2

Luna and Chip spent the next few days uncovering more details about this Glitch person. Turned out he was an ex-enforcer from Zinc’s private militia way back in 2189, eight years ago. He started off as a lead hacker and slowly worked his way up the ranks by engineering advanced tech. Retired early at forty-one and, according to the dark-web, spent a lot of his time selling and distributing illegal tech.

He planned to stay at the Vadchia Plaza, the biggest and most expensive hotel in Zemon, which would cost a little more than a grand to stay the night, while he discussed the Power Gauntlets with the Legion. “Boss” would meet with him somewhere else. “Boss” would give him the number he/she was willing to pay, and by the time he made it back to the hotel, the gauntlets would be theirs. They would be a million dollars richer.

Just one night. That was all they needed.

Luna would sell them on the black market months after the heist (just to be safe and to not draw any attention to themselves), take the million bucks, and fly out of the ZLB Triangle. It was foolproof. She couldn’t wait.

She and Vanderman used the money they stole from The Witch’s Inn to book a room Sunday night. Two thousand and two hundred dollars down the drain, leaving them with only five hundred each. Chip came up with a plan to disable the power and access Glitch’s room while he was out discussing the deal. He even recommended bringing the whole arachnofibre set because, well, Vadchia Plaza wasn’t a simple in-and-out job. The security was airtight, there was a camera on every corner, armed guards, security drones. Everything. It made sense that Glitch would want to stay there.

The full arachnofibre suit would make them invisible, but not for long. Changing your facial structure was one thing, sure, but using the whole suit at once would eat the battery faster than a dog chewing up a trunk of ham. They had to be smart, and Chip, despite being an asswipe, was a smart guy. Luna could trust him to deliver a solid plan, considering he’d been right about every other robbery in the past.

Luna had met Chip through Vanderman four years ago. Back then, Chip was a generic computer-science graduate who, despite the increase in computerised jobs, struggled to find work. He had bumtripped bad one night at the Bridge Scarlet stripclub in West L’ankor after downing a vial of Afterburner in one swallow. A drug-addict. Go figure. Vanderman found him sleeping as naked as a jaybird in a dumpster on Crease Avenue the following morning.

"You wanna know why they call it Afterburner?" Chip had told him groggily. "Because it burns worse than church."

After that, he and Vanderman talked, and soon Chip was willing to help out with these thieving escapades. He needed the money. He needed something to whip him into shape and keep him sane.

The story would still make Luna laugh quite often, but each time she would remind herself that she had been in a similar position, just without the drugs and being naked. That was all Chip.

As of now, the only concern Luna had was Sarah. Sarah didn’t like staying at home alone, and Luna wouldn’t be back at L’illian till the mid morning at earliest. She thought about getting Sarah a babysitter, but chalked that off grimly, for two reasons. One: If the heist was successful, the babysitter would likely find out and expose her to the public. Two: Sarah would drive the babysitter insane.

Probably.

She decided that the best option would be to bring her. Christmas break was around the corner, so she figured her school wouldn’t care much, and plus she was an intelligent girl, even if people didn’t think so. She knew a lot of things about a lot of stuff. She was curious and cute, like a bunny rabbit, and reminded her a lot of Mom.

On Friday, once Sarah finished school at 3 P.M., Luna decided to bring her to the nearest electrical pod so she could recharge her arachnofibre suit. Just a short trip. It was on the second floor of the apartment complex, next to the micro-casino Lucky Draw. The casino had been busy this afternoon, and the residents were tossing dice at the green betting tables, playing blackjack, poker, roulette, and operating jackpot machines. All a waste of money, but she supposed rich people could afford to do that.

A rectangular gap trailed across the wall, exposing the metropolitan spread. The sun winked on every edifice and commercial outlet, bright, sometimes blinding. From this view, Luna could see the L’illian railway dive through the city, and across it the three-thirty bullet train bolted, loudly shaking the very ground beneath her.

She went over to the electrical pod – a large egg-shaped containment unit with the smiling Lightning Man flashing a thumbs up, his hair a bright blue and his eyes covered by a goal-coated visor – and untied the straps around the suit. It had been three years since she used this station, and the black carbon-weave texture on the suit had been gathering dust in the wardrobe of her mother’s old bedroom.

Sarah had asked her why she needed the suit in the first place, and Luna explained that she was trading it in for some nice gloves.

“Gloves?” Sarah had said, shocked.

“Gloves,” responded Luna.

“That doesn’t sound like a fair deal.”

“These are a very special type of gloves.”

And they most certainly were. Sarah had no idea how much they would impact their lives. Once this heist was over, and once they made it out of the city, Luna would explain everything to her, since she figured Sarah would be buzzing with questions. More than ever.

How did you get so much money? Why are we moving? Do you like ice cream?

She thought about this as she approached the recharge station.

“What’s that?” asked Sarah, rubbing her eyes with her nylon-jacket sleeve.

“This is it.” Luna flapped the dust off the suit, inserted her wrist-cable into the pod socket, paid the ten-dollar fee, and the pill-shaped slot on the machine slid open, revealing another USB slot.

Lightning Man spoke: “Charge up for a good time! WHOA HOOOOOO! Thanks for using Lightning Man’s charge station!”

Before she could jack into the slot, she recoiled and let out a big, wet sneeze. She rubbed her nose on the crook of her sleeve.

“Gross!” said Sarah. “Use a tissue!”

“Bite me.” Luna plugged the cable from the suit into the slot and waited dully for it to charge. The battery percentage popped up on the small black screen, , and quickly it began shooting up.

“Are you coming down with a cold?” she said. “Should we get you medicine?”

“No,” Luna said. “Should we get you meds?”

“For what reason?” she asked.

“To shut you up,” she joked.

She giggled. “If I shut up then I’ll give you nothing to complain about. And you love complaining, Luna. You always complain. It’s like your thing.”

Luna let out a loud, diaphragmatic laugh. , the pod read. “Listen, Sarah – ”

She puffed her cheeks and looked at Luna with wide, blue eyes, nodding.

“You’re… well, we’re goin’ out again this Sunday,” she said.

Her face lit up with excitement. “Where?”

“Fancy place,” she said. “I’m not sure you’ll like it – ”

“I like fancy places,” she said. “Like mansions and libraries and stuff. I mean I don’t like reading, but the buildings and scenery look nice.”

“We’re going to be gone a long time,” she said.

“How long?”

“Till late morning at least,” she said. “It’s a bit far away.”

“But what is it?”

“A hotel.”

She beamed. “Are we staying there for the night?”

“No,” Luna said, and Lightning Man spoke from the machine:

“FULLY CHARGED! PLUG OUT YOUR ITEM BEFORE IT EXPLODES!”

She pulled out the suit cable and watched it automatically zip into place, like a retractable cord. “Just stopping by,” she continued. “We have a package to collect off a friend.”

“What package?” she asked.

“Some cool gloves,” she said, and she realised that she wasn’t entirely inaccurate in saying that. “Think you could last that long? You can sleep in the car if you get tired, and Chip’ll be with you like normal.”

“Sounds like F-U-N-E,” Sarah said.

“Foon?” said Luna. “What’s that?”

“Fun,” said Sarah.

She laughed again. “There’s no ‘E’ in fun, Sarah.”

“There is if you spell it wrong,” she said, flat-faced.

She grinned, pulling her in close. “C’mon. You have homework to do, and I have work to do.”

“No homework today,” said Sarah.

She looked at her doubtfully. “Oh yeah? No work today?”

“Mr Deckard says we’re progressing fast,” Sarah said. “Like we’re going through the work quickly. It’s really cool. We’re almost finished, and next year we start learning advanced biology.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Luna.

Sunday Night

It was just like last Sunday, except Luna needed a larger chrome-yellow box to hold the arachnofibre outfit. She dressed up in a neat three-piece suit, like she was getting ready for a business meeting (although the real reason was that she simply didn’t want to look like a street dweller). She brought Sarah down to Chip’s van and spent the next two hours travelling across Zemon City, listening to the rain pound on the roof. Even though a week had passed, that bouncer’s prediction still held steady. A storm was building, and each night the weather seemed to grow more violent.

Once they made it to the Vadchia Plaza at nine o’clock at night and they could see the giant pinball, flagged walks, and marble-carved steps (as well as the enormous laser beams which shot out from behind the building like a music concert), Sarah had fallen asleep, and Luna was on the verge of it.

This was it. The big night. Sarah woke up at the perfect time, and Chip drove under the hidden passage into the Plaza parking lot, where the ceilings were lit by sodium-vapour lamps and the red paint on the walls was wearing away. Up ahead and to the far right, Luna saw the elevator, and next to it the sign which read LOBBY AT FLOOR 0.

They all caught the elevator to the lobby. The lobby was big, wide, and smelt of freshly picked flowers, although she didn’t quite possess the floral knowledge to name them all by heart. They were potted in enormous jardinières alongside the secretary desk. Behind the desk stood two women dressed in sleeveless, red qipaos, and behind them a giant hologram of a floating Earth, spinning on its axis above an alabaster fountain. There had been a great deal of people in this area, and the queue to the sign-in ended up being a ten-minute wait. The woman’s computer had been marked with a Chinese dragon – the symbol of Vadchia, one of the three main technological companies in the ZLB Triangle, and by far the most successful.

They booked in – their fake names had worked yet again – and from there Vanderman and Luna split off with Chip and Sarah. Chip had told them he was going to bring Sarah to a kid-friendly parlour to get her something to eat, and that sounded good enough for Luna. Well good enough.

Vanderman and Luna got to their room on the fifth floor, set up a Cloud Call with Chip, and went over the plan another couple of times.

The job commenced at ten.