by Natalie Grey
Intern? ADAM, what are you talking about?
Dr. Molinero frowned. “My intern?”
ADAM, you better have a good answer for this.
>>Just keep saying what I tell you<<
“I assumed this was an intern’s work.” Jennifer, realizing where ADAM was going with this, struggled to hold in her laughter. It was all she could do to frown in concern. “There are numerous very basic mistakes on the first few pages alone.”
Dr. Molinero looked torn between anger and shame. “Dr. Yordan, this is not your area of expertise.”
“It’s not the area I’ve chosen to work in,” Jennifer said loftily, trying to add a theatrical flair to ADAM’s suggestions, “but I happen to be well-versed in immunology. Not to mention, one doesn’t have to know immunology to see that these calculations are off.”
Dr. Molinero’s face went even paler. “I do not appreciate the suggestion that something is wrong with my work.”
“And I don’t appreciate that when Mr. Marcari comes to check on our process, he’s going to find that we were held up by incompetence this basic.” Jennifer dropped the papers back on the desk.
“I was… just testing you!” Molinero’s voice sounded wild.
She didn’t need ADAM’s expertise to know a lie when she heard one. “I know you were trying to test me. I also know this was your real work.” She held the papers out to him. “Consider this your warning, doctor. I won’t go to Hugo, this time. But I will go to him if I ever see these sorts of mistakes in your work again.”
She broke off as she saw Hsu walk by in the hallway. Immediately upon arriving, Jennifer had been taken to Hugo and Hsu had been bundled off in another direction, and Jennifer still needed to confer with the other woman.
Molinero saw her look. “What?”
“That… other new scientist. Which lab is she in?”
“Why?” He looked suspicious now.
Shit. Um…
“Because I haven’t had a chance to inspect her work yet.” Jennifer lifted her nose and swept out of the room.
CHAPTER FIVE
One of the guards set a cup of coffee down at Gerard’s side. “Anything else, sir?”
Gerard looked him over. The man’s slightly rumpled uniform said DOMINGUEZ on the nametag. If Gerard remembered correctly, this man had come back to serve Hugo from somewhere in Italy. He’d been tanned and thin when he returned, but he was putting on weight now. Gerard’s lip curled. Dominguez would be useless in a fight.
He needed to institute a better training regimen, clearly.
“Nothing else,” he said shortly. “Leave me. And I am not to be disturbed, is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.” Jacobo Dominguez left, looking at the floor. He didn’t want Gerard to see the flash of anger in his eyes.
The man would surely take offense, and Jacobo told himself that this was a good job. He could still see Gerard’s eyes lingering on the wrinkles at the cuffs and collar, and so he straightened his uniform as he walked through the halls.
Not for the first time, Jacobo thought of quitting. He could keep telling himself all day long that that the pay was good and the work was easy, but there had been a shift in the air recently.
The boss made surprise inspections of the facilities. New scientists were brought in and the old ones disappeared—but Telmo pointed out that they never seemed to take their passports out of the safe in the guard captain’s office. Gerard was everywhere, inspecting everything, and the experiments…
The experiments started to make Jacobo sad after a while.
At first, he told himself that they were clearly criminals, sold from some of the local prisons. He heard about that sort of thing happening.
They’d been turned into actual werewolves, which was incredible. He wished he could tell people, but he could only talk about it with the other guards. The experiments were actually able to transform, just like in the books Jacobo read sometimes, and the scientists could make them attack targets, who were probably other prisoners.
But even knowing that they were prisoners, it got difficult to see them in their cages. They looked too thin and hopeless, even when they were wolves. Jacobo didn’t like that.
He stopped as he caught sight of the new scientist through one of the windows. She was kneeling down to whisper into one of the cages.
Maybe she felt sorry for the wolves, too.
Jacobo watched as she poked her fingers through the bars. He would never have been brave enough to do that, but the wolf didn’t bite them off like he was afraid of. Instead, she smiled and seemed to be scratching the wolf’s muzzle.
Jacobo decided she was probably not the sort of person who would like Gerard, no matter that Gerard seemed to want her.
He also decided that if she was brave enough to put her fingers through the bars like that, then he was brave enough to say hello to her the next time he saw her.
Rules be damned.
—
Back in the guard captain’s study, Gerard flipped through video clips of the new scientists.
So far, nothing looked incriminating.
He frowned and crossed his arms over his chest as he watched a clip of the dark-haired one. She spread the documents out on the table and looked them over, and then she looked up at the ceiling. He could see her lips moving.
Maybe she was doing calculations in her head? It would be strange, but scientists were strange.
Anyway, at least she wasn’t taking pictures of the documents.
More video clips. She was well-behaved. She didn’t talk much with the other scientists, as he’d been afraid she might. She didn’t seem to like Molinero, which Gerard could almost sympathize with. The man was a self-important ass who kept failing to get results.
Maybe she really was on the level. Maybe her story about joining the Velingrad facility was accurate.
Maybe it was the other one who was the traitor, the Chinese woman from Sofia. She’d been a captive there for eleven years without any escape attempts, but perhaps she had been a sleeper agent the whole time.
Gerard scanned the videos of her next. Like the other woman, Hsu was meticulous in her work. She filed papers neatly, she never took photos, and she seemed to avoid the other scientists whenever possible.
She did, however, seem strangely reluctant to perform experiments. For someone who claimed that this was her life’s work, she always looked very unhappy
But the next video clip was very, very interesting: the two of them in close-headed conversation in one of the corridors.
Gerard’s face broke into a smile. At last.
He watched while the two scientists conferred, and then he slowed down and watched the video again. They stood close together, but he did not see any flash drives or papers change hands.
But as they walked away from each other, Hsu looked nervously back over her shoulder as if to make sure no one was watching.
Gerard scanned the rest of the videos. None of them seemed to show anything wrong. The two women did not cross paths again. Neither of them sent messages to the other over the in-house servers, and there were no unauthorized attempts to contact the outside world via email. His elation was turning to frustration. If there was a nefarious purpose to them being here, he could not find it.
He was still sure something was wrong.
He stood up and left the room, walking quickly through the hallways. He barely noticed as people flattened themselves against the walls to get out of his way, or as they watched him to see where he might be going. They always liked to scurry in the other direction, like mice.
Like he couldn’t find them.
He stopped in front of one lab in particular. The windows on each had been one of his suggestions for the facilities. He did not like the idea of the scientists shutting themselves up in there and thinking they could do whatever they wanted.
The dark-haired scientist, “Irina,” was kneeling on the floor by one of the cages, stroking the muzzle of one of the wolves. She
murmured something and stood, dusting off her hands.
She caught sight of him and the smile vanished from her face.
Gerard turned and left wordlessly. Let her know she was being watched. Let her be afraid.
But she hadn’t seemed afraid. She’d seemed to be daring him to make something of what he’d seen.
He didn’t like that, and he’d show her as much, but not in the way she expected. He lifted a finger to flag down one of the guards. “Find Ying Hsu and have her brought to the main house. Make sure she is walked past Laboratory 7.”
—
The real problem was that all of this was boring as hell.
Jennifer stared at the paperwork spread out in front of her and waited for ADAM to say something.
Anything.
Literally anything.
She spent her days staring at paperwork, noting down changes and data as ADAM directed her to, and trying to appear aloof enough that the other scientists wouldn’t bother her. Dr. Molinero was afraid of her since she had corrected his work, so he never came into her lab.
That was good. She hated him.
But she was lonely. In every mission she had run up until now, she’d had the camaraderie of her pack—and, later, her adopted pack and their allies. It made a difference to go into battle knowing that there were people with you who had your back without question, people you would protect with your own life. The jokes to take away the grimness of the fight, the encouragement to keep fighting when it seemed hopeless, the reminder of why you were fighting…
She missed it.
She missed Stephen.
Alone in the lab, Jennifer squeezed her eyes shut and tried to keep any of the tears from escaping. She knew that ADAM could probably arrange for her to speak to Stephen, and the possibility had tormented her for two weeks. She hadn’t been brave enough to ask, though—and Stephen hadn’t tried, either.
He was probably furious.
How was she ever going to be able to explain to him that this was something she had to do? That she couldn’t miss the opening to get the information they needed, and still live with herself?
Because at the end of the day, that was what it came down to.
Whether she decided to leave Earth with her new family, or stay with everything she had ever known, when nightfall came each day, she was going to have to live with the choices she made.
Only by following her sense of honor, and pushing herself to the breaking point and beyond, could she find out where her heart lay: stay, and give up Stephen and her new family, leave, and give up the planet that had raised her, not knowing if she would ever come back.
She pressed her fingers against her eyes and counted to ten.
>>Jennifer, are you okay?<<
Let honor be your guide.
“I’m all right, yes. Thank you, ADAM.” She picked her head up and swallowed. “Is the rest of the team on their way?”
>>Yes. They are currently making a plan. Because of you, they know for sure where to target now.<<
“Good.” She could hold out as long as was necessary… just as long as she knew her gamble was paying off.
She was shuffling through the papers again, however, when six guards marched by.
And between them was Hsu, hands cuffed in front of her.
Brussels, Belgium
Lance made his way around crates of engineering gear and into the sunny kitchen of the rental apartment. Located in a less-fashionable part of town, the old building was laced with so much metal that it was essentially a Faraday cage, so no smartphone-addicted youths wanted to rent it.
The apartment had been rented through three different cutouts and was theirs for the next six months. They hoped to be gone within the week, but hotels and short rentals tended to garner more scrutiny.
It was ideal for their purposes. Bobcat, Marcus, and William had spread out their work in the vaulted living room, and were testing tracker-blocking discs they had developed for the shipping containers of Bethany Anne’s shoes. There was a great deal of grumbling about impossibilities and doing all of this for shoes, but Lance had known enough engineers in his time to recognize the glint in their eyes.
They were enjoying the hell out of this.
His amused smile at the engineers faded as he observed the clipped conversation taking place in the kitchen.
Nathan had insisted on coming back to Earth, and there was still a definite chill in the air between him and Stephen. Neither had let the matter escalate even to raised voices because neither of them was foolhardy enough to risk another lecture from Bethany Anne.
The second lecture tended to be considerably less gentle than the first.
Still, even if their manners were polite, they were clearly angry with one another as they studied a map together. Stephen was leaning back in a chair, chin propped on one fist as he examined the topographical map, and Nathan’s arms were crossed over his chest.
“You’ll want to circle around and approach from the south,” Nathan explained. “Ideally from the sea.”
“I know,” Stephen said coldly. He looked over at Nathan. “I thought you were planning another visit to Bulgaria.”
Nathan went to pour himself a cup of coffee, “There’s not much to plan. Stoyan and Irina will take us to their former Alpha.” He nodded to the corner, where the two Wechselbalg were deep in conversation with Peter.
Nathan was annoyed. His own plan to speak to the Alpha of Stoyan’s pack was not likely to result in anything. He had yet to meet a pack leader willing to give up their life and lead their pack entirely into the unknown, and very few even offered their pack the sanctioned chance to join Bethany Anne.
In all honesty, Nathan was not sure why he kept trying. Maybe it was just that he liked to believe the best of people, and he wanted the packs both to understand that there was a place for them in the world Bethany Anne was building—a place where they did not have to hide—and to realize that the world beyond Earth was something that was also their concern.
The further you got from your old life on Earth, the more you realized how petty the rivalries were.
None of them were going to survive long if something unfriendly came through that gate and decided to take Earth.
But his own attempts to explain that to people weren’t meeting with much success, and he didn’t like the idea of Jennifer being alone in Spain, and Stephen going alone to scout out the rescue plan. Stephen was the one who had lost her in the first place.
“ADAM suggests that Stephen disguise himself as a tourist.” Lance couldn’t see inside Nathan’s head, but he could see the frustration well enough. “Catalonia has a number of historical tours that might point out possible castles to examine, and while Hugo doubtless has people in place to warn him about new people in town, we don’t think he’s watching the tour busses.”
“A tourist.” Stephen looked pained.
“You won’t be alone, though.” Lance grinned. “Guess who’s going with you?”
Stephen stared at him. He could not think who might be going with them. Then he looked sharply over his shoulder into the other room, where a shout was closely followed by the sound of a small explosion.
“Them?” He gaped at Lance. “You think I’ll be able to keep a low profile with them?”
Lance grinned. “A low profile? No. But you really think anyone’s going to realize those three are geniuses unless they get near a set of wrenches? Besides, they need to scan the area for good evac routes for the shoes.”
William stuck his head around the door. “I’m looking forward to seeing Spain. We aren’t leaving until tomorrow, though, right?”
Lance gave him a look of deep misgiving. “Yes. Why?”
“Well, since we’re in Belgium…”
Nathan, Stephen, and Lance only stared blankly until Bobcat pushed William aside.
“Beer,” he explained. “Now come on. You guys going to sample the local culture, or what?”
—
Jennifer
paced back and forth. In the fifteen minutes since Hsu had been marched past her office, she had come up with about a hundred plans to rescue the other woman—but none of them were exactly viable. “I have to help her,” she muttered. She’d been saying that for the past few minutes, as if the urgency would help her.
>>It is too dangerous to interfere,<< ADAM said.
She snapped, “You think I don’t know that?” ADAM’s calm voice had helped her sometimes when she felt out of her depth, but right now, it annoyed her.
>>I simply fail to see how you can help her without interfering directly.<<
“So, what? I should just let her be executed?” Jennifer shot a look of pure fury up at the sky. “She’s an ally. You don’t just let an ally be hurt.”
>>Perhaps they do not mean to hurt her.<<
“Then why would she be in cuffs?”
>>Many reasons. Perhaps she engaged in criminal conduct and they are bringing her to a local police station. Perhaps, and more likely, they are wondering what you will do.<<
Jennifer sat down on her work stool with a thump. “Wait. You think that’s why they’re doing this?”
>>I only said it was possible. However, you have said that you think Gerard has doubts about you. Your cover stories state that you and Hsu both miraculously escaped the carnage at Velingrad. It is highly possible that he realizes you are connected, even if he does not know how.<<
“Oh, God,” Jennifer whispered. “You mean I put her in danger by coming here?”
>>Not necessarily. Hsu was abducted, remember. It would have taken us significantly longer to find her and rescue her without you coming here so that we could track you.<<
“That’s true.” Jennifer bit her lip. “I just… I don’t know what to do. Letting her face them alone seems wrong, doesn’t it?”
There was a long pause.
“ADAM? Please say something.”
>>You must weigh the cost of losing against the benefit you can do if your cover is not compromised,<< ADAM said finally.
In reality, he did not want to say anything at all. Stephen’s anger when he thought ADAM had encouraged Jennifer had given a new dimension to ADAM’s calculations.