It hadn’t been too hard to fit a little camera to one of my soldiers, and from there I had left him just outside the moss-caked walls of the old factory. He’d found a way in from there, a tiny crack big enough for a mouse to fit through, and I had trusted him to find a way inside from there.

  My toys tended to have a life of their own when they were within a certain distance of me, able to follow commands even if I couldn’t directly see them. But once that range had been passed they became inert, like Andy just walked into the room, and would stay put.

  But if I had a way to interact with my creations, like via a webcam link for instance, then distance wasn’t much of an issue.

  That evening, home alone, I tapped into the webcam of my lone soldier and was greeted to a feed of a dark and dusty factory interior. The machinery inside was rusted, every surface caked in dust. I would have thought the intel we had been given was bunk, except for the fact that I could see footprints in the dust.

  “Forward,” I murmured to myself. The soldier did so, plastic feet hastening along the ground. He followed the tracks, moving as quick as he could. Which was not particularly fast, all truth told, like the scurrying of a mouse.

  Towards the back of the bay there was a steel shutter, open just wide enough for the soldier to drop and shimmy under. That was when I saw them.

  STING grunts, standing about in their glossy armour as they smoked and drank. Most of them had removed their helmets, sitting around a makeshift table to enjoy a round of poker. I guided my soldier into the shadows. He was small, sure, but he could catch their eye quickly if he stood in the light of their lanterns.

  “Christ. Doctor Hagan is on a tear,” one man said, eyes fixed to the cards in his head.

  “Yeah well, word on the street is that Jupiter knows we’re in Argent. And the project apparently isn’t done, so our deadline has gotten a lot sharper,” another man replied.

  I kept the soldier inching through the shadows, but I couldn’t help but listen in. This was all intel, after all.

  “Come on. I’ve heard people crapping themselves over Jupiter ever since we got here, but how bad can he be? He’s not even ranked all that high in the Society.”

  “You hear about that battle down in Memphis last year? Where our lab out that way got destroyed, and that huge tornado wiped out our Mecha Enforcers?”

  “... That was him?”

  “Supposedly. Society sent him and a few others to hit the spot. Course the hit was so devastating we barely have eyewitnesses to explain what happened. Still, a storm like that sounds like the kind of thing his powers can do.”

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  Jupiter did not act on his own much these days, I knew. The story went that once he had gotten to the top of the food chain here, he had been happy to delegate matters to underlings. But I’d heard tales of him going toe to toe with the likes of Shadow Queen, Vetruvian Man, and even Dauntless.

  Really, they were damn lucky they’d be getting us and not him. Not that I planned on going easy on them.

  My soldier found his way to a door at the back of the large chamber, a stairwell that descended underground. Light illuminated each loop in the stairs, but I could see only one other doorway down there. This one was closed, locked tight by a card reader. I saw that much as my soldier got closer, and the sight of it made me curse.

  It’d be easy to get through during the raid. But I could hardly have the soldier shoot his way through the door, not without drawing all eyes to me.

  “What to do...” I mumbled to myself.

  “What’re you playing?” Todd’s voice nearly made me jump out of my skin, and I thrust my arms out to my sides for balance. I usually kept an ear out for the creaking of my door, but I’d gotten too damn engrossed in my work.

  “Nothing,” I said glancing back at him.

  He pressed in, still infuriatingly inquisitive as ever. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that video game. But the graphics look kind of crappy.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “I’d like to see you get better video fidelity on a camera that size.”

  Soon he was beside my workbench, peering up at the laptop and watching intently. “Oh, wait, is his like... a real camera?”

  “Yes. Now kindly give me some space, Todd.” I pressed a palm to his scaly brow and tried to push him away, but the little jerk had a lot of strength in his tiny frame. It was like trying to push a donkey with one hand.

  “Wait wait wait, what is all this? What’re you doing?”

  I sighed, rolling my eyes. Would’ve locked the damn door if I had the key for it. “It’s none of your business. Now kindly-”

  The door slid open on camera, a STING soldier making his way out into the stairwell. I seized on the opening, my soldier darting from the shadowy corner and passing the back of the soldier’s heel as he stepped through. Here I could see that STING had taken a lot more effort to reshape the underground, erecting prefab metal walls with more card readers by the doors.

  I took a breath, guiding my soldier along. “Todd,” I said. “If you keep this to yourself I’ll make you a Dauntless action figure that can actually fly.”

  “HUH?!” he snapped to attention like a dog hearing the word ‘walkies.’ It was enough to make Lassie look up on my bed, peering over at us. “For real?!”

  “For real. But!” I held a finger up at him. “If Gail or Brian hear about anything I am doing? I will break your toys. All of them. Not because I want to, but because you broke the sacred trust we have. Understand?”

  Todd paled. “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would. I wouldn’t be happy to do it, but it would happen.”

  Todd frowned, but gave me a small nod of understanding. “I won’t tell, relax,” he said.

  “Good.”

  He left me to my devices, finally, and I pressed my soldier onward. Each door he came across was locked in a similar way, so that would be something else to get through, but he did pass more patrolling guards.

  By my reckoning, STING had at least 25 guards, and I didn’t have a way to tell who else was in the locked rooms.

  Heavily armoured guards, each one toting a laser rifle. Guns that, according to Masquerade users, could slice through steel.

  To beat that? We’d need to be careful, especially with Beatrix being the only tank we had. I stashed my soldier behind a row of boxes and killed the feed. Setting my laptop aside, I fished in a box at my side and pulled out a handful of steely jacks. The little metal points pockmarked my palm.

  Well, I had time to remake one of my dad’s best self defence tools.