Chapter 238: Twelve Extremely Small Criminals

Becoming twelve tiny snakes was an excellent way to discover that the same drainpipe could smell terrible from twelve directions at once. There was no larger version of me waiting outside with better judgment, because Miniature Multitude had turned my entire body into a committee of five-inch problems.

[System: The three-hour cooldown starts now, mate, so keep all twelve together, because I don’t want to explain how you lost your own arse behind a filing cabinet.]

Number twelve gets promoted to arse manager, and the rest of us are filing a complaint about our working conditions. I pushed six bodies through the drain and brought the others along the sheltered fence, gathering the views until I could tell which puddle belonged to which version of me.

Bridget waited around the corner in her car while keeping Nessa on the phone. Lukas watched from above the fence with his own phone ready to record anybody approaching the office. We’d agreed that he would draw the guard away if the door opened, leaving me to find the slip without an argument shouted through the window.

The office door had enough space underneath for one body at a time. I slipped inside and found a clerk beneath a sign claiming property was the company’s priority, although somebody had scratched out the first word where customers couldn’t see it.

A flat black case sat open beneath the desk around a bound collection register. Nessa’s keys hung on a numbered hook, and the original inventory slips waited beside a printer close enough for me to reach using the filing cabinet as a ladder.

I could steal the keys, let Lukas drive and accept that Nessa might need a second bumper by morning. Unfortunately, the false surrender form would still exist, allowing Renn to report the truck stolen and leave her defending herself while he kept charging fees.

[System: Paper first and grand theft kebab second, ya drongo; pinch the slip so Rook can nail him properly, unless you fancy spending tomorrow explaining twelve matching mugshots.]

I’m taking his good pen as well, because this criminal organisation has twelve employees and a frankly insulting stationery budget. I checked the collection number Lyra had sent and Bridget had made me repeat, then arranged three bodies against the cabinet so another could climb between them.

The matching slip listed an apron, a bag, a phone charger and cash taken by the owner. Nessa’s signature sat below that list without a surrender clause anywhere on the page, giving me exactly what we’d come to steal before a door opened behind the clerk.

"Renn wants the afternoon batch destroyed now, and he said not to leave it for the morning shift," the arriving worker said. The clerk stood with a sigh and lifted the whole tray, taking my evidence towards a shredder beneath the counter.

I flattened behind the tray’s raised edge while one tail threatened to become the most embarrassing part of the operation. The worker reached for the stack just as Lukas sneezed outside, drawing both men towards the window for the second I needed to shove the slip free.

It slid down the tray and caught on the shredder’s edge, hanging by a corner directly above the opening. The clerk bent to pick it up while I tried to decide how many tiny snakes it took to ruin one man’s interest in paperwork.

[System: Go for the shoelaces, mate, and don’t waste your teeth on him when those socks have already started digesting his feet.]

Six bodies attacked his laces while another dragged the slip backwards, and I stole his pen with an eighth because I had standards. He screamed about rats and climbed onto his chair, forcing me to accept a disgusting insult for the good of the mission.

The second worker swung a broom beneath the desk and nearly flattened one copy, briefly threatening to turn my criminal career into a particularly upsetting game of mini golf. I withdrew the distraction bodies while keeping the paper moving, but its corner folded against the shredder and refused to come free.

Outside, Lukas announced that the fence was unsafe and offered to demonstrate the problem. A loud clang followed, pulling the broom man towards the door while the clerk shouted for him to stop whatever idiot had climbed onto their security light.

If he gets arrested for a fence inspection, we’re letting Bridget explain the invoice. I used two more bodies to lift the paper’s edge, freed it from the machine and dragged it beneath the door while the workers ran outside to address a much louder problem.

Through the fence, I could see parts of Lukas’s performance, including a waving boot and a guard repeatedly arriving where he had been a moment earlier. Each time they ordered him down, he asked which side was safer and managed to turn the answer into another complaint.

I checked all twelve bodies before reuniting beside Bridget’s car, then presented the slip and my stolen pen like a cat delivering something horrible. She accepted the paper and made me leave the pen outside, which felt like censorship of an artist.

"Your sneeze needs a better warning system, but the fence lecture may be the first time I’ve enjoyed you explaining anything," I told him. He claimed he had been building a natural rhythm, which I chose to ignore while Bridget compared the signatures.

She sent photographs of both forms to Nessa and Rook, then brushed a cobweb from my jaw. I considered claiming another six somewhere harder to reach, but her amused look suggested she’d already priced that service.

"My mother wanted me to meet a man with ambition, and you’ve just managed to be twelve criminals before midnight," she said. I was preparing a suitable answer when Lukas handed her a second sheet taken from the gate.

Bridget asked whether I’d counted every small body before changing back, and I admitted to two counts while avoiding Old Mate’s deeply unhelpful suggestion of twelve tiny condoms. She said that was reassuring, because she would hate to spend the rest of the night checking the car seats for spare boyfriends.

Nessa’s truck appeared among eighteen vehicles marked for the next day’s auction, but the collection time was the problem. The first transporter was due to leave before my flight test, and the yard lights came on behind us as its driver opened the gate.