Chapter 6 Present
Present
Jack
“You can’t trust him,” I say emphatically, bringing my hand down on the meeting table hard enough to hear it crack under the sudden impact.
“We aren’t saying we should go in without any recon at all, Agent Roth,” Snow replies sternly, like a highbrow headmistress at a school for over-pampered bluebloods.
She has a particularly garish flint to her eyes, too, that has me wishing I could challenge her to an alleyway fistfight.
“But we can’t just ignore the information your brother’s given us either if there’s even a chance it’s real.
I’ve already contacted the nearest FISA base in that same area, and they’re dispatching a team right now to check out the location for its validity.
When they report back, we’ll decide what to do from there. ”
Watching Leo interview my brother was one of the tensest experiences of my life, and that shit’s got some real hardcore competition.
Dan used every tactic we were trained for by OI to get under any interrogator’s skin, to push and stab at them, to dance and swerve until they’re tied in knots and full of holes, bleeding from places they were too twisted up to see.
“Fuck this!” I snarl, getting up from my seat and storming out of the room.
Ever since Dan gave up that obviously bullshit information about the machine, I’ve been stuck in a meeting with Snow and our unit, tearing his intel to shreds, arguing over what the hell we should do with it.
My vote to ignore anything Dan tells us has been summarily shot down every time I try to voice it, probably because Snow is getting desperate, which is fair given the enormous crap storm coming our way if we don’t find the machine before OI decides to use it.
She’s likely getting all sorts of sonic pressure from her bosses in government to get this shit sorted.
Leo follows me out of the meeting, jogging to catch up with me on my hostile stomp down the corridor, frightening young junior agents, sending them scurrying, like packs of fish dispersing in the path of a pike that would otherwise devour them.
That’s right, arseholes, you all want to survive like Nemo?
You’d better move the fuck out of my way.
“You know I’m with you, yeah?” Leo prods when I make no move to acknowledge him. When I don’t respond, he carries on. “I think Dan is lying too. Almost certainly. I just can’t decide if he’s doing it on purpose, or if OI has ordered him to.”
“I don’t give a shit either way,” I growl, frustrated by just about every fucking thing happening around me, mostly because there’s not a lot I can do about any of it. “We have to work out how to un-mindfuck him.”
Leo’s brows draw together in a slight frown, thinking that over before nodding in agreement. “We need to talk to Rohan, then.”
“Where the hell do you think we’re going?” I gesture aggressively at the hallway in front of us.
Rohan was absent from the meeting, apparently down in his lab, pissing around with his microscope and unethically obtained samples of blood.
Snow told us that he’s trying to figure out how to combat the mind-control drugs, how to reverse their effects or prevent them from taking hold in the first place.
Our second-best bet to stopping OI from literal world domination is a blocker or inoculation of some kind against the drugs they created.
It's unlikely Rohan will be able to do anything meaningful in the time we probably have left before OI pulls the trigger of their mwah ha ha evil plan, but he’s got a better chance than most of succeeding.
Possibly a better chance than anybody else in the world, given how he had access to OI’s lab during his incarceration.
Stone Senior didn’t give him full access, because he’s not a complete idiot, but Rohan had enough to understand how these drugs work as well as how they’re made.
As predicted, we find Rohan squinting at something through his microscope.
He has a worryingly distressed expression on his face, a brand of emotion I didn’t think him capable of feeling, let alone expressing so blatantly.
It’s awful, I hate it, I want it to stop immediately.
An unsure-of-himself, frantic Rohan is like blunt teeth scraping over my scalp: disturbing, and it makes me twitchy.
Rohan looks up at us after a moment, scribbling down notes in a pad next to him.
He doesn’t use a laptop or tablet to take notes, like most of the scientists I’ve seen; he’s probably too aware of how easily anything tech can be hacked and the information on them stolen by an enemy with enough skill and imagination.
Rohan raises his eyebrows at us expectantly, and that’s all the opening I need.
“We need to go after Stone,” I say, planting my hands down on the worktable and leaning toward him. “You in?”
It probably means something that I’ve stopped thinking of Rohan as a Stone, that he’s a Sathe now, his mother’s son, not his father’s. I don’t know when that happened, or if it matters, but it’s flipped a switch inside my head somewhere along the way.
Rohan doesn’t pretend not to understand what I’m talking about. He grips the edge of the table and pushes his shoulders back, leaning toward me as well. “Are we taking him out clean,” he asks, voice low and ridged with malice, “or are we getting messy with it?”
“All I care about is what he’s done to my brother,” I tell him, feeling the grim twist at the corners of my mouth, that hungry, thrashing creature in my chest uncurling itself at the scent of blood in the air, “and how to undo it. After that’s sorted, we can put as many holes in him as we’ve got left in the chamber. ”
Rohan is already nodding along in agreement.
“Sounds like a good time to me.” There’s that same gleam to his black eyes that I remember from the day we met properly for the first time, when I woke up in medical, something purely animal, primal, instinctual to things like us, the need to hunt down a threat and kill it, the solution a mangled, bloody, final thing.
I can feel Leo’s agitation practically vibrating from him in steady waves, and I understand it even if I don’t share the feeling.
No matter what he might believe about his nerve, he hasn’t got the same impulses as Rohan or me, wasn’t raised to murder his problems at birth before they could grow up to become bigger problems, to rip the heart out of anything with larger claws and sharper teeth that draws in too close.
“But how do we find him?” Leo asks, visibly pushing aside his discomfort for my sake. It fills me with affection for him, the fact he’s willing to do and be part of things he’d be against in any other circumstance just because it’s for something that matters to me.
Leo looks from Rohan to me, brows pinching together. “I mean, he’s a jet-setting billionaire with a thousand places to hide all over the world.”
It’s definitely a point. If we’d known where Ian Stone was all this time, he’s the first person we’d have gone to about tracking down where OI had stashed Rohan.
Rohan’s mouth tugs up into a blithe smile, eyes brightening from simple black to glimmering onyx.
It’s a mix of smug and excited and has me feeling a reactive mashup of giddy and hostile.
I want to smack the look off the haughty bastard’s face and demand to know what’s got him so hyped up so I can share in it because I’m certain it’s good news for us.
“What did you do, you sneaky little shit?” I ask, a vague buzz of anticipation humming under my skin, like a flurry of bees are looking to make a nest somewhere between my muscles and bones.
“Planted a bug on the fucker, didn’t I?” Rohan crows, arrogantly triumphant. At Leo’s shocked “seriously?” he rolls his eyes and tuts. “What, you thought I spent all that time I was caught by OI rocking in the corner of a cell? Knitting? Alphabetising my dust-bunny collection?
“Chill with the ‘all that time’ bullshit,” I say, wrinkling my nose at him.
“It was, like, a month. Barely. And I almost got shot two dozen times, storming random fucking OI bases searching for your ungrateful arse.” I jerk my chin at Leo.
“This one was practically your knight in shining Kevlar.” I shake my head, vaguely disgusted by the memory of Leo displaying his bone-deep hero tendencies.
Rohan pointedly ignores me and turns his attention to Leo when my partner asks him, “Where’d you plant the bug?”
“Dear old dad let me out of my cell and into the lab,” Rohan explains. “Big mistake, giving me access like that. He kept swerving too close, and I stole his phone, planted the tracker, and put it back in his pocket before he noticed it was gone.”
Leo looks annoyingly impressed at the basic slight-of-hand trick Rohan apparently performed.
“Brilliant, mate,” he says, grinning brightly at Rohan, who seems to revel in the approval, shooting me a furtive glance just so I know his preening is at least partially to irritate me, the prick, which in turn has my hand twitching to smack both of them.
“Hmm, at least one of us was trained right,” Rohan says to me in a clear retaliation for what I said when we rescued him.
I’m about to come back at him with a suitably scathing retort when the entire base is wracked by an explosion, everything from the walls to the ceiling to the floor shuddering violently, like we’ve just been hit by an earthquake.
But it isn’t an earthquake. Alarms start blaring a second later, almost deafeningly loud.
Leo flinches, agony splintering across his face as he bends over at the waist, hands going to his ears. His new senses are still overly sensitive, the alarm too much for him to take this soon. I reach for him, steadying him so he doesn’t crumple to the floor from the overwhelming pain.
“We’re under attack!” Rohan shouts, gaze moving frantically to the exit.
“It’s OI,” I yell back, arms holding Leo up and already shuffling him toward the same door Rohan’s eyes went to first.