Excerpt: [Title In Progress]

she found herself scrunched into her full-length locker. It had been the only space available to leap into when she heard the oddly light footsteps of the elvinn, Madoc, approaching, and had been forced to squeeze herself inside to avoid him seeing what she was doing.
It’s damn lucky, she thought, that elvinn have no better sense of smell than humans… or any sort of mental senses.
She watched Madoc from between the thin slats in the locker door. Years of hanging around Efvan had groomed her mind into expecting elvinn to be hardly taller than her – Madoc, though, was so very much taller than her and she really could do without the huge creature from finding her poking through her hidden contraband.
She had been sitting innocently on the bench of the locker room, picking out the necessary items for her mission – now the poachers trusted her, it was time to act.
The agents had gotten her stuff to her via Reyn, who had met her in a café on Mainstreet the night before her medical exam. Just a couple meeting for lunch – and took her back to his hotel room, rented specifically for the purpose. The pair of them had stuffed it into the bottom of her back-pack.
If the poachers had realised what she was from her test results, she would need that stuff to escape. Luckily, they hadn’t, so the mission was on.
Also in the pack was an earpiece with a tiny microphone inside of it, a small PDA full of the maps the other agents had stolen from the poacher’s hacked network, a black silk scarf, black leather gloves, a pair of coloured contact lenses – blue – and a wallet of lock-picks.
Luckily, she’d gotten the contacts in before she heard him approach, because it felt like an age before the blond elvinn finished in his own locker and left, switching off the light as he went.
Gemini released the breathe she hadn’t realised she’d been holding, and clambered out of her locker. Doing that regularly was sooner or later going to give her claustrophobia.
In the half light caused by the corridor lights seeping through the glass of the door, she prepared quickly.
She pushed the earpiece into her right ear and flicked the tiny switch on it. It crackled briefly in her ear, then, after a brief moment, Jericho’s soft, thickly accented voice came through.
“Golta Etra Mikka-”
“Inda Nova Inda. Hello, Jericho,” she whispered back, completing the letters of her name in the Agent’s code.
“So I guess ve are on vith the mission?” he asked. She smiled faintly, continuing to prepare even as she spoke in hushed tones.
“Yep. Ever seen the inside of a locker?” she said conversationally as she pulled on the leather gloves.
“Dia… I should hope so, hasn’t every-vun?”
“Not from the inside of it.”
“Oh…”
For a moment, there was silence on the other end of the link up, and then he started laughing. “How in Thenrea’s name…”
“There was an emergency!” she snapped, before she realised she was doing it, and frantically lowered her voice. “Madoc came along.”
“The elvinn? Efvan vas not happy about that, you know.”
“I didn’t think he would be.”
She looked up as someone cut in front of the light, and froze. For a dangerous moment they stayed there, yelling in Zakatsian into a mobile phone. Stefan, then.
She stayed still and silent until he walked off again, not wanting him to notice movement through the glass.
She grabbed the lockpicks and PDA and stuffed both of them into her pockets. Finally, she wrapped the scarf carefully around her head, covering the lower half of her face and all of her bright hair.
“Jericho?” she whispered as she moved to stuff her empty bag into her locker.
“Dia?”
“I’m about to move out. Stick with me.”