Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [33]
I pull myself up onto the catwalk that runs behind the adboard and wedge the screwdriver under the corner edge of the screen, prising it away from the casing, cracking the plastech. But there's no need to finesse it.
The great thing about smear is that the tech is straight out of the box, compliments of my friend in Amsterdam, so there aren't preventive measures in place yet. Smear's not the technical word, of course; it's a TSR-3 signal delay device that interferes with data packet transfer, so the image that gets displayed is garbled and incomplete like that painting with the melted clocks. It was invented in America to try and shut down streamcasters who were getting too vocal in criticising the administration. It's nice to be able to turn it around.
I click open the plastic container, disguised as a flashdrive, in case of random searches in the street, but I'm sweating so heavily, I nearly drop the damn thing. Ash nudges his way in beside me. 'Two and a half minutes,' Jazz calls from below. Ashraf's jaw is tight with stress as he takes the smear chip and binds it onto the motherboard with his pocket solder.
'Can you guys move it? Let me get a clear shot of this?' Toby tjunes, his abruptly added weight making the catwalk shudder.
'Fuck off, Toby, there's no time. You can't film this part of the operation. It's too sensitive.'
'Hey, fuck you, Tendeka. It's my connection. I get the footage I want. And you think they're not going to figure it out when they come to fix it tomorrow morning?'
And then Zuko swings up, so the walkway is dangerously overcrowded, when we should already be down and safely back across the highway.
'You're risking all of us, you asshole.'
But Toby is unmoved. 'Yeah, so are you. Just give me a clear view, and we can all go home.'
'Ninety-six seconds,' Jasmine calls from below.
'Shit, shit, shit. Everyone down. Now!'
Toby jostles in to get his shot and it's all I can do to stop myself shoving him against the railing, which is the perfect height to hit him behind the knees and tip him into the mesh of barbwire below. Even deactivated, it would do plenty damage.
'You're on your fucking own.' I swing out round the side and start the descent, not bothering to look back. Ash is already halfway down, but Zuko has stalled on the walkway, trying to get in the picture. 'Thirty-seven seconds.'
'Would you get down?' Ash snaps. 'There's no time!'
Zuko finally catches a wake-up and starts scrambling down.
Toby rolls over the railing, real dramatic, and I'm praying he clipped in incorrectly, that his harness is going to spill him the twenty-metre drop, but no such luck. The karabiner catches and he rappels down, easily overtaking Zuko.
'Six seconds. Come on!'
I touch down. Ashraf is struggling to unclip, and there really is no fucking time when we're ankle-deep in smart barbwire that is about to reactivate. I flick open my Spiderco, rip the blade through the reinforced webbing of his harness, and we vault over the wire, his hand locked in mine.
'Minus three.'
Toby kicks off hard from the support beams, still relatively high, so that he swings out over the highway, clear of the wire, and then the moron simply unclips, which means he tumbles two metres onto the tar. He lands hard. I hope he's broken something.
'Jesus fuck!' He stands up and starts hobbling across the highway, clutching his shoulder.
But right now I'm worried about Zuko, who is only halfway down. If he gets caught, and caves and links this back to me, it's going to be the end of more than just a promising junior soccer career.
'Minus sixteen,' Jasmine says, still watching her clock. 'I'm sorry, I must have messed up the timing. But it's going to kick in any second.'
'Jump, idiot!' I shout. And Zuko does, landing