Interstice 3

  Lily stares directly into the lens of the camera, knowing that she’s totally screwed, as the two men laugh at her from the door. “You should have been keeping track of the time,” one of them says with a malicious laugh. “Hurry up, let’s go!”

  “Luke, you sonofabitch!” Lily screams at him.

  “What the hell is wrong with you!” He says. “No names!”

  “Oh shit,” she says, eyes wide and a look of abject fear painting lines on her face. “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking! I’m sorry!”

  “No, you’re not sorry,” he growls back at her. “But you’re gonna make it up to me, and then you will be.” He grabs her by the arm and shoves her passed him, forward and through the door into the street. “Get in the car,” he says.

  This car is old, and the automated driving system had been ripped out. Criminals and privacy nuts frequently did this so their cars couldn’t be tracked. It wasn’t exactly illegal, but it did mean those cars weren’t allowed to drive on expressways. Lily is shoved into the backseat of the large car and sits uncomfortably among piles of garbage and the boxes of equipment they had just stolen.

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  “You never use names, what the hell is wrong with you?” Luke continues yelling at her as he slides into the driver’s compartment. He turns and glares at her, his eyes hot with rage and his fist raised. “If we weren’t in the middle of a goddamn heist right now,” he says and trails off, his mouth tight as he turns back and starts driving.

  Lily drops to the floor on the backseat, and tries to force her breathing to slow down. She has never been so careless before, this is a huge disaster. Almost on its own accord her hand slips into her pocket and pulls out a small ziplock bag of powdered Sarcoline. She takes a pinch of the powder and rubs it into her left wrist. As the drug is pressed into her pores she closes her eyes and slowly her muscles relax. Her mind starts to clear, and the veins on her wrist where the powder was absorbed start to pulse with a dull purple colour. Lily puts her head back against the seat and lets the Sarcoline hallucinations wash over her consciousness. They should only last for a few minutes, and then she would be back to her confident self again. The real her.

  Lily’s mind races through everything that just happened over the last hour, and the Sarcoline fueled hallucinations bring it to life in mind. She watches herself make the deal with Luke. They go to the stake-out, waiting for the security team to leave. She helps him set off the EMP to knock out security.

  Then Lily is inside, during the robbery itself. Lily can see herself kneeling down on the floor of that small office, stuffing cash into a bag. She watches herself stand up and stare dumbly at the security drone, then turn and run out of the building. But the hallucination doesn’t follow her out of the office, and Lily’s eyes lazily focus in on one detail. An object that is softly glowing in the Sarcoline haze. A soft purple outline around the gun she had dropped, laying on the carpeted floor. With her fingerprints all over it.