Sly Cooper and the Gang In: A Long Lost Love

CHAPTER 13

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The wind cut through Sly's fur as he scaled the skyscraper. He was three floors away from the 150th story. Every muscle fiber in his hands ached and the air was becoming thinner by the inch, but he'd waited five years for this opportunity, for this lead. Thankfully, bionic knees didn't wobble no matter how much strain you put them through, so his legs were stable as steel as he balanced, flipped the laser into his freezing, gloved hand, and cut a hole in the outer glass.

"Alright, Bentley. I'm in."

Flipping through, he landed on the white tile of the assembly floor, cane out for balance. Everything was eerily silent. The only sound was the small whir of cameras as Bentley pointed them all temporarily toward the ceiling. Though his watch was muted, he could feel the seconds ticking by like sand. Twenty-seven minutes from the moment his feet hit the floor.

He snuck carefully through the halls and rooms of the assembly floor, turning the corner to the hall leading toward the stairs and nearly collided with a security guard. "Hey, you're not supposed to be–"

Sly was dressed head to toe in night black, his heist gear designed to be near-invisible in the dark, so there was no excusing himself as building staff or a janitorial worker. He grinned a shit-eating grin and interrupted the guard. "Neither are you, big guy." Bentley'd sent out an email to all the staff that the building was being sanitized, and they weren't supposed to report in for duty for the night. Over the guard's enormous shoulder, he glimpsed another patrolling rhino racing for a manual alarm. "See, that's just not going to work out for me . . ."

Before the guard in front of him could blink, Sly unslung his cane from its holster and threw it like a javelin, pinning the running guard down the hall to the wall by his jacket sleeve. In three quick strikes, he had the polar bear in front of him unconscious, but two more goons were shouting commands to "Freeze!" from down the hall behind him. He'd have to get them down before the pinned rhino got free and hit that alarm.

Dodging left as Guard Number Three went for a haymaker, Sly first smashed the hippo's shoulder radio with his palm, then caught him with an uppercut and slipped a foot across the security man's ankles, knocking the guard flat. Guard Number Four was a little easier; in his effort not to trip over his unconscious coworker, he slid to the side–right into Sly. Leaping up onto the wall, the Master Thief pulled out his best parkour and struck the bison hard across the cheek with an aerial roundhouse, landing in what he was more than just a little pleased to note was perfect form. Three out of four guards downed, Sly strode up to the pinned rhino and flicked his cane. "Going somewhere?"

"Why I ought–"

Before he could finish the sentence, Sly yanked his cane free, hooked the crook of it in the rhino's shirt collar, and flipped the enormous guard over his head, smashing him face-first into the nice, polished tile floor. "Well, that about does it."

He waited for Bentley to hack the biometric lock on the door to the roof and swung it wide, feeling fairly confident in himself–and ran face-first into a guard patrolling the stairway. The final security man took one look over Sly's shoulder, saw all his fallen comrades, and made to radio for backup.

Sly struck a hand out, covering the radio buttons. "Ah, ah, ah," he grinned, wagging a finger at the elephant. The guard's brow furrowed, and Sly used that heartbeat of confusion to come up with an elbow strike right below the elephant's right tusk–knocking him out cold. "They work you too hard around here," he quipped, "you're a little overdue for a nap," and shut the door on the elephant's trunk.

Dusting off his hands, he padded up the short flight of cement stairs and into the blisteringly cold wind at the top of FarFlight Tower. A particularly strong gust nearly blew him over, but he staggered his footing and walked toward the glass dome housing the Gate.

Bentley remotely triggered the lock and Sly hauled open the heavy door. The hinges squealed, loud even in the screeching gale. Inside was much, much warmer. Across the floor were sprawled yards and yards of wires and desks stacked high with specialized computers. In the center of the dome, a cylindrical machine stood, like a single airplane engine but hollow in the middle, rotating slowly around the centrifuge. "Not very creative, calling it a Gate," Sly muttered as he followed Bentley's instructions to hook up the failsafe to the main computer. The contraption looked exactly like a 'gate,' except there was nothing on the other side but more of the glass dome.

He typed in the code that synced the failsafe with the Tower's mainframe. Just in case, he told himself. Just in case this is the worst idea I've ever had.

Taking a deep breath, he pressed the power button and watched the machine come to life.

The center of the centrifuge began to glow a bright blue like a fluorescent light had been turned on. Around the edge of the machine, gears turned, cycling and cycling until the movement created a vortex in the center, and that bright blue turned blinding. Sly squinted, his eyes burning as the light crescendoed. "You could've told me to bring some shades," he radioed to Bentley.

"They'd obscure your vision if you need to act fast," came the answer.

"I'm around the corner when you're ready!" Murray shouted down the audio processor, as over-loud as ever.

Sly's heart began to thud against his ribcage, faster and faster the longer it took the machine to charge. His palms turned slick with sweat. Has it always been this hard to breathe up here? He'd jumped out of helicopters, scaled mountains, and survived explosions, but this . . . This was the scariest thing he'd ever done.

She said if I could just turn the machine on . . . He checked to make sure it was still tuned to its testing coordinates. Everything looked the same as it had on Bentley's planning paperwork. The Gate was programmed exactly the same as it had been when Carmelita had fallen through.

The air in the dome charged, and Sly's fur stood on end.

Something began to appear in the center of the vortex–not the personnel gate in front of him, but the ship gate above the dome. Something large. Sly's breath caught in his throat. Wherever she'd gone, maybe she'd found an aircraft to protect her while she traveled back through the transport to her own time.

"Sly–"

"Just give me a minute, Bentley." Just a minute to see if it was her.

He'd prepared a thousand words, a thousand speeches, had run through this exact moment in his head over and over again nearly every hour since he'd walked out of the police department.

Five years of searching for his lost love, and it had all come down to seconds.

But it wasn't Carmelita that came through the Gate.

It was a dark wing.

Razor-sharp steel feathers cut through the bright blue blaze oscillating in the center of the machine, and stretched. Stretched like they were waking from some thousand-year slumber and finally got the taste of air, again.

Sly hit the failsafe button.

And absolutely nothing happened.