Affinity CoLab Presents Rebel/Rebellion

been cheap, but The Resistance is paying for this job. For their small investment, I’ll deliver the funds they need to bring down the city’s corrupt oligarchy. I’m happy I’m getting paid, but honestly, I’d have done this job for free. I’ve a score to settle with the owner. Every time I look at his shining tower rising out of the bay, I have to fight the urge to touch the scar on my right cheek. Yeah, Timothy and I have history. I’m looking forward to hitting him in the only place he hurts.

Back on the casino floor, it’s hard to believe that a plunging neckline, a slash of red lipstick, and a boatload of attitude is all it takes to hide from my co-workers. For one nasty moment I made eye contact with Sol, a waiter who makes me laugh—a dangerously intimate thing. I let my eyes slide past with the indifference of a true high-roller and hoped it was enough. His cold shoulder confirmed my acting skills.

Now, I grab a drink from a different waiter’s tray and make my way to the ladies’ room.

Old Rosie grins at me from beside her pile of hand towels. All week I’ve brought her rum cocktails and she’s been obligingly incurious as a result.

Inside the far-left cubicle I unwrap my voluminous skirt and fold it into a small package, lining outward. Straps sewn into the underside turn it into a backpack. I step onto the toilet and push on a ceiling tile. Moments later I’m shimmying along the crawl space between Floor 111 and the roof of the building, air ducts to the left of me, plastic tubing to the right.

My route takes me past the elevator shaft. Heights don’t bother me, but I linger only long enough to secure a small package to the wall.

The watch pinned inside my neckline shows I have ten minutes until things kick off. A job like this is a curious mix of thrill and boredom: adrenaline rushing, and nothing to do but wait. I spend some of the time checking the adjustments I’ve made to Timothy’s pneumatic tube system.

Here’s how it works: customers come in and exchange foil-like credit-strips for casino chips. Once an hour Antonio, the head cashier, empties the credit drawers, stacks and rolls the strips, then stuffs them into a transparent cylinder. At the top of the hour, he pushes the cylinder into a dispatch-box in a wall tube, closes the sluice valve, and—whoosh!—air pressure carries the package along a system of tubes to a vault six floors below. At sunrise, Antonio accompanies Timothy to the vault where the two men count the night’s take.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

I’ve spent the past six nights working my stacked-heel hacksaw and hand drill, making a small-but-significant alteration to the tube network. Boned bodices are back in fashion this year, which gave me a perfect, if uncomfortable, means of smuggling in the curved plastic components I needed to build my very own dispatch-box.

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