by CJ Brightley
He raised one eyebrow and stared at her for a long moment.
“I’m sorry.”
He smiled, amused by her discomfort. “I should have been paying better attention.”
He said they were tracked, that the IPF would know if they got too excited. “Why hasn’t the IPF found us here? The vertril keep coming.”
He gave her another faint, sideways smile. “The vertril are excited when they find that Niall and I are here. I have to make sure they are more excited as they chase me, so the IPF doesn’t pinpoint this location.”
“You mean you tease them?” Now that would be terrifying.
He nodded. “You could say that.”
Aria licked her lips. “Why did you decide to let me go tonight? I’m glad you did, but what made you change your mind?”
“I remembered something.” He studied her face. “Why did you keep following me?”
Remembered what? She shrugged. “I’m curious.” She wanted to add, and you’re interesting, but flushed with embarrassment and stifled the impulse. He’d never looked at her with anything that could possibly be construed as that sort of interest, even when Margot had prompted him.
She blushed even more when she realized his eyes were still on her. His lips quirked in a faint smile as he returned to his lunch.
Her embarrassment turned to irritation, and she scowled at his black curls. “You know, it’s not polite to laugh at people.”
He blinked at her innocently when he looked up. “Was I?”
She scowled even more as she looked down, feeling his eyes still on her flushed face. Was he embarrassed? At his own rudeness or on her behalf? She didn’t feel any censure in his gaze, but neither did she want to look up to try to decipher his expression. He surely read much more in her face than she did in his.
His quiet kindness, his courage, and the ferocity of his love for Niall tugged at her heart. But just because she had begun to care for him did not mean he felt anything in return. She told herself it was foolish. His expressions, the quirky smiles that made her heart beat faster, were human. She assumed they meant what they would mean if he were human. But he was not human, and it was easy to forget that.
She felt her heart thudding as he continued to study the top of her head.
After a long silence, he said softly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
She glanced up to see his eyes still on her, more serious now. She shrugged awkwardly. “It’s my fault. I’m sorry. I’m just irritable. Because I’m nervous.” She swallowed and tried to smile. Play it off. Just because you have a crush doesn’t mean he needs to know it. Don’t be stupid, Aria.
His eyes rested on her face, and she had the disconcerting feeling that he understood everything. Then he smiled and said, “First missions are always nerve-wracking. I like to think of all the possibilities and how I will deal with them. But if that makes you nervous, think only of your part and how your courage will enable the mission to succeed.”
She looked down again. “Thank you.” For pretending you didn’t just watch me embarrass myself.
Chapter Nine
Ten o’clock.
Owen, Gabriel, Aria, Niall, Geoffrey, and Jonah’s entire squad wore tiny wireless headsets with microphones that pressed against their throats. Designed for the military back before the Revolution, they still worked flawlessly, but there weren’t enough for everyone. They’d tested the headsets that morning and decided on codes. One click of the tongue for yes, two for no, at least when silence was an issue.
The resistance forces had fourteen bulletproof vests. For the first mission, everyone wore a vest except a few of those providing cover fire.
“Do you have a video camera?” Owen asked.
Gabriel and Eli looked at each other. “Yes. Somewhere.” Eli found it, an old digital model, with only a few hours of video capability. “It’s not much good in the dark. At all.”
Owen shrugged. “I’ll take a penlight and see what I can get.”
The target building was innocuous, more like an office building than a military facility. Aria didn’t know what they expected to find inside. The squads spread out to cover each corner of the building. It wasn’t large, just one corner of a city block, bordered by trash-strewn alleys to the rear that separated it from the other buildings on the block. The building was older, the concrete facade slightly worn, but not enough to stand out on this street. The windows on the first floor had all been bricked up, but that might have been an older modification. The main door showed faint lines of metal wiring crisscrossing inside the thick glass panes. Despite the protective measures, the inside of the well-lighted lobby was visible to Aria and the others standing outside.
It was clear the building was secure, but it could have been anything from a corporate headquarters to a bank. Nothing about it was obviously military. The armed guards carried law-enforcement issue pistols and the reception area had metal detectors in front of heavy metal doors. No insignia or logos marked the doors or reception desk. The guards were alert but relaxed, and Aria imagined they were used to long, uneventful night shifts.
Owen stayed some distance back from the building while they got in position. He slipped into the alley and they heard nothing for several minutes.
“Going in a third-floor window.” His murmur would have been inaudible to someone standing in front of him, but the microphone picked it up.
Silence.
“Desks. Papers.”
Silence.
The silence dragged on so long that Aria would have been worried, except that she could see Gabriel’s face beside her. He seemed content to let Owen work without prompting him for a status update yet.
“First floor now,” Owen said.
Silence for long minutes.
“Do you want us to come in?” Jonah asked.
“No.”
More silence.
The guards chatted with each other. One of them pointed to something behind the desk, and Aria wondered if they had monitors back there, with a video feed of whatever Owen was doing. But what they saw didn’t alarm them, and they went back to their discussion. She breathed a sigh of relief, then winced when she heard it over the headset. Everyone else was silent and professional.
“Going to the basement.”
After another long silence, Gabriel asked, “Are you finding anything?”
Owen did not answer immediately. “Yes,” he said finally. “Is it advantageous or disadvantageous to leave evidence of an intrusion?”
Gabriel’s lips flattened as he thought. “What sort of evidence?”
Silence.
“Owen?”
A slight crackle in the microphone. “I’m three floors down now. Reception is spotty. Opinions on evidence?”
“What sort of evidence?”
“Missing hard drives. Dead vertril. Chemical spills.”
Gabriel said finally, “Do as you think best.”
“Understood.” Then, “Losing reception. Remain in place.”
It was nearly an hour later before they heard, “All clear. Mission complete.”
He met them at the hotel with his rucksack slung over his shoulder, splattered with blood.
“You look gruesome.” Aria grimaced at him. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
Inside, he emptied his rucksack on the conference table. Eight removable hard drives, a handful of folders filled with papers, and the digital camera. Then a larger bundle that had filled the rest of his pack. “We can analyze it later. We need to go. It’s late.” He jogged to his room and reappeared a moment later in a clean shirt. His face was still streaked with blood, and he accepted Aria’s offer of a water bottle. He splashed water into his hands and on his face, scrubbed quickly and wiped it off, letting the water fall to the floor.
He spoke while he cleaned up. “The camera is full, but I don’t know how much you’ll be able to see. The basement is huge, the whole city block. I didn’t explore all of it, but I got enough. The f
irst basement floor is secure; most of the hard drives came from there. Possibly some sort of planning and intelligence center, lots of computers, conference rooms, secure video links. The second floor down had the chemical work; there were a number of labs.”
He set the water bottle aside and untied the bundle to reveal a number of glass jars tied together so they wouldn’t clank or break. “They’re labeled, but I don’t know what they do. The names aren’t familiar. These three have some non-standard chemical structure. I’ll be able to decipher some of their properties, but it will take time. I’d need to study more about human biology before I could guess what they would be used for. These others are mundane, but again, I don’t know what they do. If you have a pharmacist or chemist among you, you might be able to figure it out, but I assume these are custom-made cocktails so it may not be obvious.
“The third floor underground had vertril of various ages. I killed them. This drive came from a computer on that floor; I’m hoping it contains documentation on them. That floor also connected directly to the sewer and underground rail tunnels.”
Gabriel gaped at him. “That’s amazing. And I thought windows in the secure buildings didn’t open.”
“They don’t.” At Gabriel’s perplexed stare, Owen added, “I took it out of the frame. I put it back when I left, but given the other destruction, that was probably unnecessary. At least they won’t know how I got in.”
Gabriel let out a long, slow breath. “We have much to do.”
“Not now. We need to go. If they’ve discovered the intrusion, the other facilities will heighten their security.”
“I don’t think they noticed.” Gabriel frowned. “How did you do that, by the way?”
“Disabled motion sensors and proximity alarms. But at least some of the vertril had already been tagged. The tags report on their vital signs at intervals and alarm at irregularities. If the alarms haven’t already been triggered, they will been soon.”
Gabriel nodded. “Understood. Ready when you are.”
The second mission had Aria’s heart in her throat before they even departed.
Owen, Aria, and the squad leaders wore the headsets. The fourteen bulletproof vests outfitted everyone going into the facility except Owen and Jonah. Those providing cover from the walls would go without.
Evrial tried to give Jonah hers, but he flatly refused to take a vest while a woman didn’t have one. “The answer is no, Evrial. I know you’re a better shot than I am, and it doesn’t matter. The answer is still no.”
Gabriel silenced them with a look. “We have a few night vision scopes, too. Dominic, Geoffrey, and I will take those, unless you want one, Owen.”
“No.” Owen shook his head.
They made their way to the Eastborn Imperial Security Facility by squads. Owen guided Niall and Aria through the tunnels; the Fae didn’t seem to need night vision, and they made no noise as they slipped through the darkness. They climbed a ladder and emerged into a side street, where they kept to the shadows, moving through deserted alleys and darkened commercial zones. Once Aria stopped walking completely, lost in the black night. A moment later Niall’s cool hand slipped into hers and drew her forward, around a corner, to where the faint starlight illuminated the alley enough for her to follow Owen again.
They reached the facility, though Aria could see little. All the lights were trained inward; outside the massive wall, the shadows were dark.
Owen left her and Niall for some minutes, then came back and murmured, “I disabled the motion sensor at the top of the wall. I’ll help you up.”
He’d also secured a rope to the top edge of the wall with an eyebolt, which he used to climb up. Aria followed him with some difficulty, and he leaned down to haul her up by one arm.
“Stand here,” he said, helping her get her feet onto another rope he’d tied between two eyebolts four feet apart about two and a half feet below the top edge of the wall. Niall followed her, and she felt the rope shift beneath her under his slight weight. It was tight, but with both of them on it, they sagged to the middle. She put her left foot on the eyebolt near her for stability. Owen slithered onto the top of the wall, where he lay motionless. “Can you shoot from here?” He leaned down to whisper the question between them, nearly inaudible.
She nodded and glanced at Niall. The wall was wide enough that he had to stretch to see the ground inside, but he nodded as well. The boy appeared as cool and unworried as Owen did, but Aria felt her heart pounding. The pistol felt heavy, the holster dragging at her belt.
Owen murmured so softly she heard him more clearly through the headset than through the air. “The front gate guards have not been alerted.”
Clicks told her that the others heard.
“Were these already here?” she mouthed to Niall.
He shook his head, pointed to Owen, and mimed screwing the bolts into the concrete.
“By hand?”
He nodded.
Owen waited another few minutes. “In position?” he asked finally. He looked down and nodded to them, then slithered off the far edge of the wall. He dropped to the ground thirty feet below in a soundless crouch and paused a moment.
The inside of the complex was lit by spotlights mounted on the walls and the corners of each building. Aria thought he looked painfully exposed in the harsh light. No alarm sounded, though, and Owen crossed the two hundred feet to the nearest building in moments.
He slipped along the wall, a silent shadow, until he reached a utility door. It had no outside handle, but he leaned against it for a moment and then opened it. He reached up to the top of the frame and fiddled for a moment, then disappeared, leaving the door cracked behind him. Still no alarm sounded, and Aria glanced toward the front gate again. She couldn’t see the guards from her position, but she would see if they moved into the facility or if the gate moved.
She held her gun tightly, her hands sweaty despite the chill. Her eyes scanned the open space.
In her ear, Owen’s voice came through the headset. “Teams in now, over the wall. The door is open. Down the hall, left at the end, down the stairs, right to the end of the corridor. I’ll meet you.”
Aria glanced to her right. The three teams, fifteen people, rappelled down the wall and streaked across the grass without a sound. She looked back to the front gate. Nothing stirred yet.
Silence for some moments, then Owen said softly, “This is where the alarms start. From here we have three or four minutes at most. Your only concern is getting the prisoners out. I’ll handle the rest.”
A moment later, Aria winced at the deafening wail of an alarm that blared through the headset. On the outside of the building, floodlights flared to life along every wall, and through the second-floor windows, strobe lights pulsed red and white.
Aria and Niall kept their guns trained on the guards now visible at the front gate. They didn’t move from the gate, though they glanced back at the buildings. Obviously, they’d been trained to hold their positions regardless of distractions.
An explosion sounded from a distant corner of the complex. “Distraction one is in progress,” Geoffrey’s voice said through the headset. “Guards arriving in minutes. How is the front gate?”
“Guards holding their positions,” said Dominic. His squad was on the other side of the gate.
Niall motioned to her and she spoke into the headpiece as she figured out what he was saying. “Niall will take care of the guards. Don’t shoot yet.” She stared at him, trying to read his pale face in the shadows. “Really? Can you do that?”
He nodded. He wore Owen’s swords, but she knew he didn’t intend to use them. He clicked the safety on his pistol back on, leaped from the rope and disappeared into the shadows without a sound.
A few moments later, she saw a guard disappear. One moment he was there, at the edge of the spotlight, and the next he was gone. Another guard looked for him, stepped closer to the darkness, head raised in curiosity but not worry. That time she saw a small shadow leap at
his back, and then he was down, flat on the ground with Niall’s skinny body crouched over him. He dragged the guard into the darkness before the two remaining guards noticed.
Aria looked back at the building. The alarm still blared through the headset; it must be deafening inside the building. She heard a dull clank, then Owen’s voice.
“El forgive them.” He was breathless, though she couldn’t decipher whether it was with exertion or emotion. The words made her throat tighten; what horror had he seen to provoke that response?
A sudden crack nearly burst her eardrums, and Aria cried out, jerking off the headset. A moment later she struggled to put it back on, eyes flicking between the building and the front gate. All the guards were gone now, pulled out of sight, and Niall stepped into the light for a brief moment and waved.
“Front gate is open,” Dominic said before she could react. “No thanks to our team,” he added.
Evrial’s voice came over the headset for the first time. “We’ve encountered some difficulties here but should be out—” a burst of gunfire cut off her last words.
Silence, then several quick shots. “Still coming. Three guards down.”
Aria could hear them breathing hard now, and several sets of pounding feet. “Yes,” to some question she hadn’t heard.
“Clear to exit?”
“Yes.”
The door opened and figures streamed across the grass. Harsh white floodlights made the long dash to the front gate painfully exposed, and Aria held her breath as she scanned for threats. She couldn’t identify all the figures, but she saw Evrial with a small form over her shoulders, perhaps a child. The others hauled adults with arms slung across their shoulders, the Fae staggering, stumbling alongside the humans.
She didn’t see Owen.
“Going back in.” Jonah’s voice came over the headset, breathless. He’d been one of the first out and she saw him sprinting back to the door, another three men following close behind.
“Going home. Have twelve Fae. We’re slow but we can make it. Bartok is staying to help the next group.” That was Evrial’s voice.