Chapter Twenty-Seven - As Subtle as a Sledgehammer to the Nose

Emily and the girls stumbled out of Sam’s car like tiny over-excited clowns. The children were the clowns, not Emily. She wasn’t certain where Sam fit in that analogy.

“Alright Boss, what’s the plan?” Teddy asked.

The others seemed to defer to her, though Athena was also starting to take charge every so often. Emily wondered if there was some sort of power-dynamic at play, or if it was just her sisters being her sisters. “The plan is to meet up with Alea Iacta, then... I suppose we’ll go from there. Trinity.”

Trinity perked up, all six of her little racoon ears twitching up.

“One of you is going to make contact with Alea. Maybe... with a scarf around your face? We don’t want you to be too recognizable.”

“Oh, I have something for that,” Sam said.

She went over to the passenger side of the car, then fumbled in the glove box for a couple of minutes. She returned with a pair of shades, a neck warmer, and a baseball cap with a university’s logo on the front.

“This is my inconspicuous passerby disguise,” Sam said. “I have a coat in the trunk too, but it’s a bit big for Trinity.”

“Why do you have that?” Email asked.

One of Sam’s eyebrows perked up. “In case I need a disguise in a hurry? The hat hides the hair, the neck warmer half your face, the glasses your eyes, and the coat’s one of those poofy ones. My aunt gave it to me, but it makes me look fat, I find, so it’s perfect for this.”

“Right,” Emily said. She added a tally to the strange things Sam did.

A glance around revealed that they were still in the clear. Sam had parked a block over from where Alea Iacta was supposed to be, so Emily didn’t worry too much about being spotted if he was being followed.

What worried her was leading any followers to their position.

“Sam,” Emily started. “You wouldn’t happen to know of any places with access to the metro from here, right?”

Sam grinned, a toothy, scary kind of grin. “Why, Boss, I’m so very glad you asked.” Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out her phone and tapped a few things on it. “Here, I downloaded this.”

Emily took the device and looked over it. There was a map of Eauclaire, but with clear lines cutting through the city. The metro, obviously. Emily could remember seeing a more cartoony version of the same map in the train station.

“Oh,” Emily said. The map didn’t just have the exits where there were meant to be stations. It had accessways marked out too.

“Yeah,” Sam said as turn the phone around. “I looked on Oogle maps, and all of those accessways are still there. They’re like little huts all over the city. I’d been seeing them all my life without thinking about it. I think the city uses them to store stuff too.”

“Where’s the nearest one?” Emily asked. She didn’t know Eauclaire well enough to pinpoint where they were at that moment on the map.

Sam blinked at Emily, then half turned and pointed to a building about ten paces next to her.

“Oh,” Emily said. It was, indeed, a bit of a shack. A small brick building wedged between two apartment buildings, with a narrow alley on either side and a sign on the front with the city’s crest on it.

“Good work, Minion Sam,” Teddy said. She gave Sam a thumb’s up, but Sam lowered her hand for a five-five, which prompted the others to join in too.

Emily hummed to herself for a moment before asking an important question. “Do you have the keys?” she asked.

“Uh,” Sam said. “No?”

“The building is out in the open, you know,” Emily said. “We can’t just pick the lock when anyone driving by could see you.”

“I could smash it,” Teddy said.

Emily wasn’t sure she could. The door was one of those unadorned industrial doors. Even a bear would have a hard time finding the purchase to tear that off, she suspected.

“Okay, that’ll be a problem for later,” Emily said. “We need a way to get Trinity over to Alea Iacta, then we figure out how to leave.”

“Should I go?” Trinity asked. One of her was decked out in Sam’s clothes and she looked... a little silly, but not terribly so. Just a girl dressed for a slightly colder day.

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Emily hesitated. It probably wasn’t the most responsible thing to do, sending a lone child out to meet a stranger in a cafe. “I’ll go with you,” she decided. Her current outfit didn’t look anything like her heroic one, and as far as anyone was concerned, she was probably just a local student. “You’ll meet with Alea Iacta while I’m nearby. The rest of you will stay with Sam.”

“Okay!” Trinity agreed.

“I don’t like that you’re going off on your own, Teddy said. “What if some capitalist tries to entice you away with cheap promises of pretty things? They’ll come up, offer you a nice house in the suburbs, then bam! You’re a wage slave paying off a mortgage for the next million years.”

“I think I’ll be fine,” Emily said. “Don’t worry so much. Besides, Trinity can tell you if anything goes wrong.” She hesitated for a moment, then squatted down to be closer to Teddy’s height. “I wouldn’t mind a hug for good luck, though.”

Hugging Teddy meant that she had to hug Athena too, then of course Trinity wanted in. Fortunately, Sam decided not to ask for a hug because Emily wasn’t sure what she would have said to that.

“Right, we’re off,” Emily said. She reached down and the disguised Trinity grabbed her hand. “Try to find a way into the access building that won’t get us all arrested while you’re here.”

Sam gave her a thumbs up, and then Emily and Trinity were off.

The place Alea Iacta was hiding in wasn’t too far off. A cafe on a more trendy street, with a few boutiques and clothing stores on either side of it, and a busy bus lane right in front.

“Alright,” Emily said as she and Trinity paused on the street across from the cafe. “Here’s the plan; we’re going to cross the road, then I’m going to order something at the counter. I’ll point out which one of the people there is Alea Iacta, and you sit across from him. Tell him where to meet the others, then come back to me.”

“Okay,” Trinity said.

“Can you repeat everything?” Emily asked.

“We go into the food place, you get food. And while you get food, I tell the minion to go to the place where the rest of us are. Then we leave with the food.”

There was more emphasis on the food than Emily had planned, but otherwise Trinity seemed to have understood. “That’s right. If you do well, I’ll give you two doughnuts, okay?”

Trinity’s eyes sparkled, and her tail started to swish behind her.

“Ah, try to hide your tail too, it might give us away.”

Hand-in-hand they crossed the road--Emily made a point of teaching Trinity to look both ways, again--then they slipped into the coffee shop.

It wasn’t all that busy, probably owing to the hour. Too late for lunch, too early for supper, and most of the heavy after-work traffic was probably already past. Trinity sniffed at the air, and her hat wiggled until Emily patted her on the head. She glanced around, and saw Alea Iacta, sitting on his own, off in a corner booth that let him have a good look at the door.

Emily lowered herself down to Trinity’s height. “He’s the one over there, in the blue coat. Go sit in the chair next to his booth, then tell him that the Boss wants him to go to where the rest of you are.”

Trinity nodded, then with a skip, moved over to where Alea Iacta was. She scrambled up onto a seat not too far from his, then started talking to him. It looked like just an innocent girl talking to a stranger.

Emily stood in line, eyeing her sister, then when her time came she ordered a box full of mixed doughnuts--no cream-filled, they were too messy--and paid up. The moment she picked up the box, she swept around the coffeeshop and told Trinity to come with her without meeting Alea Iacta’s gaze.

“That went surprisingly well,” Emily said once they were walking back.

“Yeah,” Trinity said. “So well I get three doughnuts?”

Emily sighed. So much for feeling capable. “We’ll see,” she said. A glance over her shoulder as they approached the next intersection showed her Alea Iacta leaving the shop with his coat’s hood pulled up.

Hopefully he wouldn’t be followed, and hopefully no one had seen the exchange or thought anything of it.

***