The surgery had gone well. Minor scaring around the iris that would smooth out in a few hours, but that was better than most who went through it could say. The man with blue hair edged himself off the operating slab in darkness. With his right hand he groped for the eye-patch left on the table. He would be sensitive for a while longer, maybe a day, before everything would be working perfectly. Meanwhile he fumbled with knotting the cloth strap behind his head, fingers still tingling from the restart of his life-support system as it poked around through his veins and nerves for damage. If the cyber-doc had done his work properly, the new blueprint for his right eye would be integrated with the system and it shouldn't take apart the expensive modifications as it woke up. The man wasn't thinking of that, though. The doc had a reputation for honest, if mostly illegal, dealings. His thoughts were on the job the new eye was for in the first place. He might have managed with the standard package he had installed years ago if not for the complications he had found out about after taking the money. Not enough money for something like this, really, but the job might pay off in perks or fame. Messing with a royal battalion on home ground was gutsy to say the least. Stealing things from right under their noses when some foreign dignitary was visiting was worse. Having to steal the foreign dignitary that they would doubtless be guarding would be considered insanity. That would of course be why the client would have hired him to do it. As opposed to the doc's solid reputation, the man's was like fire, flickering and bending and burning things it touched. The job had come through multiple layers of obfuscation to his brooding form in a low-down pub three weeks ago. It had asked if he would abduct a woman for a sum of money. He had been running low on cash, accepted after too shallow of a background check. It had come through channels that gave him easy jobs in the past and that had lulled him into a false sense of security. Vinney would be off his white list and back onto the grey for the next while for this one. As it was, when he got the background, not the full background, but at least a fractured facsimile, he had needed new eyes. Going in blind was out. Knowing what hid behind each synthetic skin and chromed holster would be what kept him alive long enough to make it out when things went wrong. In the dark, he knew his plan was foolproof, each step taking him closer in through the underground halls to a room designed for the comfort of political guests, and then stepping him back out with one more person. It would go wrong though, and he knew this too. He expected to execute something poorly, to have missed key information, or to just be damn unlucky. Two days later, in the middle of the job, it did not come in the manner that he expected.
She was waiting for him as he walked in the room. His disguise, a perfectly tailored royal battalion issue uniform did not give him away. His accent was perfect. The reason for opening the door and entering had been established as an escort. She knew, somehow, and what scared him was that he didn't know how. Things went wrong: this was a law of operating. When you did not know how things went wrong, only that they were was when bad things happened to people in his profession. It was this that caused him to uncharacteristically freeze up in the doorway as she smiled at him daintily, the tips of her lips curling up ever so slightly into something just shy of a gloat. She knew, had said so as soon as he closed the door. That he was there to kidnap her, to disappear her from the midst of a heavily armed installation near the heart of the empire. She said he might succeed. She wasn't worried, or if she was she hid it behind a smooth surface of amusement. He was off schedule, precious seconds wasted. The pause breaks as she rises from the couch, picking up her purse, shielded so heavily even his new eye can make nothing out but smudges. "Let's go," she says with a giggle.
They walk. He follows a memorized pathway, recalculating everything as he moves. Seconds mean position changes and speed changes. Different passcodes for doors and cameras and elevators. He is not lost though every hallway looks the same; grey-green carpet and crimson banners hung on cream walls. Sharp, square turns and zig-zagging patterns through a colossal labyrinth. They meet no one. He is still panicking. He takes moments to glance behind him, he smile static on the face of someone who should not know they are being kidnapped. No, not kidnapped if they follow knowingly, he thinks. He is being used, somehow, he imagines. They walk, muffled footfalls and giggles.
Hallways, stairwell, parking garrage, small inconspicuous car. Plans adjusted for the seconds and executed flawlessly. The new eye keeps them out of the way of company. It was a good investment. The car is on the freeway when the wrongness finally clicks into place. Her purse shimmers in the rear-view mirror and the shielding melts away. Enough in it to vaporize the car and anything within basic-human spitting distance of the exterior. The trigger is rigged to some remote detonation signal. The listener is set and primed to go off. She hasn't stopped giggling every minute or two. All he can do is drive, hostage. A click, the door, not the bomb his muscles tense for. She lazily dangles it by three, two, one fingers and drops it. It takes a second and a half before the purse begins to detonate, two before the car gets rocketed forward, riding the shockwave. The back window is cracked into a spiderweb pattern, and he can't hear for the next minute of driving. His foot is jamming the gas to the floor the whole time. It's a half hour and most of a city away before she makes another sound that he can hear. "What's next, before they figure out what happened?"
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