Unsurprisingly, raffles for Jin’s more affordable suits were selling like mooncakes before the midautumn festival. Chinese pop-song beats mingled with the voice of a man talking over a loudspeaker as he demonstrated skinning a thick yellow boa before draining it of its blood. I felt Iris’s presence like a twinge at the back of my head. If I turned, I knew I wouldn’t be able to spot her, she was so stealthy in her tailing of targets. But she was behind me somewhere. We had agreed to meet at the citadel just a half mile from Snake Alley ten minutes apart. The building was easy enough for Iris to scale, being a stronger and more agile climber than I was. Victor had gotten us climbing shoes and handholds that could stick to concrete as easily as a gecko to a flat wall using van der Waals forces, he’d explained. They were so new on the tech market, they weren’t even being sold yet. But Victor had managed to get them, like he got everything else.

The hard part was deactivating the sensors that formed a dome above the top of the citadel, which would trigger Jin’s alarms if Iris and I tried to climb onto the building’s rooftop. Replicas had been made of both keys to the generator building, and Victor had gotten in without a hitch earlier and turned off the autotransfer switch so backup power wouldn’t kick in. Lingyi, hacked into the Taiwan Power Company, was ready to shut down the electricity within a mile radius of the citadel. Now Iris and I just needed to get into the building undetected.

I emerged from Snake Alley and turned down a small side street with a few pedestrians. Dirty walls, iron bars, and endless lines of laundry drying pressed in on both sides. At eleven p.m., the residences were mostly dark and quiet. The farther I walked from Snake Alley, the more deserted it became. Broken windows of empty, abandoned apartments and doorless frames gaped as I passed them. I wondered how many homeless meis were sleeping inside these buildings, which looked ready to collapse at any moment.

I reached the citadel’s towering column of concrete, and it reminded me of a giant stone monster. Looking up at the flat, blank wall, I felt the adrenaline course through me. I stretched my arms overhead and rotated my shoulders, loosening up. We had chosen a moonless night to break in, and with the thick smog settled over the city, the area was dark except for two floodlights at the citadel’s entrance. Reaching into the pouch slung at my waist, I powdered my hands. I’d never climbed anything so high before, much less without a harness.