Chapter 262 | Bait and Switch
Chapter 262: 262 | Bait and Switch
The hostage dummy went in 2C. Camille positioned it against the far wall, away from the single doorway, and spent thirty seconds checking the sensor readouts to confirm that all twelve indicators showed green. The room itself was sparse. A desk pushed against the left wall. A filing cabinet in the corner. A window that overlooked the courtyard between buildings, currently sealed with reinforced glass that could take a hit but not two.
Camille left the room and walked the length of the second-floor hallway twice. Forty-two feet from the east stairwell exit to the door of 2C. Thirty-eight feet from the west stairwell exit to the same door.
She could cover both approaches from a central position near the bathroom doorway, which offered a recessed alcove deep enough to provide partial cover while maintaining clear sightlines in both directions.
Somewhere above her, through the ceiling, she could hear the soft grinding of material being generated. Petra was building. The sound carried the particular resonance of crystalline structures being pulled into existence through raw Aspect power, and even Camille had to admit that the volume of material being produced was impressive. Whatever Petra was constructing on the third floor would be substantial.
Not that it mattered. Petra was on the third floor, and the hostage was on the second floor, and Camille Ortega did not need a recommendation track princess to win a fight.
Three minutes and forty seconds. Camille settled into position in the bathroom alcove and generated a single Rivet construct from her right palm. The hardened nail materialized with a faint orange shimmer, about three inches long, warm against her skin.
She let it dissolve and regenerated it. Two seconds flat. She could fire a volley of six in under four seconds with trajectory adjustments mid-flight, curving each one around obstacles and through gaps that standard projectile users couldn’t navigate.
Camille’s Precision Read activated passively as she scanned the hallway. The stress fractures in the wall near the east stairwell door. The slight warping of the ceiling tile above the west stairwell exit where moisture damage had weakened the adhesive.
The hairline crack in the floor tile seven feet from her position where repeated foot traffic had concentrated pressure. Every weak point in the physical environment registered in her awareness like highlighted text on a page, and the translation into tactical information was automatic.
She knew where the walls could break. She knew where the floor would buckle under impact. She knew where a rivet fired at the right angle could punch through drywall and continue into the room beyond.
Two minutes.
Camille breathed through her nose. The orange glow at her palms held steady. The hallway waited, empty and fluorescent and smelling like fresh paint and ozone.
One minute.
She heard the buzzer sound through the speakers mounted in the ceiling. A flat tone that carried through the entire building and announced to everyone in the observation deck above that the exercise was live.
The south entrance was two floors below her. Lukas Belmont and Percy Mendoza would be walking through it right now. Two boys. One with a mid-tier telekinetic Aspect and a file full of inconsistencies that nobody had explained yet, and one with an analytical Aspect that processed information faster than he could vocalize it.
Percy was the brain. Lukas was the hands. Together they represented a reconnaissance and engagement team that could theoretically identify weaknesses in her defensive setup and exploit them before she could adapt.
Theoretically.
Camille generated six Rivet constructs across both palms and held them in a loose pattern, ready for immediate deployment. Her orange energy cast warm light across the recessed alcove.
The building was quiet.
Footsteps.
Faint, from below. The east stairwell. Two sets, one slightly heavier than the other, moving at a pace that suggested purpose without urgency. They were climbing. First floor to second. The sound grew louder with each step, and Camille tracked the approach through the closed stairwell door, counting the footfalls, measuring the rhythm, feeding data into her Precision Read until the tactical picture crystallized.
Two people ascending. The heavier footstep belonged to someone with more mass. Belmont was six-two and lean but surprisingly dense for his frame, especially given what Steele’s physical evaluations had revealed about his strength output.
The lighter footstep was Percy, who weighed less and moved with the particular caution of someone who knew that anything louder than necessary would register as data in someone else’s analysis.
They stopped.
Just outside the stairwell door. The footsteps ceased and the silence that followed was worse than any sound, because silence meant they were thinking, and thinking meant they weren’t going to walk politely into her kill zone.
Camille’s fingers tightened around her rivet constructs. Orange light pulsed faster.
Ten seconds of nothing.
Twenty seconds.
Thirty.
The stairwell door opened. Slowly. The pneumatic hinge exhaled as the door swung inward and revealed the landing beyond.
Percy Mendoza stood in the doorway.
He stood alone.
Camille’s eyes narrowed. Percy occupied the full width of the doorframe, his grey and blue costume catching the fluorescent backlight from the stairwell, his navy blue hair slightly damp at the temples from the climb. His brown eyes were wide behind his glasses. His notebook was nowhere in sight, which meant either he’d left it behind or he’d finally learned to trust his own recall.
His hands were empty. No weapon, no tool, no Aspect manifestation visible. He just stood there, framed in the doorway at the end of the hallway, forty-two feet from Camille’s position.
Looking directly at her.
"Um." His voice carried down the corridor with the particular resonance of someone who was terrified and trying very hard to sound like he wasn’t. "Hi."
Camille didn’t fire. The rivets held at her palms, orange and ready, but she didn’t release them. Percy’s body language screamed target. Shoulders hunched, weight on his back foot, eyes darting between the hallway walls as though cataloguing escape routes he didn’t intend to use. He was scared. Genuinely scared.
But he was standing in a doorway at the end of a forty-two-foot hallway, alone, without his partner, looking directly at the person who could pin him to the wall from this distance with her eyes closed.
Nobody was that stupid.
Camille’s Precision Read fired involuntarily, scanning Percy’s posture for the weak point, for the opening, for the fracture that would tell her what this situation actually was beneath the surface performance. And what her ability found wasn’t a weakness in Percy. What her ability found was a weakness in the situation itself.
Percy Mendoza was bait.
Every nerve in Camille’s body fired at once. She spun from the alcove and the hallway behind her was not empty anymore.
A desk was flying toward her face.
Not falling. Not sliding. Flying. The walnut surface filled her entire field of vision as it crossed the distance between the west stairwell exit and her position in what felt like no time at all, trailing amber light from the spectral constructs wrapped around its legs.
The thing weighed at least a hundred and fifty pounds and it moved with the kind of velocity that mid-tier telekinetics were not supposed to generate.
Behind the desk, twenty feet back down the hallway near the west stairwell, Lukas Belmont leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and four amber constructs fanning out from his back like wings made of liquid sunset.
His half-mask covered everything below his eyes, and above the matte black fabric those amber eyes carried the particular warmth of someone who was enjoying himself far more than the situation warranted.
"Special delivery for Room 301." His voice was muffled by the mask but the amusement in it carried just fine.
"I believe you ordered the bookshelf by three?"