"Let's play a game," Zif says, in a calm and gentle way, both tone and words that February has learned to knee-jerk fear.
The truck is rattling down a country track, just across the state line. Zif is watching the road, but with the casual air of someone familiar with it; February is huddled in the passenger seat in coiled dread, even before this. Trips out are more unpredictable than evenings in.
"What game?" February says, looking at her knees.
"Client gets in touch, says they need something exfiltrated. Rush job; today." The truck rounds a bend, jolts over a pothole, and emerges from the trees into open ground. It looks like a building site; or at least, a site that got as far as having materials piled here, and then — planning hiccups. Bankruptcy. Who knows? No more work, anyway, just weeds slowly eating piles of gravel and sand, stacked lengths of concrete culvert pipe, sheafs of rusting rebar. Listing portajohns, and way over on the far edge of the site, almost to where the trees resume, the cracked and peeling bulk of a modular cabin, presumably intended as the site office.
A training game, then, not sex. Probably. Possibly both; but Zif's been calmly, evisceratingly clear that she expects February, among other things, to get competent enough to be useful at the criminal trade that fucked her life up.
Can't beat an asset that does it for free, she'd drawled condescendingly, during a very long evening of explaining February's new status quo to her, chained in the raw concrete basement of Zif's farmhouse, with shears for February's clothes and a freezing cold hosepipe and a scrubbing brush made for saucepans and shampoo for dogs.
(Zif doesn't have a dog.)
Possibly both, but nonetheless, deadly seriously a professional training exercise.
"What's the target?" February manages to say it evenly, and Zif parks up and shows her a photo on her phone; a metal case around the size of a cashbox, alphanumeric code stencilled on the side.
"Obviously," Zif says, "it's in the cabin." She smiles, meanly. "Also obviously, the cabin has a camera, and if you get seen on that, you lose the game. You won't know that, until afterwards. Simulates getting picked up by the police for sloppy execution."
February looks at the site, the cabin, Zif. Gets out when she's told. Waits while Zif strolls around, re-opens the passenger door, and opens the glovebox.
"Corporate site," she says. "Corporate onsite security. Ever been shot with a paintball gun?"
February shakes her head.
"Simulates being shot," Zif says, hefting the weapon.
February has simulated being shot by corporate security eleven times, and each time Zif stands over her and says, "From the top." The last couple of times, she's handed February a tissue and waited for her to stop crying.
By now, it's dark.
(February cries again when Zif's glovebox turns out to also contain a set of night vision goggles. "Correctly equipped corporate security," Zif says, but her smile says I like it when you cry.)
She's spotted where the camera's mounted on the cabin, but has to guess the field of view, and be conservative. Losing that way, too, is going to hurt; she doesn't know how Zif will make it hurt but she knows she will. She's quiet. She pays attention to sightlines. When in doubt, she freezes where she's sure it's safe, monitors the patrol routines Zif's simulating, flits through the breaks in it. Circles the site. Breaks into the cabin — quietly, quietly — through a back window. Stays low and quiet while she seaches the cabin's shelves and cupboards, heart hammering — how many plausibly-sized but wrong boxes can one place contain? — until she finds it, checks the number on the side, quietly thanks the already-ingrained impulse to memorise that as important when Zif just casually flashed the picture.
Freezes, heart doing something ugly in her chest, when sudden bootsteps mount the cabin steps and the key rattles in the lock.
It's Zif, she thinks wildly, and that's — a better and a worse thought than actually being caught breaking in by someone else. And it's part of the game—
She moves, quiet and low; waits for the opening door and the body stepping through it, lunges. They go down in a welter of limbs, February gritting her teeth against making any sound, desperately wrestling; and finds herself on top, paintball gun in her hands, pointed down at Zif's chest.
It feels nothing like triumph; terror, mostly, but she keeps it pointed dead steady, right up to the point Zif jams a shock prod in her ribs and lights her up.
Zif dumps her, limp and sobbing and handcuffed, into the back of the truck. Climbs in, and starts backing up to turn them, to head back up the long, bumpy track to the highway.
"That wasn't bad, until you couldn't shoot me," she says coolly. "What's the statutory limit on corporate security holding you before they hand you to police to be charged, February?"
February tries to stop crying. "Thirty-six hours," she sniffles.
"That's right," Zif says. "I want you to remember that everything I do to you in the next thirty-six hours is documented in corporate arrest records, February. All of it."
(A deadly serious professional training exercise. But nonetheless, in the end: both.)
"You'll thank me, when you're not getting caught for real," Zif says, and glances over her shoulder at February's tearstained face. Grins. "...Plus any other time I tell you to, of course."
"I avoided the camera, though?" February says wretchedly, begging for that much, for some faint praise.
"You'll find out in thirty-six hours," Zif says.
