by Lolita Lopez
Thunderstruck, Ella gaped at Jolly. “What?”
Jolly frowned. “Your shelter? That’s why you’re here, right?”
“No, I’m here because of the bombings.” Still trying to make sense of what Jolly had said about the shelter, she asked, “My shelter? It’s…gone?”
“I’m so sorry, Ella.” Jolly handed her a photo and some papers. “I thought you knew.”
“I didn’t.” She took the photo and papers and looked at Torment. “Did you know?”
“No.” He wasn’t lying. He seemed just as taken aback by this news as she did. “When did it happen?”
“Overnight. I was asleep when Jed came in and woke me up. She said something big was happening at your shelter. By the time I got there, the government wrecking crew was tearing it down. Just demolishing the whole damn thing.”
Ella stared at the photos of her shelter reduced to rubble and tried to fight back the tears stinging her eyes. All that hard work. All the years of planning. All the sacrifices. And it was all gone.
“I thought it was George, at first,” Jolly interjected carefully, “but then I found out he’d been kidnapped and—”
“What?” Ella’s head snapped up. “Someone kidnapped George? How?”
“He was grabbed sometime between the bomb in Jesco and the one here. I haven’t been able to tighten the timeline yet. There’s a lot of information to comb through right now, and I’m only one person.” She gestured to her piles of paper and notebooks. “The bombing, your shelter, the election, George—it’s all just a jumble right now, but I think it’s tied together. Somehow.”
“Any leads on the kidnapping,” Torment asked, leaning forward to grab a notebook.
Jolly slapped his hand away and frowned at him before shifting aside the notebook he had tried to grab. She gave him a different one. “That’s all I have on George’s kidnapping so far. He left the secret police headquarters, got into that transport and hasn’t been seen since.”
“The drivers? His guards?” He thumbed through the notebook and studied her quick sketches and notes.
She shook her head. “Dead. They found them in the wrecked transport. A stolen sanitation truck had slammed into it.”
“Witnesses?”
“If there were any, they were snatched up by George’s goon squad. Anyone who managed not to get taken in for interrogation isn’t talking.”
“There was construction on the road?” He tapped the hastily sketched roadblock signs in her notebook.
“Something about the sewer lines underneath the road,” she said. “He shouldn’t have even been on it.”
“George wasn’t the kind of man to wait for a detour. He would have ordered his driver to take the closed road if it was his usual route, even if it meant driving on the sidewalk,” Ella commented. “His habits make him vulnerable. He’s easy to anticipate. Whoever kidnapped him, probably counted on that and maneuvered him right where they wanted him there so they could hit his transport and take him.”
Torment made an agreeing sound. “Do you have any photos from the bombing?”
“Sure.” She gave him a stack of them. “I made notes on the back. Identities and such.”
“Thank you.” He glanced through them, turning them over to check the information she’d scribbled on them. He hesitated halfway through the stack. Flipping the photo toward Ella, he raised an eyebrow. “Look.”
“Harkin.” She took the photo from him and studied it. Harkin stood in the crowd of government employees milling around the crime scene. He was barely visible, his face down as he pretended to work. “He’s got a government ID badge and a uniform.”
“Easy enough to get,” Jolly said. “I have a few different sets of my own. Never know when I might need to sneak around in places I’m not supposed to be.” She gestured for the photo back. Looking at it, she shook her head and frowned. “I didn’t even notice him. It’s been so long since…”
Ella met Jolly’s embarrassed gaze as her voice trailed off. Since he left you pregnant and alone. “It’s okay, Jolly. It has been a long time.”
“It can’t be a coincidence, right?” Jolly asked, waving the photo. “George goes missing. Your shelter gets torn down. There’s a bomb detonated at the New Dawn election headquarters. Harkin shows up in The City. This all has to be connected.”
Suddenly, Jolly shot out of her chair. “I wonder…?” She walked to a filing cabinet in the corner of her messy office, jerked open a drawer and pulled out a thick roll of maps. “Here. Help me with these.”
Ella followed Torment to the large table against the wall where Jolly had taken her maps. She took one corner of the stack and held it down while Torment took the other, Jolly sandwiched between them as her nimble fingers moved over the grids. “New Dawn headquarters is here. Secret police building is there. Your shelter is—was—here. George was kidnapped here.”
She crouched down and dug around under the table for something. When she straightened up, she had another map with her. This one clear and flimsy. She considered it for a moment before spinning and flipping it and placed it over the other map in perfect alignment.
“The tunnels,” Ella remarked, already following Jolly’s line of thought. “You think he’s using them to travel without being seen.”
“Yes,” she confirmed with a nod. “He probably planted the bomb under the New Dawn headquarters. Over here,” she tapped the spot where George had been kidnapped, “he must have grabbed George and dragged him down under the street.”
“But where would he go with George? Where would he go as a hideout? Would he stay here in The City or would he try to leave?” Torment asked, his fingers tracing various tunnel lines.
A painful memory resurfaced. Staring at the map, Ella felt her body go numb as she realized what Jolly and Torment hadn’t. They couldn’t know, after all. They hadn’t been there when Harkin lost his damn mind after she told him she was pregnant. They hadn’t been there when he had hurled all those ugly words and made his nasty accusations. They hadn’t been there when he threw the lantern that started that horrific fire.
“He’s waiting,” Ella murmured as it all made sense to her. “He’s waiting for me.”
Torment regarded her for a moment. His eyes widened slightly. “It’s a trap.” Rigid, he rose to his full height and glanced around the office as if searching for threats. “It’s well-known that most of our forces are on maneuvers and training this week. He bombed the colonies when we were low on forces to get Raze out of the way—”
“Because he knew you would come just as I did,” Jolly interjected. “If he got your man out of the way, you wouldn’t have anything stopping you from leaving that ship. You’d come right back to The City as soon as you heard about your shelter being destroyed. I’d bet all the money I have in my pocket right now that he’s the one who gave the orders to tear down your shelter. Maybe that’s why he kidnapped George? To make him call in that order?”
“But why?” Ella wondered aloud. “What in the world could he possibly have to say to me after all this time? Why wouldn’t he just get a message to me through Danny?”
“Who knows why crazy people do the things they do, Ella?” Jolly seemed just as mystified. “But he’s here, and he’s done all this to get your attention.”
“I have to find him. I have to know what this is all about,” Ella decided.
“No!” Torment grabbed her arm. “Ella, we have to get you back on the Valiant immediately.”
Ella tugged her arm free. “No.”
“Yes.” His expression had gone hard, his eyes dark and all friendliness vanished. Grabbing her arm, he started to drag her toward the door. “I am responsible for your safety. Whatever game your ex is playing he can play alone.”
“Torment!” Ella jerked to free herself but his grasp was too strong. “Let go! We have to do this. We came all this way to find out what he’s doing and why. We have to stop him before he hurts anyone else!”
“And I will! But you? Y
ou’re going back to the ship where you belong.” He tugged her toward the door, ignoring her slapping and jerking motions. “Stop fighting! You’re going to bruise your—”
In a flash of movement, Jolly jammed a strange device against his back. He stopped mid-sentence as awful zapping sounds filled the air. His entire body stiffened and seized violently. A heartbeat later, he sagged and crumpled onto the floor.
“What did you do, Jolly?” Ella exclaimed as she dropped to her knees to check on him.
“He wasn’t going to let you go.”
“That doesn’t mean you had to kill him!” Nearly hysterical, Ella tried to find his pulse. “What is that thing?”
“Jed calls it a Volt.” She flashed the strange device before tucking it into the back of her pants and hiding it with her shirt. “It’s not lethal.” She hesitated. “At least, it’s not supposed to be.”
“Jolly, if he dies—”
“He’ll be fine. Look, he’s still breathing. We better get a move on if you intend to find Harkin before he does something else stupid. You know where he is, don’t you?”
Ella nodded reluctantly. “The map,” she gestured toward it. “It brought back a memory of a place.”
“I’ll go with you. I’ll keep you safe.”
“Harkin isn’t going to hurt me.”
Jolly looked unconvinced. “I’m still coming with you.”
Ella glanced down at Torment for a moment before making her decision. “We can’t just leave him here like this.”
“I’ll lock the door behind us. He’ll be fine until he wakes up.”
“He’s going to be furious.” Ella eyed him warily. She placed her fingers against his neck and felt the reassuring thud of his pulse. He wasn’t the only one who would be furious with her.
Raze. Just the thought of his disappointed expression made her chest hurt. He wouldn’t be angry, but he would be upset. Hoping he would understand when she had a chance to explain, she rifled through Torment’s pockets in search of anything useful.
“What is that?” Jolly crouched down for a closer look at Torment’s ear.
“It’s a communication device,” Ella explained while unbuckling his watch and putting it on her own wrist. Like all the other tech the men wore, she expected the watch would have a tracking device in it. Raze would be less irritated if he could locate her. She pried free the earbud and put it in her pocket. “We can use it if we get into trouble.”
“Let’s hope we don’t need it then.” Jolly picked up the two oranges that had rolled out of Torment’s pocket when he fell. “I’m hungry,” she explained with a quirk of a smile. Oranges hidden away in her own jacket, she grasped Ella’s hands and hauled her to her feet. “We should go.”
Ella cast one final glance at Torment’s unconscious form before rushing out of the office with Jolly.
Chapter Twenty-One
“She did what?” Raze gawked at Torment. The operative had been tracked down after failing to check-in at the correct time. By the time Raze and the SRU squad had landed in The City with Keen’s investigators, Torment had been patched up and cleared by medical. Now standing in their mobile command unit near the bombed-out election HQ, Raze tried to make sense of what Torment had just told him. “Ella or her friend?”
“Jolly electrocuted me,” he snarled and lifted his shirt to show the angry burn marks on his back. “Her friend.”
Raze studied the circular wounds. “With what?”
“Some device that I assume her tinker sister made,” Torment grumbled. “Everyone had cleared out of the shop by the time I woke up, and I didn’t have time to waste trying to get more information.”
“Like the old non-lethal pulse guns our ship security forces used to carry?” he asked, trying to visualize the device in question.
“Exactly like that,” Torment agreed, “only not as sophisticated. I’m lucky they didn’t kill me. The juice on that thing was cranked all the way up. The pulse cycle rate wasn’t calibrated correctly either. How I didn’t have a seizure or cardiac arrest is a mystery.”
“I’m sure they didn’t mean to kill you,” Raze said hurriedly. Thinking of Ella, he couldn’t imagine that she would attack Torment without a reason. Eyes narrowed, he asked, “What were you doing when the friend zapped you?”
Torment dropped his attention to the screen in front of him showing the tangled streets of The City. “I was trying to get her back to the Valiant.”
“How?” Raze suspected Torment had put his hands on Ella, probably not in a cruel or violent way, but enough to scare her friend. “Did you grab her?”
Torment nodded once. “I wasn’t trying to hurt her. I was trying to drag her out of that shop. She didn’t want to leave. Jolly doesn’t know me well enough to know that I would never hurt Ella. She was trying to protect her friend.”
Raze frowned. “Don’t grab my mate again, Torment.”
Torment answered with a silent nod.
With that out of the way, he turned toward the digital map Torment had in front of him. “So, where is Ella?”
“She’s underground,” Torment explained, touching the screen and enlarging a section of it. “Her chip pinged it’s last location here. The signal in the chip is too weak to penetrate the ground and tunnels.”
“Ping her handheld,” Raze said. “She’s always carrying it.”
Torment shook his head. “She left it in her hospital room.”
An invisible hand squeezed his heart as he realized she likely hadn’t gotten his last message. She had run off to confront her past without knowing how much she meant to him. If anything happens to her…
Forcing that thought out of his mind, he focused on the problem in front of him right now. “We’ll have to get into the tunnels. She can’t have gone far on foot. How long ago did she dump you?”
Torment lifted the cuff of his jacket to check his watch. He scowled at his bare wrist. “Where the hell..?”
“Did you get robbed while you were unconscious?”
“Ella and her friend locked me in the office. No one could have reached me.” Torment met his curious gaze. “Ella must have taken it.” He touched his ear. “My earbud, too.”
“That’s my girl.” Raze smiled. “Cipher?”
“Boss?” He stepped forward and awaited his instructions.
“Get a lock on Torment’s watch and patch me through to that earpiece. I want to talk to my mate.”
“On it.”
Feeling more in control, Raze stood with hands clasped behind his back and watched the soldiers and airmen moving around the mobile command unit. He caught Torment glancing in his direction as if assessing him. With a sigh, Raze asked, “What?”
“You are unnervingly calm.”
“I had a lot of time to think on the flight here.”
“About?”
“Ella, obviously,” he answered with a touch of annoyance. “She’s survived so much. She has street smarts. She knows how to read people. She has friends and contacts all over The City. She’s probably safer on her own than with any of us beside her.”
“I’ll be honest. I expected you to come in here and demand we shut down the whole city and mount a rescue.”
“I don’t think Ella wants to be rescued. Not the night we took her off that prison transport and not today. She wants to stand on her own two feet.” He paused before adding, “But that doesn’t mean that she can’t also need me standing beside her.”
“Boss, we’ve found her.” Cipher flicked the data on his tablet screen to the larger screen in front of them. “We can’t tell if she’s underground or above. We’re only able to get a location, not a depth. It looks like some kind of abandoned factory.”
“And the earbud?”
“It’s turned off.”
“Can you send a message via Torment’s watch? Tell her to turn it on and put it in her ear?”
“I can, but what if she’s in a dangerous situation? What if the message alert is heard?”
“
No,” Torment interrupted quickly. “Our equipment has all sounds disabled. They vibrate, but at a very low frequency that’s inaudible. She’ll feel it if it’s in her pocket or hand.”
“Try that,” Raze ordered. “We need to be able to communicate with her.”
“I’ll see if I can raise her.” Cipher disappeared to a corner to do his work.
“What’s it like on the ground?” Raze turned his attention back to Torment. “Are my men at high risk?”
“No higher than usual,” Torment replied. “It seems that the populace has decided the bombing was a scheme by the government to steal this election. Our embedded operatives have sent intelligence updates, and it’s not good. The government had already instituted a series of election security measures that were designed to keep the poorer citizens from voting. After the raid on the tunnels and now this?” He shook his head. “This place is one bad decision away from a full city-wide revolution.”
“Not our problem,” Raze said matter-of-factly. “We aren’t here to provide police services. If they want our help settling down a pissed off populace, they can agree to the terms of the treaties we’ve offered. I’m not putting a single one of my men in harm’s way for that piece of shit government.”
A strange look crossed Torment’s face. “Did they tell you about Ella’s shelter?”
“Yes.” He clenched his jaw. Even now, the white-hot fury of it burned low in his gut. He couldn’t even imagine Ella’s heartbreak. She had worked so hard toward achieving that goal. Those homeless girls meant so much to her. Where would they go? How would they stay safe?
“She took the news well,” Torment said. “Later, though, when she’s alone, she’ll need you. That’s a blow that will hurt.”
“I know,” he replied softly.
“Shit,” Torment cursed suddenly. He patted the front pocket of his pants and made a face. “Speaking of hurt…” He retrieved strips of a pain patch. “She didn’t take them with her.”