The Cartographer's Daughter

17. The Scanner Heist

I wake hours before dawn and sling my black backpack over my shoulders. The moon is bright enough to light up the street and as I step outside and walk toward our meeting place, I can pick out the shadows of dozens of women, each with their own backpack like mine.

After persuading these women to join our cause, we spent a week in training. We learned to flirt with our gaze, we built trick heels and got used to walking and tripping in them. An attractive and stylish woman named Ophelia transformed my butchered hair into a pixie cut. We practiced over and over the method of extracting a scanner from a secured holster without the victim being the wiser. In the end, I could disarm both Bami and Amundi without either of them feeling a thing.

3 a.m. The women are huddled in a tight pack around a cellar door in a back alley of Inanna. No one speaks. The Dragon Lady's servant fiddles with the padlock key in the dark, but soon clicks it open and opens the doors slowly to dampen the creak of the hinges. We file into the cellar, down the stairs. We're all quickly chilled by the dank interior, crossing our arms and holding the backpack straps close. It smells of damp cement, the heavy mineral scent of being underground.

Someone with a flashlight turns it on and pushes their way to the front of the line, and we begin walking in a single line through a tunnel that slopes steadily downward. The tunnel is tight enough to reach out and graze our fingertips along each wall, more claustrophobic than the cave ruins under the Library in Alexandria. It's completely dark except for the faint glow of light at the front of the line. We each follow the other's shadow. 

After some time, it's hard to say how long, the tunnel flattens and opens up. There's an electric lamp on the wall, just enough light to see a silver track leading into the darkness, and a single small electric rail car parked at our end of the line.

“This was laid down from the other side, obviously,” the woman named Ophelia says, gesturing to the track. The car looks bolted together from scrap metal, and probably was many years ago. As we board the car, the Dragon Lady stands by the door, handing each woman a sealstone carved with dancing bee-headed women.

We pack inside, pressed like sardines in a tin, and when all limbs are in the door Ophelia throws a switch and the car kicks off down the track, sparks flying from the cable above and raining down on the cavern behind us. The train ride takes hours. I rub my fingers around my wrist where my Ouroboros bracelet should be. I left it, along with my pirate’s earring, with Bami. We shift our weight from foot to foot.

7 a.m. “Next stop, Imperial City,” Ophelia says in a singsong voice as she slows the train to a stop. The track ends in a wide cave, and we can see a few other tracks around its perimeter, leading off like compass points. No one outside our party is using this hidden transit center, but I'm beginning to understand the reaches of the underworld around the Imperial City.

In the center of the cave is a rickety spiral staircase. We ascend to a cave above, where more tight tunnels shoot off in every direction with identifying numbers carved above each offshoot. We each have instructions on how to navigate the tunnels to our stations, and each woman pulls out a slip of paper to check. My directions send me to tunnel 9 with a handful of other women. We pull out glow sticks from our bags and crack them, led on by the greenish light. Two women peel off in different tunnels behind me, and I take the third branch, a right turn that I follow to its end.

8 a.m. I check my watch, as do the other women in their stations. We should all be in place. I unzip the backpack, pull out a red dress and change by the greenish glow. I shakily step into the pumps with the trick heel, and check my watch again.

8:05 a.m. I pound on the trapdoor above me, and it opens. From somewhere unseen, a shopkeeper lowers a string bag down to the tunnel and I drop my sealstone inside it. A token of admission. I hear footsteps fade for a moment, and then come back scraping something along the floor. The shopkeeper lowers a ladder into the tunnel, and I climb it carefully in the high heels. I emerge into the light.