I took out the handholds, testing them against the concrete wall. They had short handles as the grips were attached to six-inch circular discs able to adhere to any flat surface. Other than the shoes made of the same material, these were the only things that would be keeping us on the wall. As long as we held on. Iris and I had practiced climbing at headquarters with the gear. She took to it straightaway, but it didn’t come intuitively for me. I flicked my wrists in the way Victor had shown me to deactivate the handhold’s grip on the concrete, practicing several times.

A faint stir of air was the only indication that Iris had arrived. She pulled a black knit cap over her shock of short platinum hair and winked at me. “Hey,” she said and tilted her chin up. “Not so bad.”

Yeah. Not so bad if I didn’t plunge to my death to be flattened like a scallion pancake. “Sure,” I said out loud. “Easy.”

She grinned, but I could only see the humor in her dark eyes above her face mask. Iris wore the same black cargo pants as I did, and a short-sleeved black tee. Only she had half a dozen syringes sheathed on each side of her pants, within perfect reach to stab someone with a sleep and memory-wipe spell.

“Is the area clear?” Lingyi spoke into our earpieces. She was monitoring all of us on her MacFold from our headquarters. I could picture her in my mind, in a bright tank top, pushing the black frames of her glasses up as she typed. Arun, who wasn’t needed for this operation, had some lab crisis to deal with and was the only one in the group not linked in to our com sys.

“Yes, boss,” Iris replied. “Will let you know when we’re at the top.”

She nodded at me and we both pulled on our climbing shoes and strapped on our handholds before gripping their handles. “Go parallel to me,” she said and thrust her handhold against the concrete. Iris was eight feet up the side of the wall before I even scrambled on. The pads of my climbing shoes stuck like glue to the concrete and I maneuvered my way upward, getting used to the flicking motion of my wrists and roll of my ankles to deactivate the grips each time.