After dropping off the second bag of loot and storing it in her annex locker, Tasìa had one last bit of business to tend to before she would allow herself to go to sleep.
She approached a cell near the end of the B-side corridor.
She was looking for Felicité but the Argentinian was not there.
At this late hour, she would be in the media room with her head down as she tapped away on the TRS-80 keyboard.
Felicité kept the device on her person at all times. On the surface it appeared to be an antique 1980's TRS-80 handheld pocket computer with a remolded backplate to hold a modern charge battery.
A few months ago when Felicité knew that she was going to the hole - the isolation ward - after she got caught with a controlled substance the Argentinian asked Tasìa to hold onto it for her for safekeeping. She likely assumed Tasìa had no familiarity with the specs of the device.
In that assumption the blonde was wrong.
Tasìa grew up in a household full of discarded technology with a century worth of electronic scraps from university project throwaways. It was where her father worked as a utility repairman.
She had given the TRS-80 special scrutiny after Felicité handed it over to her. Even as Tasìa accounted for the replacement of the power source, she found it to be significantly heavier than what the iconic device would weigh at factory stock. A mere six oz.
As she delved further, Tasìa had to commend the Argentinian girl.
The compartment within the device had been hidden very cleverly. You could have opened the backplate and you still would not be aware that the niche was there.
It took Tasìa two hours to figure out how to disassemble the device, and, while she did so, not damage it by accident.
She had to hold a magnet against each of the length-wise sides at just the right pair of spots to cause the interior switches to pull up and release the lockdown mechanism.
Once she figured that out, Tasìa discovered inside of the TRS-80 was a modern handheld device in the stead of the native processing unit that in its time made the handheld computer a little more useful than a calculator.
The front panel LCD still functioned as designed with a point matrix-like text read-out, but the internal wires hooked up to the modern mobile instead of its native processor; it possessed all the functionality of the modern device, sans graphical display, while Felicité was also able to keep it hidden from authority.
Felicité had converted the old TRS-80 keyboard and monochrome LCD display into a bash shell text-based console which allowed her to program and perform operating system level commands without the assistance of a graphical interface.
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It appeared Felicité did not even bother with the touchscreen device at all, but merely used the mobile for its central processing unit, wireless system, and hard drive storage.
After all, the command-line interpreter was all a professional hacker like Felicité needed.
Tasìa found her in the back row of the media room. Four other inmates sat, watching a drama of a musical festival originally performed nearly a hundred years ago in a city in northern Mexico. The concert was recreated in phenomenal three-dimensional detail for any of the inmates who had media buds on that could handle the band flow.
Moving images of dirty, naked people filled the panorama walls around the inmates. An angry bearded man on a stage stacked with Marshall speakers and Latin percussion kits read poetry written so poorly as to possess none of the natural hard iambic cadence that Tasìa found beautiful when she heard English spoken.
She understood at most only every third word when it was spoken so quickly and artlessly.
"Get back to the music, assholes. Bring back Santana," one of the inmates yelled.
However, the other inmates seemed enwrapped in the panorama display, in spite of everything. At this hour, they were likely high as well. Too high to care about the quality of the crap they were watching.
As for Felicité, she ignored everyone. She did not even notice that Tasìa had taken a seat beside her.
Poor situational awareness, Tasìa thought.
She looked around. Still at a loss for the name of the verse reciter at the podium from the long-ago musical event, a man now long dead. What was his name, Gwensbird, or something?
"Really shitty and atrocious poetry," Tasìa said loudly in a disgusted voice.
Felicité's head jerked up.
"What?"
"How can you tune that out, Felicité? It is like a spike in the ear."
As she bit her lips and she wrinkled her very light-haired brows, Felicité appeared confused.
Good.
That was Tasìa's intention, to take advantage of the situation and put the Argentinian on edge.
Tasìa spoke again, "we are moving the schedule up."
In a questioning, skeptical tone, Felicité said, "oh, but we are, are we?"
Tasìa reached into her waistband. She handed Felicité the roll of coins.
"We are moving things up to tomorrow."
"The fuck did you get those?"
"I found out earlier in the evening that someone had planted a switchblade in my locker; the evidence pointed to Castro. I returned the favor, picked through her locker; that is where I found those coins."
"You are worried that it was put out on your head? It wasn't. Trust me."
"How can you be so certain," Tasìa asked.
"Trust me," Felicité repeated.
Tasìa saw something she had never seen Felicité express before in her presence, fear. Her eyes were almost all white now, with none of the frosty blue showing around her pin top sized pupils.
"The hit is intended against me."
Tasìa stood up. It wasn't time to play sympathetic girlfriend; she was here to light a fire under Felicité's ass.
"All the more reason why we are moving things up. We are breaching the tower tomorrow. Yes, you can keep that roll of coins. There will be another roll just like it if you can persuade your friends to get us out of here by Tuesday."
With her message delivered, Tasìa turned around and walked away.