“Do I have a choice?” He gave her a lazy smile, eyelids dropping slightly, as if he were ready for a nap. “You lot would be hopeless without me. It’s terrible odds, though.” He switched to English. “We’re gambling with our lives, and the house always wins.”

The odds had always been against us, but once committed, I was all in. There was no going back now. We wouldn’t know unless we tried.

Lingyi rose. She was the brains behind our group, the hacker, the planner, the boss. But as her friend, I could tell how tense she was and realized how much we had riding on this break-in. If we failed, we were as good as dead.

“I can’t stress how important it is to follow the plan exactly as I’ve laid out.” She looked at each of us in turn again and held our gazes long enough so we felt the weight of it. “Am I clear?”

“Yes,” we all replied, except for Iris, who had climbed onto the padded platform. Dressed all in black and standing perfectly straight at the edge, head dipped, she reminded me of a match ready to be struck.

“Iris?” Lingyi said, quiet but firm.

Iris executed a perfect backflip onto the floor before she responded, “Yes, boss. I heard you.” She stretched her arms overhead like a panther.

Lingyi colored but didn’t press the issue. It wasn’t like her to get flustered. The stress of running the mission was definitely getting to her.

This break-in had to succeed or our objective would be at a standstill. And time wasn’t on our side.

CHΔPTER TWELVE

Three days after I broke into Jin Corp, I got an unexpected message from Daiyu while I was throwing knives at my target wall. Excitement spiked through me when I saw her icon on my Vox. I was acting like a hopeless, infatuated boy.

Hey, I’ve been busy with my senior project, but wanted to let you know they found my friend Joe behind Jin Corp, unconscious.

I had been searching for any bit of news on this, but had come across nothing.

What? I responded, unable to ignore the guilt threading through me. What happened?

Looks like a mugging. He woke finally with a fever and is delirious. The doctors think he’s caught that flu going around. He can’t remember anything.

I broke into a cold sweat. That was not part of the plan. The only way Joseph was exposed to the flu strain was because he had touched the vial I had stolen, or because I was still contagious. Either way, it was my fault.

I’m sorry, I replied. I hope he gets better.

But I knew from Arun that he thought the fatality rate of this mutated flu strain was as high as 80 percent.