Max Collins - Before the Dawn

She held her breath for a few seconds... but no alarm sounded, no lasers blasted at her, and the mines didn’t go off.

Releasing the wire from the necklace, Max gazed fondly at the huge blue stone, and for the first time all evening, a true, wide smile creased her face. She lifted the necklace — feeling a real reverence for its value, if not its history — and gave it a quick kiss...

... then, as if her lips had done it, the alarm sounded.

And all hell broke loose.

“Shit,” Max whispered, her vocabulary of “forbidden” words far greater now than she’d ever heard from Colonel Lydecker.

The thief suddenly realized the necklace had also been resting on a pressure alarm — a security measure that had somehow not made its way into the Brood’s stolen plans. The alarm siren squawked like a gaggle of angry geese, a grating, obnoxious sound Max decided she would have hated even under innocent circumstances.

As opposed to these guilty ones...

The first laser drilled the stand the necklace had been on, and exploded it in a shower of wood and velvet, just as Max pulled herself up out of the way. Despite the mines in the floor, which were presumably now activated, choosing the lesser of bad options, she kicked her feet out of the suction cups, and dropped to the carpeting as lasers blasted holes in the room all around her.

At least where she’d alighted, there hadn’t been a mine...

Grabbing the Plexiglas shell of the exhibit, tucking it to her like a big square football, Max did a forward roll and popped to her feet just as a laser fired a blast at her face.

She dodged left, reacting with the lightning inhuman speed bred into her, though she nonetheless felt the heat of the blast as it shot past her right cheek, and she could hear her hair sizzle as her nostrils filled with the burned smell of it.

Leaping with all her considerable might, she flung herself onto one of the exhibit cases in the middle of the room just as another laser blast chewed the floor not far from where she’d been standing, setting off the small blast of one of the mines. They obviously weren’t meant to kill, only to maim.

That was a relief... she guessed...

She only had a few seconds now until the lasers would target her again. Hefting the Plexiglas box, she threw it halfway across the remaining distance toward the door. It hit, but the sound of its impact was swallowed by the explosion of another mine, and the box disintegrated, making shattering music in a cloud of black smoke.

Leaping to the safety of the crater she’d created, Max knew all planning, any strategy, had disintegrated along with that box... from here on out, she’d just have to stay smart and get lucky. She ran to the door, dodging and cutting all the way. To her great surprise, she wasn’t reduced to a bloody mess by another explosion — the number of mines must have been minimal, to keep the building damage down.

She twisted the knob and found that the door had autolocked when the alarm went off — another tidbit absent from the security plan.

The lasers were getting closer now, their aim improving as she stood motionless in front of the door, heat and/or motion sensors probably leading them to her. Another blast shot toward her and she sidestepped just enough for it to miss her, and blast the lock off the door, skittering halfway down the hall.

Max yanked what was left of the door open and leapt into the hallway, then ducked around the edge of the door as stray laser beams shot wildly down the corridor.

The two guards came running toward her, and Max realized they must have disarmed the mines in the hallway thinking she would be trapped in the exhibit room. Each carried a nightstick and a Tazer.

The nearest one was a muscular guy in his midtwenties, his face an angry mask. The farther one was the plump guy she’d seen testing doors, and he was older by at least twenty years and heavier by nearly a hundred pounds, and looked scared.

The muscular one aimed his Tazer and fired, but Max ducked under the dart, rolled forward, and came up, her right fist catching the guard under the chin, lifting him off the floor, and sending him sprawling across the hall, no doubt to wake up later and wonder how so small a “girl” had coldcocked him like that.

The plump one tried to look determined but the gesture failed when his chins started quivering. He fired the Tazer without aiming, then stood in bewildered fear as Max came up to him. A voice in his head probably told him to draw his nightstick, but another may have reminded him how little he was being paid, so he just stood there motionless, shivering like gelatin.

Max patted his cheek, and smiled sweetly.

Then she scurried off down the hall.

The thief could hear sirens in the distance when she threw open the museum’s front door, but by the time the cops got here, she’d be long gone...

... and the Heart of the Ocean was tucked safely inside her fatigues. Max couldn’t wait to get back to the theater to show the prize to Moody.

She would have felt like a king of thieves, if she hadn’t been... “a girl.”

As she watched from the corner, the nine-year-old Max — a foreign figure in this residential neighborhood, her thin blue-gray Manticore smock flapping in winter wind, her bare feet planted on the cold concrete of a sidewalk — tried to comprehend what the young child was up to...

But the genetically bred soldier-in-the-making simply had no idea what the female child was doing, rolling a ball of snow across the white yard, making a bigger ball of it with her every step.

Focusing in, Max looked closely at the child across the street — a girl whose long black hair peeked out from beneath a red stocking cap. A little older than Max, at least a year or two, the girl had full lips, a short nose, and wide-set blue eyes beneath long, butterfly lashes.

Mesmerized, as if witnessing a dream, Max watched as the girl rolled the ball of snow back the other way. The round white thing came up almost to the girl’s waist now, and Max still couldn’t figure out what this kid thought she was doing.

After backing up to the corner and ducking behind a car, Max watched the girl for a moment, then slipped across the street, a blue-gray shadow. Now on the same side of the block as the girl, Max edged behind the corner house without being seen, and took off across the backyards, heading for the third house, in the front yard of which the girl was playing. This snow-rolling behavior Max had never seen before — what sort of strategy was this? — and she needed a closer look.

When Max rounded the third house and crept up to a spot behind a large evergreen to watch, the girl was still at work in the snow. To Max, her nightshirt and bare feet seemed suddenly inconsequential, compared to the wild-colored clothes of the other girl: red stocking cap, green mittens, pink parka, blue jeans, and canary yellow boots.

Max stared in rapt fascination as the girl in the red stocking cap decided this ball was big enough, abandoned it in the middle of the yard, and moved down near the sidewalk to start another. The girl packed snow onto the new ball until it was too big to hold, then she rolled it as she had the last one.

When the child was finished, the second sphere of snow was only slightly smaller than the one next to it, and it too came nearly to her waist. The girl tried to lift it up to set it on top of the first ball, but couldn’t quite get it off the ground.

Knowing she should retreat and avoid any contact, well aware she needed shelter, food, and warmer apparel, wanting to keep moving, Max nonetheless remained frozen with something other than the cold: something about this girl kept her here, kept Max watching...