It was almost midnight, and Kai was somewhere he was not supposed to be.

His name, at that stage, was also not Kai, and being somewhere he was not supposed to be was something that was totally normal to him.  Initially known as Quickfinger, he had ended up with the moniker K just days into joining the gang back when he was twelve for his ready attitude to do almost anything he was asked with  a chipper but monosyllabic “’kay!”  Or possibly because of the initials on the wooden handle of the knife he always had on him.  Now more or less fifteen – he wasn’t totally sure when his birthday was – he’d been breaking the law in the knowledge that he was doing so for the past ten years, and had been doing so on a more frequent basis with the cartel he was involved in for the past three.

It was a little above average that night in terms of breaking the law.  To start with, K hadn’t paid a bus fare, which was such a minor misdemeanour he didn’t even consider it to be one.  He wasn’t actually sure if he’d ever paid a bus fare.  On the bus, he’d stolen a jumped-up businessman’s wallet out of habit – the guy had been pompous and annoying anyway, and K had been very hungry so he reasoned it was justified – though he had paid for the McDonald’s he got once off the bus.  With the stolen money.  Then he’d jacked a car from the car park at McDonald’s, and driven it underage and without a licence to get to his intended destination.  K would have been able to say that he’d at least obeyed all the other traffic laws, except he wasn’t entirely sure what they were.  He hadn’t rammed anyone, though, nor had he jumped any red lights, and he hadn’t gone any faster than anybody around him.  He was, however, prepared to admit that driving across New York in a stolen car was a liberty that he probably shouldn’t have taken.

He’d at least had the sense not to park it anywhere near the FBI building.  And really, it sort of served his boss right for only getting somebody to desert him right in the outskirts of New York to do a job when he was expected to be in Charlotte in North Carolina by the next morning.

Then again, the man hadn’t really been thinking straight.

“There’s a god*mn Judas in my own group feeding information direct to the FBI!” he’d been fuming not twenty hours before, and K had tried to be understanding even though it was four in the morning and he really, really wanted to go back to bed.  “Some b*ggers in the Feds are actually trying to shut me down!”

K had been bundled into a truck going north because “you’re still a little tot and there’s no way it could be you, so get yourself into their HQ and find out who it is.”

It had taken almost three hours, but K had duly got himself into the HQ – adding breaking and entering to his list of crimes for the night (he wasn’t sure if the two guards he’d encountered were now dead, but if anybody caught him he would definitely be booked for assault and maybe attempted murder, if not actual murder) – and he reckoned he had about fifteen to thirty minutes to look around before he was busted.  That was assuming the security system was up to the mark and people noticed something had gone wrong with it.  He’d overheard the guards saying that the building was empty for the night, so response time would depend on where people were coming in from, and on when the bodies were discovered and which directions people went in after that, and depending on who moved where and when, and where he moved and when, there was still the option for much more time.  The building was big; K was small and he’d cut the power, working only with a very dim screen from his mobile phone, and every window was an open door.  His boss might have complained about a traitor hiding among them, but he appeared to have a number of federal agents on his side, because he’d provided K with a blueprint of the building and highlighted the rooms and departments which he didn’t need to go into.  K had struck lucky in the second one that wasn’t on the list.  For an agency that held a lot of confidential data, it wasn’t incredibly secure, and that went for internal security as much as it did for building security in general.  It had been easy to pick the locks on the filing cabinets, and wearing a pair of plastic surgical gloves, K had spent a few minutes alternately munching on some cold fries left over from McDonald’s and flicking through the files on hand.

In all honesty, it was not the most exciting mission he’d been sent on.  He wasn’t particularly fond of doing them alone, either, he reminisced with a sigh as he set down a file that looked like it wasn’t of use and plucked another one out of the drawer.

Narcs Highway, East Coast caught his attention on the third page.  He skimmed on briefly, and at mention of alleged murders over drugs money attributed to his boss that K knew were true because he’d witnessed them, he set it aside for further reading.  It would give the game away that the Feds had been busted if the files went missing, but he wasn’t going to get caught for hanging around reading them, and with the fury that the boss had gone into, K doubted any federal agent worth their undercover salt would be oblivious to it.

Reaching for another fry, he took out the next file.

Narcs Highway, East Coast—

It went on the pile to take away.  As did the next one, and the one after that.

His stomach growled at him, and he frowned as he reached for the next file.  He’d eaten only a couple of hours ago.  Then again, it was midnight bridging Friday and Saturday, and midnight starting the weekend was time for dumplings with L.  That was another two reasons to be grumpy: he was missing dumplings, and L wasn’t with him.  L would have made the whole thing much more fun.  Usually, L was allowed to go on missions with him.  He’d only joined about six months before, but in that time, despite an age difference of almost a decade, the two had become firm friends.  Maybe it was their shared Asian heritage, but the man was good fun and seemed to think that K was intelligent and in need of things that would stretch his mind.  They had lapsed into an easy routine – Monday was shooting practice (though K was better than L and had been for some time); Tuesday was drag racing; W