The first stopwatch died at two minutes forty-nine.
Mara saw it before she heard Noé swear. The gray display faded in her hand, as though the digits had given up before they had. At the far end of the warehouse, Noé was still kneeling in front of the dummy vault door, a steel plate bought from a Merksem scrap dealer and bolted to two construction uprights. Inez, stationed behind a plywood partition, looked up at the camera she had mounted on the ceiling.
“Does it still count?” Baptiste asked.
“No.”
“I’m asking for the adjudication.”
“There is no adjudication.”
Mara set the dead stopwatch on the plan unfolded across a wallpapering table. The paper took up almost the entire surface: three levels, two stairwells, a service corridor, the sorting room, the freight elevator, the airlocks. The Vandenberg depot was no palace. That was precisely what made it interesting. In the diamond district, modest facades had learned not to advertise what they protected.
The warehouse advertised everything: the smell of dust, the cold coming beneath the sectional door, tape marks on the floor, a kettle on a workbench beside three wire cutters and a torn-open pack of cookies. For eleven days, they had been building a poor version of the depot here, just accurate enough to discover where a body lost time.
“We start again,” Mara said.
Noé stood, shaking his right hand.
“With five fingers, or do you want to test the four-finger theory?”
The tip of his index finger had turned dark red. Probably nothing broken. Mara watched him bend the joints.
“You forced the strike plate.”
“Because you took nine seconds off my time.”
“Seven.”
“Sorry. I withdraw my medical complaint.”
Inez stepped down from her stool. She wore a black knit cap despite the fan heater running near the entrance. Her blond hair had been trapped beneath it since dawn; it made her look younger until she spoke.
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.