83

Kai Zhou

January 12, 2048. Washington, D.C.

The crawlspace under Erik’s house was large enough for Kai to walk upright. When Kai and Lila had owned their own house, it had been a struggle to move around in the crawlspace with his back bent, squatting. And that had been before the war, when his body was strong and fully intact.

Kai located the plumbing that went up to the kitchen, listened to each of the pipes in turn with the stethoscope he’d brought. He marked the one connected to the sink, which he’d purposely left running, with a red X, then went to find the main circuit panel.

He felt like he was deceiving Lila by planning this without telling her. But there was no doubt in his mind that Erik was going to try to kill him; he was too good a poker player to misread what he’d seen on Erik’s face.

He flipped the breaker switch leading to the heater for Erik’s pool. Erik would never notice it was off; as far as Kai knew, Erik had never been in the pool—it was just a prop, a display of his wealth and power.

Rerouting the wiring was the hard part, especially with only one good hand. During basic training he’d received cursory instruction in booby-trapping, including about two minutes on how to electrocute someone using a house’s typical 110-volt setup.

An hour later, shaking from the exertion, his hip throbbing, he had the wires from the pool’s heater wrapped around the pipe leading to the kitchen faucet. In theory, when the time came all he had to do was flip the breaker, then get Erik to touch the faucet. He hoped he’d done it right.