Roux just shook her head. “Welcome to Manhattan.” She held her arm out for a taxi. “It’s almost four, they’re all going off duty soon, and I am not standing on a subway platform in this heat.” She stepped farther into the street so that the next cab would have to hit her or stop for her, not even flinching when one nearly grazed her as he slammed to a halt. I couldn’t hear the driver, but I could read lips well enough to know that he was using some pretty unique and colorful curse words.
He and Roux would get along just fine.
“I’ll text you later?” Roux said as she climbed into the backseat.
“You better! Enjoy your class! Don’t break anyone’s nose!”
“I make no promises!” She stopped and pushed her sunglasses up on her head. “You sure you’re not bored?”
Now I could hear the cab driver, as well as all the car horns behind them, mad that Roux was holding up traffic. “Definitely not bored,” I told her. “Trust me, I’m done. I’m a civilian. I’m out.”
And I meant it.
Until I got home and heard the news.
Chapter 2
I first knew something was wrong when I rounded Spring Street and our loft came into view. Everything looked normal, just another day in Soho, but there was opera music soaring out, seeping through the cracks in our closed windows and floating down toward me.
It was “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
Translation? “Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart.”
I ran the rest of the way home.
We’ve lived in our loft since we moved back to Manhattan from Reykjavík last year. It was just supposed to be a stopping ground, like so many of our houses were. Sometimes they felt like movie sets rather than homes, four walls with actors inside, playing our parts and then moving on to the next set, the next role. I’ve lost count of all the places we’ve lived, but we’ve been on six out of seven continents. (Let’s be honest: Antarctica doesn’t see a lot of crime-related activity. It’s too cold to even think about committing a crime.) I think this is the longest my family has ever been in one place, which is interesting. I’ve always had wings, never roots, and now I wake up to see the same four walls and have the same name—Maggie—every single day.
Hearing the Austrian aria made me realize how quickly all of that could disappear.
I dashed down the street and hurried into the elevator, yanking its steel door down and jabbing the button until my finger hurt and it finally started to rise. The soprano’s voice was staccatoing like rocks across a pond, making my heart match its pace. We never listened to this song, not ever.
This song meant that something was wrong.
The elevator doors opened at a glacial pace, and I finally got so impatient that I stuck my fingers in and practically pried them apart. Our front door was there, the dingy #3 hanging smack in the center, a stark counterpart to the fingerprint scanner that sat next to the doorbell.
The fingerprint scanner had been installed last year, notable not only because it was, you know, a fingerprint scanner attached to our front door, but also because the Collective had no idea that it was there. Angelo had it put in as an extra measure of security, along with our new steel front door. If anyone ever tried to sledgehammer through the door, they’d quickly find a half ton of metal waiting to stop them. It was cool if you didn’t think about why we needed those things.
This is why we need them:
When I was four years old, a man named Colton Hooper tried to kidnap me because I was apparently a little safecracking genius and he wanted to use me for his own nefarious needs. We didn’t know it was him at the time because he hired someone to do it. Luckily, my parents and Angelo got wind of the plan and they flew me out of the country. Colton killed the kidnapper-for-hire to protect his own identity.
That’s crazy enough, I know, but what made it crazier was that Colton was a high-ranking member of the Collective. He was our handler—in charge of assigning our missions, providing our multiple identities, and setting us up in our new locations. It turned out he was quite the multi-tasker, trying to sell information about us to Jesse’s dad’s magazine. If he couldn’t get me, he might as well make some money, right?
Wrong.
Look, I don’t like to brag a lot, but I’m pretty proud of the fact that we stopped Colton. And by we, I mean Roux and Jesse and me. I sort of broke code—okay, I completely broke code—by telling Roux and Jesse about my family and the Collective. But they responded by being awesome and helping me prove that Colton Hooper was a liar and very dangerous.
And oh yeah, there was also a twenty-block high-speed chase in which Roux, Jesse, and I had to outrun Colton. Then Roux attacked Colton, and Angelo had to fly in on a helicopter and save us. Followed by taking out Colton, which made my parents be all like “What. The. Hell.”
It was a long week, I’ll tell you. I think I’m still recovering from the drama, even though it happened almost a year ago.
So that’s the short version of why we had a fingerprint scanner installed. I don’t even know where Angelo got it, or who installed it, but it was there now. I jammed my index finger against it and waited impatiently for the familiar sound of the bolt clicking open. I can crack the lock, of course (what good is being a lock picker if you can’t even break into your own house?), but it’s faster to wait for the scanner instead.
Still, every second felt like an hour.