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Cliff Marlow’s apartment is on the seedier side of town. But, for all its location leaves to be desired, the apartment itself is beautiful. Cliff had done it out himself, sourcing old tech from back alleyways and furnishings from secondhand stores. Sveta had helped him with bits of it - is familiar with the bones of the place - but it still takes her breath every time she steps inside to see what has changed from the last time she had visited. Today, she steps into an oasis of green: light shines from all around her, and if not for Cliff’s furniture, she could have believed that she had stepped outside and into a ancient, verdant forest. The projection of the images across all the surfaces of the apartment is seamless. She tastes rain at the back of her throat and can almost smell the rot of loam and leaf.
“I prefer this over the desert,” she says approvingly.
Cliff turns towards her, already smiling, like he’d known before she’d even stepped foot in his apartment that she’s near. “That shit gave me the mother of all migraines," he grouses, wafting his hand about in air. “With the sun and all.”
“Told you so,” she sing-songs.
Cliff rolls his eyes. Flips her off.
He’s already settled in a chair behind the desk, so Sveta drags his overlarge beanbag across the floor to sit beside it. She flops down on it, letting it rearrange itself underneath her, and begins unpacking her own computer from her bag. Out it comes, unfolded on her lap, and the screen lights up, recognising her face.
“You ready?” Cliff asks. “T-minus 5 until go time, baby.”
One by one, Sveta pops each of her knuckles. “Of course I’m ready,” she scoffs, and flicks her wrist. Her screen extends itself, flickering superimposed on the air in front of her, a holographic mirage that she can manipulate with only the swipe of her fingers and the twists of her hands. It’s a heady sort of power, one that Sveta has honed and constructed herself.
“T-minus five,” she mutters again to herself, and her fingers begin to fly across the keyboard.
For the most part, Cliff leaves her alone. He pushes a glass of water close by her feet for her to reach forward and grab if she feels she needs it, and beside that places a small bowl of popcorn - not too heavy for the tangled pit of nerves writhing in Sveta’s abdomen like a nest of snakes, with the sort of texture that she can sink her teeth into and bite to redirect her antsy frustration. This - his silence, the snacks, her humming an endless, looping tune under her breath - is a practised sort of routine. Almost as practised as Sveta’s craft, built over years of knowing each other. Sveta doesn’t often like to think of how long she and Cliff have known each other for and worked together - it makes it too permanent, more so than it already is.
Cliff has his own tasks to be seeing to. Unlike Svetlana’s portable computer, his set-up sprawls across the entirety of his desk and is a monstrous configuration of monitoring and free-standing projections, all of them displaying a different screen full of content. For all people consider Cliff to be not the brightest, he navigates between screens with a practised surety, seemingly able to take in and process fast-moving, simultaneous streams of information at once. Sveta has started to be impressed at this - started, because being impressed requires getting over the competitive urges that rear up in her chest every time she sees Cliff next to anything technological, antique calculators and cutting edge tech alike. And Sveta’s never been good at letting anything go - so, started.
Tonight, Cliff’s monitoring the dozens of security cameras interspersed throughout the federal government’s ballroom, zooming in occasionally on whichever guests catch his interest but mostly just letting it all pass by, surveying it all. Sveta glances up from time to time, mostly catching an impression of vaulting ceilings that vanish up towards the heavens, glittering finery, rancid opulence, and the sweet sight of opportunity.
“Gonna eat good tomorrow,” Cliff comments, with that same hungry gleam in his eyes. He’s zoomed in on a women swanning around the outskirts in a dress made of vintage camera film, but he’s not so much looking at the fashion as he is the large yellow diamond approximately the size of a five year-old’s clenched fist that dangles from her throat.
Then, he adds, “thirty taps until go time. You there, Sveta?”
Lines of code flow out from beneath her fingertips. It trails around her like a cocoon, a membrane, warping the air and distorting her view of Cliff.
“I’m there,” she says.
Cliff is tapping down the moments on the edge of his desk with his pointer finger. If Sveta had the time to spare, she thinks that she would like to tell him to shove it.
But she doesn’t. Her finger slams down on the enter key with only a second to spare.
She lets out the breath that she hadn’t know she’d been holding.
“We’re go,” she says, and perches herself on Cliff’s lap just in time to watch as the next two arrivals to the party slink through the front doors.
“Good job,” Cliff says approvingly.
Sveta squints suspiciously at the two newcomers as they make their way around the outskirts of the party. There’s nothing particularly unusual about them - both thin and reedy, one slightly taller than the other, one with a shock of ginger curls and the other with only the vaguest shadow of fuzz to suggest that he might have once had hair. They’re certainly dressed for the occasion, with smartly tailored suits and watches expensive enough that Sveta could probably pay the next three months of her rent with one of them alone. But looking at their watches draws her attention to their wrists, and -
She leans back with a disgusted huff. “Not my best work,” she scowls.
Cliff leans forward, squinting. “You can barely see that.”
Barely isn’t good enough. Sveta can’t stop looking at the pair’s wrists, where there is - just there, just perceptible enough to catch - the faint, iridescent sheen as the cloaking technology she had meticulously built and coded settles across their skin, twisting their features and hiding them in plain sight. On a good day, the faint lattice of lines that make up the illusion are invisible even to Svetlana herself. Today is obviously not a good day.
“No one is going to see this unless they’re looking for it,” he tells her. “Seriously, you’ve outdone yourself.”
“I’ve done better,” Sveta insists.
Cliff squeezes her hip lightly. She’s very much aware of how large his hands are, how broad - and how much larger and broader they seem when they are curved around her the way that they are now.
“You did the hard shit,” he tells her. “Trust the guys to handle the rest of it. I mean, look at Hollzy go.”
Sveta glances at the monitor just in time to watch as the redheaded man stumbles, as though he is drunk, into a gentleman crossing his path. He steadies himself against the gentleman’s shoulder, and Sveta can tell, even without audio, that he is apologising profusely for the collision by the ebay that his lips are moving rapidly and by the earnestness on his face. Stupid Canadian, she thinks fondly. Apologising over everything - except, of course, Shane Hollander is not apologising for the fact that he uses the distraction to swipe the man’s absurdly expensive cufflinks.
Stupid Canadian, she thinks again, and watches as Shane and Ilya - currently masquerading the redhead’s bald friend - knock their fists against each other as surreptitiously as they can manage. If Svetlana ha not gotten herself in this life for the simple thrill of it, she would have scolded the pair of them for treating this like a game. As it is, Svetlana doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
It had been her and Ilya alone at first. Ilya, running from the shitty childhood that he didn’t like to talk about, trying to make ends meet away from where he had begun and willing to do anything to escape the shadow of his diplomat father. And then there’d been Svetlana, widely considered by her teachers to be a genius and so very fucking bored. Tech had been a window into a new world, but Sveta’s access, stuck in the mundanity of school and her parents’ gentile life, had been imperfect - intolerably so.
The new gig had started as a joke between her and Ilya at first. The question of what it would be like if they were beholden to no one but themselves - no parents, no teachers, no law itself. It had been less of a joke after Ilya had stolen his father’s governmentally issued flip pad in his escape from his childhood home, already partially stripped to parts to pawn. It had been a surprisingly easy leap to making it a career choice after that.
And then, at some point, they’d been joined by Cliff Marlow. Big and broad and loud, but not as dumb as he liked to pretend he was. A few years after that, Shane Hollander, who had also been in it for much the same reasons as Sveta. Genius, bored, crushed under the pressure. Together, they make an alright team. Together, Sveta thinks they might be capable of burning down the world around them and making it back up how they want it to be.
They’re good at what they do. The best, probably. Sveta’s seen wanted advertisements with their faces on - except that they’re only the faces that Sveta has crafted for them, an endless string of ghosts and discarded visages that knit themselves into the appearance of a movement much larger than the four of them.
“We should try our luck in Canada after this,” Cliff suggests, leaning back in his chair. “Take Hollzy to his old stomping ground.”
“Pay a visit to the old rich fucks over that side of the border,” she adds with relish.
Cliff is grinning now - grinning at her like they are in on some grand plan together. “Go sight seeing. Niagara Falls.”
She looks at him sideways.
“Where Niagara Falls used to be,” Cliff amends. “Maybe we can finish what we started in Europe?”
Svetlana’s heart catches somewhere in her throat. “Come on,” she manages to force out, keeping her words as light and flippant as she can manage. “You know I hate it when you refer to Europe like it’s one single country.”
“Sveta,” he says, voice dropping to be wheedling persuasive. “Baby, we were having fun in Paris. I know I was, getting to play dumb tourists together. I just - it meant something to me, and I think that it meant something to you too. And I want to know why you’re still treating me like I don’t know you - ‘cause I do. I’ve known you for years, Lana. And I like you, a lot.”
Svetlana doesn’t like to think about Paris. Not because anything had gone wrong - nothing had and Paris had been one of their most lucrative stings - but because Svetlana had spent two blissful weeks playacting the lovestruck tourist on her honeymoon. Cliff had been Sveta’s husband, the sort of husband who worshipped the ground she had walked on. They’d spent their ‘honeymoon’ going to cafés and V-museums (and, when Sveta had been sick of the virtual experiences, a dilapidated real museum hidden under a bridge across the Seine), asking people to take their pictures in front of every other lamppost they had passed, and swiping whatever wallets, valuables and finery they could get their hands on. Those two weeks are still the best two weeks of her life.
“That’s not the point,” she tells him levelly.
“Then what is the point?” he asks.
On his monitors, Sveta watches as Ilya this time slips his stolen goodies into the inner lining of his jacket. Somehow, with a sleight of hand that still impresses her all these years later, he’s managed to get the yellow diamond that she and Cliff had noticed earlier off the neck of its wearer, with a decoy in place so that the sudden loss of weight is not a give away to the party at large.
“I don’t know,” she tells Cliff, “but it’s not like there’s a life waiting for us. Cliff, you know this isn’t sustainable. We can’t go back and we can’t stop, but this isn’t going to last forever.”
“I’m not asking for forever. I’m just asking for one night with the woman I’m crazy about.”
“I don’t want one night with you,” she confesses. “I want all the nights with you, and I think I’ll go crazy to have it and lose it.”
Cliff - Cliff listens to her confession, far more vulnerable than Sveta lets herself be with anyone, and rolls his eyes.
“Bullshit,” he scoffs. “You got me for the rest of our time. The only thing making us lose this is you.”
“Oh, yeah? And if we get caught -”
“We get caught. Probably we’re executed, or locked away in some torture chamber that violates half a dozen laws, or some other mind fuck. That happens regardless of whether or not we go for it, together. And I’d rather have it for a bit than never have it at all.”
“It would kill me,” Sveta says, not looking at him, watching the monitors with all the milling, oblivious crowds that would do anything to tear the four of them - Sveta and Cliff and Ilya and Shane - apart if only they knew how.
Cliff reaches for her hand. “And this is killing me,” he says softly. “Everyday, I want you. And everyday, I see you tell yourself that you can’t have this, and it kills me.” A pause, a beat, the air is weighted around them. “Come on. You’ve made the leap before. What’s stopping you this time?”
Svetlana breaths in. Breathes out. Feels the warmth of him beside her, and the solidness of his hand on hers, and the slow kindled warmth that lights itself in the pit of her stomach. She knows him. She wants him. And wanting him is like tethering on the edge of a mountain, waiting to fall, unable to see the bottom but knowing that he is there. If she falls, she has to trust that he will catch her. It’s a difficult thing to trust. But he’s caught her before. In Paris, everyday since. He’s caught her.
“Finish this job,” she says evenly, “and maybe I’ll let you take me out for dinner.”
Cliff squeezes her hand. His smile is open, unguarded in its simple happiness. “That’s all I’m asking for,” he says, and Sveta feels the moment that he catches her, right at the end of the fall.