Blazing through the street, Lara waited until a few minutes had passed before she attempted to begin her line of questioning. “A little bit of this?”

  “A little bit of that,” Scarlet finished for her, yelling back. “I’m not sure how everyone manages to lose track of you while tracking you all the same.”

  Lara’s pulse dropped. “How are you still tracking me?!”

  “Don’t worry, we’re not using Zana’s tech. Gossip spreads pretty fast at the Lissome.”

  Penny.

  Lara pursed her lips. “Was the Director…?”

  Scarlet answered her unfinished question, “Yes, Jonathan is included in that info storm, too.”

  Lara closed her eyes, groaning. “I was trying to come by myself.”

  “I know,” said Scarlet. “Don’t worry, I’ve rescued you for a little while.”

  “Thanks.”

  Scarlet made what sounded like a laugh. “Don’t count it as a rescue mission just yet, we have our own motives. And I still have to return you.”

  Lara peered over the side of the bridge they sped over in silent turmoil.

  “Where are you taking me, anyway?”

  “A place.”

  “Where’s ‘a place’?”

  “We’re almost there, you’ll see in a sec.”

  As promised, they turned off a pass, taking a neglected road for a few miles before Scarlet stopped the bike in front of what appeared to be a boarded-up warehouse.

  Taking Scarlet’s removal of her helmet as a queue, Lara followed suit. She handed over the headgear and gingerly swung off, stretching her inner thighs in an awkward mid-squat.

  Lara watched as Scarlet headed toward what she assumed to be the front of the building, and slowly rubbed her hand against the grain of the wooden doors, looking them up and down.

  “What are you doing?” Lara asked, prompted by Scarlet’s subsequent attempts to shake them.

  “Making sure it’s non-functional,” Scarlet responded, brows slightly furrowed in concentration.

  “You mean locked?"

  “Yeah, but locked in the new, old-fashioned way.”

  Scarlet placed and held her hand for a few moments on various sections of the doors. She pressed her ear to them.

  Lara glanced around awkwardly. “Everything good over there?”

  Scarlet interrupted her, lifting her palm up to Lara as if to say “Stop”.

  Lara chewed on her lip, managing to rip off a piece of skin in the time it took Scarlet to listen for whatever she was listening for.

  Without a word, Scarlet then ran around the corner to the side of the building. Lara followed, increasingly wary.

  She found her staring at a long horizontal window centered at the top of the building. “Help me with this,” she said as Lara approached her.

  As if to answer her unspoken question, Scarlet walked over to a rusted dumpster stationed on the corner furthest from them.

  “What do you want me to help with?”

  “Just push it,” she answered, already positioned on its other side.

  Momentarily silencing her curiosity, Lara joined her, copying Scarlet’s form and placing her hands on the dumpster’s profile. It creaked in disagreement as they slid it against the side of the building until it was just beneath the window.

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  “Okay, that’s good.”

  Lara let go, rolling her shoulders. The act had re-awoken her desire for physical activity, and she was suddenly feeling more alert.

  Scarlet climbed on top of the dumpster, with her hands just barely reaching the window frame. She pressed her fingers to it, holding them there for a few seconds before hopping back down.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, telling Lara to stay put as she ran back around to the corner from which they’d come.

  Lara stood in silence, observing the brick building, then turning to regard the isolated area around her.

  Hearing rapidly approaching footsteps, she turned again to see Scarlet running back around the opposite corner. In her hand, she held a hammer.

  Realizing what she had in mind, Lara’s eyes widened. “Scarlet, is that really necessary?”

  Scarlet did a running hop, grabbing the dumpster and lifting herself back up. “I was wondering why Indigo gave this to me!”

  “Why did she give it to you--”

  The sound of smashed glass cut her off. She shielded her face with an arm as Scarlet brought the hammer to the window once more.

  “Jesus, Scarlet!”

  Scarlet brushed the remaining glass shards from the ledge before carefully tapping the surface as a safety check. Confident of the job, she brushed her hands off on her legs, leaving dusty streaks across the black fabric of her pants. She reached down to Lara.

  Lara glanced at Scarlet’s hand, to Scarlet, to the window, and then back at Scarlet. “Really?”

  “Yes?” Scarlet said with a raised eyebrow and a playful smile.

  Her blatant disregard for the obvious irrationality of the scene made Lara shake her head, but she accepted her hand. On top of the dumpster, Lara let go, standing cautiously. Scarlet had made the dumpster lid look sturdy when it was anything but.

  Lara braced the wall with one hand to steady her wobbling as Scarlet lifted herself up to the window. With both of her feet off of the prop, she pulled herself through the newly made opening, and dropped down to the other side.

  Lara listened to the sound of glass scraping the ground and Scarlet supposedly kicked it across the floor. She could hear her footsteps recede as she went further into the building. Her return was signaled by the obnoxious grating of what sounded like a metal structure being dragged against its will.

  “Gonna join?!” Scarlet yelled from behind the wall.

  Lara took a breath, taking that as her queue to follow. She shimmied across the dumpster lid, until she was center with the window. She tested the window frame for any missed glass before securely clutching it with her palms.

  With a stuttered movement, she pulled herself up. There was a point when she struggled to maneuver her body as cleverly as Scarlet had, and ended up hanging downward over the other side.

  “I’m slipping,” she said through her body’s shakes. Scarlet quickly attended to her, lending her shoulder and hand as support. Lara grabbed both, allowing herself to slip through the window and onto the metal desk that had been pushed beneath the window.

  Releasing Scarlet, she sighed and wiped the sweat from her brow, then climbed down from the desk.

  “I feel so much closer to you now!”

  Lara replied with a small, incredulous laugh which Scarlet returned with her own.

  Removing the elastic band holding her bun in place, she ran a hand through her red hair. “Take a minute to catch your breath.”

  “I’m fine,” Lara responded, looking around. “Is this some hideout?”

  “Oh,” Scarlet backed up to the center of the warehouse, which was abandoned, save for some rusting metal shelves, wooden palettes, and empty conveyor belts. “This is just a relic. Once the technology advanced, most of the activities that this particular warehouse was responsible for were moved underground.”

  “Is that public knowledge or is that something you know just because you work at the Lissome?”

  Scarlet sighed dreamily, closing her eyes, then opened them again with newfound focus. “To answer your question: neither.”

  A strange feeling crawled over Lara’s skin, unsure of how to proceed.

  “But I’m getting ahead of myself.” Scarlet seemed unaware of Lara’s growing exasperation, and instead pulled from her black leather jacket the pocket watch that Lara had retrieved the night before. She held the chain, and let it hang. It swung subtly from side to side like a hypnotist. “Take this, if you will.”

  Lara stared at her, contemplating crawling back up and over the wall to the other side. But she ignored her greater instincts, and approached Scarlet. As she did, Scarlet closed her eyes again in response.

  Lara paused, hesitating before taking her last few steps.

  Reaching for the watch, she froze less than an inch from its golden casing. Static blanketed her palm. But silencing her last seed of doubt, her fingers wrapped around it.

  Scarlet’s eyes flicked open. A light crept across them, circling her irises. Flooding the crevices beneath her sclera, it pooled in her pupils, overwhelming every structure beneath her lids until only the light remained.

  Lara’s breath caught as the hour and minute hands whirred furiously across the face of the pocket-watch. The light spread out beneath them, invading the warehouse until it, too, was encased.

  She willed herself to pull her hand from the watch, to no avail. Frozen on the blank canvas of a white page, she found herself unable to speak or move, and could only watch as the light finally snaked its way from the ground, onto Scarlet’s legs, and across her body. It consumed the fabrics, pooling beneath her waist, and draped across her arms.

  As it concentrated itself on her existence, it receded from the world around them. And they were no longer in the warehouse.