Another excerpt/scene from my WIP, ‘The Little Queen’:
As Kaya had hoped, slipping through the barriers unnoticed was actually extremely easy thanks to Sayuri’s distraction and the fact none of the guards were really paying attention to the individual lab-coats filing through. She supposed it wasn’t surprising that Jen just happened to have a couple spare coats too. Now the pair were in an office area – a small corridor with rooms either side filled with desks and computers. All were locked, but Jennifer was able to fool the card reader on one with her tablet and a small bundle of wires. When Kaya asked her what she was doing Jen answered that they needed a map.
“I thought you said you’d studied all the security here?” Kaya asked.
“I have,” said Jennifer, “I know all the software and can unlock all the doors. I can even trick the cameras to look the other way or play a short loop if need be.”
“But you don’t have a map?”
Jen’s cheeks turned pink as they did whenever she was a bit flustered. “Th-there are dozens of laboratories here with different experiments going on – robotics, engineering, weapons research. It changes all the time.”
“You never came here with your dad?”
“No. They never had a bring your daughter to work day. Everything they do here is secret, and children tend to talk,” Jennifer said, sitting down to do some presumably fancy computer stuff while Kaya watched for anyone else coming.
A number of employees seemed to be going home although there were new ones arriving. So far at least none seemed interested in the two of them. “You always were chatty,” Kaya said to make conversation as she waited. “Remember when you told everyone about Santa Claus and made half the class cry? Then the teacher tried to make you stand up in front of everyone and tell them you were lying, but you…”
“I told the truth,” Jen said, clearly remembering. “I never meant to upset anyone. I just always believed it was better for people to know the truth.”
“Yep. You had that conviction even when we were seven.”
Oops… just glanced at the screen and immediately spotted mistakes. A few missing words and a mispelling. I corrected what I saw, but I expect there’ll be many especially since most of this is completely rewritten from the previous draft rather than edited.
Once the current draft is done I’ll make it available to some beta-readers, but I’m going to get someone specifically to proofread so no-one needs to worry too much about that. At the moment I have a few chapters of Asterion up on my password protected Tumblr (most of which have been significantly altered now anyway), but maybe I’ll delete those and start putting chapters of this up there instead for anyone who would like to check on my progress.
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