Free Zero World by Jason M. Hough Page B

answers. An intruder had been inside. Searches would happen, revealing missing documents. Valix would tighten security, becoming even harder to spy on.
This is what happens when you act on instinct!
she screamed at herself.
    Melni glanced around. She may have struck out in haste but she could still plan. Yet there was nowhere to hide the body, and she couldn’t just leave it. The woman might remember something when she came around. Melni looked across the room and then up at the ceiling. Alia’s words came back to her. No water had worked its way through the ceiling
yet
. In the center of the smooth surface Melni saw a large discolored section, slightly bowed from the weight of the liquid pooled on it above.
    Her plan came together in an instant. She dragged the unconscious woman to the center of the room, then stood on the desk and began to punch at the waterlogged material above with one of Onvel’s chewed pencils.
    The tip punctured the saturated surface on the third try and filthy water began to trickle through. Melni hopped down and repositioned the body so the stream fell directly onto the woman’s mouth and nose.
    Within seconds the trickle turned into a steady pour, then a gush. Abruptly the woman coughed. She began to writhe under the deluge. Melni couldn’t watch this person drown. She would not be ableto live with herself. But she couldn’t just flee. Not yet. So she clasped her hands over the woman’s mouth and nose. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered, her own eyes closed, as the writhing turned to a frantic spasm and then, ultimately, a weak flail. Then perfect stillness. Melni opened her eyes. The water continued to splash on the motionless body before her.
    She fought back tears, though her grief was not for the life she’d just taken. The only life she’d ever taken, part of her mind noted with cold distance. The tears were for what this corpse represented. The death of control. Her careful plans and nurtured identity, slipping away.
    Yet what could she do but try? Figure something out. She couldn’t run away. There was no one to run to. Her handler? Melni wanted to laugh aloud at that idea. The old man had been waiting for something like this to happen ever since she’d stumbled into this position. He had made it very clear that there was no escape option for her, no team waiting to evacuate her south of the Desolation should her true identity be discovered. She was on her own. She had to try to put things back in order.
    Melni closed the dead eyes with the brush of two fingers, rolled the body facedown, then slipped backward out of the room. Seconds later the ceiling in Onvel’s office came crashing down in a sudden avalanche of soaked pressboard, insulation, and water. The liquid splashed down with raging force, toppling the tables and spilling papers everywhere. Everything, all his work, ruined. Except for the ten pages she’d tucked inside her envelope.
    The rising water lifted the dead woman off the floor. She began to bob amid the soaked papers. It all looked like a very sad accident, Melni realized. She felt morbidly pleased at the luck, yet her pulse pounded and her stomach felt as if tied in knots. It would only be seen as an accident if she was long gone when they found the body.
    Distant voices broke her state of semi-trance. She fled, running toward the back of the building, weaving through vacant hallways that smelled of smoke and water.
    Eventually a tiny rectangle of light high on the wall indicated a way out. It was a ventilation window above an alley door. The door itself had been chained and locked from the outside. She climbed to the narrow window instead and found it swung outward to a forty-five-degree angle. Just enough to squeeze through.
    Cold pavement met her hip. She grunted, stood, and hobbled across the street into the safety of a shadow.
    —
    The safe house on Bandury Lane had been recently used. Food in the cabinets, clean clothes in a variety of styles