Slowly, Lan slipped back into the shadows, moving behind racking and out towards the door on the opposite side of the room. Having surveyed the area beforehand, from the outside, she knew that the reception area was the building beyond this storage room. Breaking a window’s lock ahead of time had been fairly simple to do seeing as the window in question was out of sight, round the back. In fact, this was the only route she could have taken into the heart of the industrial complex without going from the front. Lan supposed that explained the two guards in the storage room.
Reaching the other end of the room, Lan turned round and, climbing gingerly onto a box into front of her, began to ascend the racking, rising up shelf and box alike, very careful as to what she put her weight on before continuing. The broken shards of the pale light grazed her as she climbed, her wiry frame suited for the job in size and in strength. She reached the top without making so much as a peep, and crouched, ignoring the drop before her. The two in the centre of the room were still conversing as they had been before, so Lan shuffled round to face the long raised grated walkway before her that circled the top of the room as a viewing platform.
She wasted no time, positioning herself on the edge of the racking top and pushing off, her body shooting through the gap between the platform and its handrail and executing a neat roll, coming to a stop against the wall. Breathing a quiet sigh of relief and exertion, Lan glanced at her watch again. The speech would start any minute now. She was running out of the time. Standing up to fiddle with the lock to the window looking out towards the central area of the plant, she detached the latch, pushing it ajar and lifting herself through and out of the storage room.
Where the storage room was two stories high on account of the racking, the walkway to the next building was only on the ground floor, its roof at such a height that Lan could still turn around to close the window she had just come through so long as she stood on her tip-toes. The faintest hint of a booming sound, and Lan hastily pushed the window to, in time for the sweeping song of the klaxon bells, their pulsing call to attention pure and inviting. Scheduling the start of his speech with the klaxon song was foolhardy, almost a challenge to the authority of the city. It was as if Grent was saying that his ceremony was more important than the night showing, more important than all the city’s happenings and other Luminaries.
A bold move, and one that gave away much of his character. For this reason Lan was confident he had not hired any real security for this event, beyond basic Faith-less grunts. The man was arrogant, an upstart in the world of the new gods, and Lan was going to play that to her advantage.
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She crossed the roof of the walkway in a short space of time, and clambered up onto the roof of the next building, using a vent as a foot and hand hold. Crawling on the slanted roof, glass entwined with curled metal in a fanciful display, she could finally see into the reception, and down on Harold Grent’s figure as he waxed lyrical at his guests. As the sound of the klaxon bells died down, she became able to hear his muffled tones. From what she could tell, it was an enthusiastic and gripping piece of rhetoric, whatever he was saying, as the audience’s eyes were all on him, and not a single mouth moved whilst Grent’s own flapped excitedly.
Lan smiled, running through her plan in her head. First, down the side of the building and into the walkway, then into the building itself and up onto the mezzanine that stretched the whole way around the room as a looking platform. She would then leap down onto the raised stage and burn Grent to a crisp with her flamethrower hidden in the darkness of her cloak. She would use theatrics of course, raise her other hand in a forceful motion and turn so the audience could only see her arm, outstretched from folds of cloth enshrouding her body, and a jet of flame that would almost certainly kill the Luminary if not simply leave him permanently scarred. Her escape route would be the same door, using the flamethrower to usher the guards out of her path.
Doubtless Archer would be present in the room, watching over the crowd from above, but Lan had prepared for this as well. He would aim for her hand, thinking that the source of the fire, which is why her arm was fitted with a metal mesh, designed to protect her arm from the bullet’s impact. She knew he would aim for her arm rather than her body, in order to stop her attack and preserve her for interrogation. Such was the Luminary culture; with the advent of power came a surge in competition, often of the dark and deadly kind. She could not let herself get caught, no matter what. That would almost certainly seal her fate in some basement somewhere, tied to a chair and beaten to death in search of answers she didn’t have. At least this way, while her arm might suffer damage, she would be able to escape alive with her intangible prize, ready to begin her master plan.
Lan let herself down onto the walkway roof, and then again down to the ground, landing a few feet away from a door in the side of the walkway. Locked, of course, but Lan saw to that in under thirty seconds. The speech would not last much longer, so as she stepped inside, she readied herself for the murder.
A creak came from behind her and her heart jumped into her throat, instinctively breaking into a silent run that took her to the door that led to the reception and through it, opening it swiftly and moving to close it as she turned around to see what the noise was. The door that lead into the storage room at the other end of the walkway was opening, and the only things she could make out around the shape of the doorframe as she closed her door, was an eye and the barrel of a pistol.