Jane greedily swallowed Yasmine's effluence, agreed to get "YASMINE" tattooed on her strong mound in bold letters, and toked up a joint that she shared with Yasmine, while still waiting for the pizza to arrive and for anything to happen on the interior cameras of the warehouse. Meanwhile, she was eagerly awaiting the moment when they could put Shiloh behind them, BioJack up and experience an epic shared trip of victory.
As for Shiloh, she was sliding under walls that were just raised enough for maintenance bots to pass under normally, running onto and then springing off black water pipes, climbing stairs, dodging cameras that swept the area and whirred, "Scanning for BioJack..." and even running along a wall before grabbing a ledge and pulling herself up to a table of frightened and confused employs that she ran past. She noted neither the restaurant's name nor any of their faces, only the scuff marks that she and Connor had left behind on that very same wall (which hadn’t been buffed out) that day. That day, which she was forced to replay in her mind and with her feet.
Minutes later, she got close to the building where Connor had died again, and paused, overanalyzing everything that had gone wrong as the sun finished setting. She'd wanted to play it safe and take the stairs inside, a service ladder that was left hanging down last time she ran through this, and then more stairs to the roof. But Connor argued that they didn't know if the ladder would be there or not, and should instead wall run back and forth between the main wall of the building and an overhanging poster that was being put up, swinging between the pylons that connected them like monkey bars. Shiloh knew she could have made it up the wall with her grappling line even without a ladder, but not everybody had a cybernetic arm with that sort of attachment, so she let Connor go for what he felt was the best route up. Then they'd been chased by the IRBS elite strike units that were lying in wait, and he was a second slower than her as he contended with the bars and died for it. So perhaps she should have insisted that he come with her, and then she could have pulled him up. Or would his weight have slowed them both down, getting them killed?
There had been no right call, Shiloh realized, and Connor was doomed either way. All she could do now was pay respects at the outline of his body once again, on a rooftop no one cared about, and then
make a leap.
What felt like an eternity later, Shiloh reached the warehouse. She'd never been there before but...wasn't it supposed to still be time for the factory employs there to work? Or had this company really done away with the human element, in contravention of the few remaining labor laws in this IceBurgh? (Not that it was an uncommon occurrence for the Board of the Resort Community Council to be bribed to look the other way.) Either way, she was not comfortable with there being lights. So how best to disable them, drop her package in the shadows, and then split?
Normally, there would also be a guard, either human or robotic, waiting by the exterior junction box that, well, controlled everything from the lights to the automation. But he, she, or they were gone now too. Odd. In any case, the crafty little courier had learned a thing or two about repairing and breaking all sorts of machinery on the streets as she took grey market, highly dangerous electrician and mechanic jobs here and there to make ends meet while still being formally listed as "Occupation Deficient." With that experience in hand, she ripped open the panel with her cybernetic arm, found a
control chip, and unplugged it, tossing it off the ledge, carelessly, into the void between buildings, the residence of
speeding mag-lev car lines and discarded lives.
In response, the soldiers yelled, "Hey, who turned off the lights?!" and "It's her! Get her!," which made Shiloh realize that this job had been a trap. Putting aside her anger at Beetle, the one man she thought she could trust unequivocally, the package did not seem explosive or they would have detonated it, and her, already. So that meant she decided to keep it and see what this was all about, as a dozen people chased her across the IceBurgh rooftops.
"What the?!" Jane cried, starting to get a little bit high and moving sluggishly as she scrambled to fire off alerts to backup units to contain the situation.
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