keep them ducking and moving than anything else. They all went wide, but Alice was set by then, having dropped down to one knee and taken careful aim at the one who’d been smart enough to draw his gun. Alice fired twice and then dove forward, through her own dancing shadow. She stepped out of the shadow of a broken lamp on the other side of the room, in time to see the place where she’d just stood obliterated by some kind of blue fire working that the Witch threw. Alice used the moment to pick off the guard she’d been shooting at, the. 45 making a nasty mess of his head.