The Path of Razors by Chris Marie Green Page B

sped ahead to the door, and when Dawn got to it, too, she put on a pair of tight gloves, slowly applied pressure to it, then stuck her head past, glancing around the fluorescent hallway.
    Nada. They were all alone.
    But then Greta darted even farther ahead.
    Leaving the stairwell behind, Dawn ran to where the Friend was guiding her, to a door marked “Housematron.”
    Heartbeat: calm. Breathing: take it down a level.
    After putting her pink folder into the book bag, Dawn took out the tension wrench, rake, and short hook the Friends had told her she’d need. Then she went to work on picking the lock.
    She only hoped that the vamps weren’t the type to have used any sort of magic aboveground. If so, she’d know pretty soon whether or not there’d be trouble getting inside the room.
    Within a minute, she had the lock taken care of and was opening the door, her lungs burning with a held breath.
    No magic, she thought. Please, no magic —
    But, without incident, she cracked the door open, allowing Breisi and Greta in before her so they could cloud any cameras.
    As she stuffed her tools away, she noted that maybe these vamps weren’t so keen on attracting suspicion aboveground after all, in spite of their more careless activities like burying victims’ heads and other body parts at an abandoned construction site on Billiter Street. They’d also been real nonchalant about their master sending off Awareness signals, because that’s how Costin had tracked them down in the first place.
    When Breisi called to Dawn, she entered, then shut the door, locked it, and slipped off her bag while scanning the room.
    The first thing she saw was a nondescript desk with folders neatly stacked in wire organizers and a computer glancing back with a blank screen. According to the Friends, the blasé setup described the vampire housematron in a lot of ways: Plain. Ordinary. Unsur prising except for what they now knew about her.
    But there was something besides the desk that caught Dawn’s eye—a queen-sized bed with an indentation on the duvet, as if Mrs. Jones had been slumbering on top of the covers the last time she’d been here. It was a personal detail that got to Dawn in a way that she didn’t want to acknowledge, so she let it go.
    Other than that, there was a bookshelf lined with plastic ferns and stacked with hardbound volumes of classics from the likes of Thackeray, Austen, and Dickens. And then there was the mahogany wardrobe against a wall.
    In addition to some drawers for clothing, that was about it ... except for the camera peeking out from behind the fern on top of the bookshelf.
    Dawn knew that it would already be clouded, but she jerked her chin toward it anyway.
    “Greta’s got it,” Breisi said. “Still, we don’t have long.”
    “Gotcha,” Dawn said. “Someone might notice the malfunction nd decide to check it out.”
    She took out a hair band from the book bag and wrangled the wig into a ponytail, doffed the sweater and glasses and stuffed them in the bag, rolled up her sleeves, then slid a headlight over her head. “I wonder if clouded cameras were the thing that drew that commando boy”—the dead one in their lab freezer—“to us on Billiter Street.”
    “A possibility,” Breisi said. “Now hurry.”
    Yeah, yeah. Dawn made it snappy, but she still went on wondering if the commando’s group kept tabs on any of those cameras posted just about everywhere you looked around the city. They might have been monitoring the burial area, which would explain why the kid had been attracted to it.
    Had the camera malfunctions made him—whoever he was and whatever his purpose—come running to snoop around?
    Sometimes the influence of an Underground reached both high and low into society. How connected was this community here in London?
    Good God—and was it only a matter of time before this Underground realized that “Limpet and Associates” had messed with the cameras near their own headquarters?
    Gah. She