His unnaturally capable eyes told him there was an electrical circuit inside the door wired to the lock, possibly some kind of alarm system. He could not just break the lock, he needed to circumvent the alarm as well. With his back to the street, his left eye rolled down and he deployed his laser system, setting it to a low power. Then he placed his fingers around the outside of the small pane of glass in the window to one side of the door and held them there. Directing his gaze at the caulking that held it in place, he focused his laser array on it. As he applied extraordinarily precise pressure with his hands to all four corners of the glass pane, his laser started to slowly heat the caulk. After a moment of this combined pressure, the pane of glass started to slide inward, the suddenly more malleable caulk bonds no longer keeping it fixed in place. With even the slightest variance in pressure, the glass would have shattered, but Shahim’s control was perfect to within a fraction of an ounce of torque, and the glass evenly strained against the softening sealant until it slowly, inextricably pushed free.

As it came loose, it started to fall inward, and in the blink of an eye Shahim had whipped his hand through the gap where the pane had stood to catch it before it had fallen even an inch. He then twisted it and pulled it back though the hole and reached his left hand back in through the gap. A fine tendril on his finger extended and projected a beam of ultraviolet at the keypad on the inside of the door frame, highlighting the still warm fingerprints Neal had left there when he activated it not ten minutes beforehand. Sensing the necessary keys and seeing from the angle of the fingerprints the order they had been pressed in, he tapped the keys without ever even looking at the pad with his actual eyes. A moment later he sensed the alarm deactivating and he withdrew his hand so that he could use another of the tendrils that ran inside his fingers to open the lock and enter.

Within a minute he was inside the house, replacing the windowpane against the still soft caulk to reseal it in place. After all looked well once more, he retracted his weapons system back into its socket and his left eye slid up and back into place. He was inside and there was no sign of a forced entry. Neal had been on the bus for only a few minutes.