Lingyi settled onto the red velvet armchair, tucking her feet beneath her and pulling down the hem of her long white skirt. She took all of us in with one sweeping gaze, dark eyes piercing behind her thick black frames, then said, “I’ve discovered that Jin Corp has a backup site for their security systems in a building located near Snake Alley. Let’s call it the citadel. Victor and Iris have already scoped it out, and it isn’t as heavily guarded as Jin Corp’s main headquarters. Only eight to ten security guards manning it at any given time. Iris and Zhou, I need you two to break into the building so I can access their security system. It’s self-contained and completely offline. I need physical proximity to those machines in order to hack in.”

“How?” I asked.

“You climb,” Victor said. “I got the latest high-tech climbing gear for you to do it too.”

Lingyi then proceeded to carefully lay out our plan in detail.

“You’re assuming Daiyu’s security code for Jin Corp will work at the citadel,” I said after we went through everything three times. “What if it doesn’t?”

“Then we’re screwed,” Lingyi replied.

I laughed, and it sounded too loud. “That’s reassuring.”

“I can work on hacking the touch pad when you’re on-site. But the truth is, you can only log in a few tries before alarms go off with security.” Lingyi tucked a strand of her thick purple hair behind her ear. “We’d have six tries, tops. And that’s nothing when we’re talking eight-number combos.”

“So Daiyu’s code has to work,” Victor said.

“Zhou said that she has an internship at Jin Corp,” Lingyi said. “It’d make sense she’d have high-security clearance, especially as Jin’s daughter and successor.”

“That’s a bit of a leap, though, isn’t it?” Victor steepled his fingertips and lifted his eyebrows. “If Iris and Zhou fail, they’ll be thrown in jail. Jin won’t show mercy in their punishment—he has the best lawyers. But maybe that’d be better than actually succeeding and following through on this suicide mission.”

I snorted. “Tell us how you really feel, Vic.”

“It is a risk,” Lingyi agreed.

“We always knew that,” I countered.

Lingyi bit her lower lip, then said, “If you or Iris want to abort the mission—”

“I don’t,” I replied, cutting her off. “I want to do this.”

“I’m with Zhou,” Iris chimed in. She was in the corner doing chin-ups on the metal bar. I’d never seen her sit for longer than a five-minute stretch.

Lingyi nodded once. “Victor, are you still in?”