Chapter 25 Twenty-Four #2
The fifth and sixth children went quietly, too quietly, like they'd already accepted their fate, whatever it might be.
By the time we arranged them against the wall of the corridor, we had a small collection of sedated bodies.
All except for the smallest girl with the rabbit, who remained in Rafael's arms, her tiny fingers clutched in his shirt even in sedation.
"Last one," Rafael said quietly.
A sharp sound from behind made me turn just in time to see Jasper emerge from a side corridor. He must have broken off from Diego to reach this part of the facility faster.
He didn't acknowledge me, didn't even glance my way. His eyes scanned the doors, landed on the last one at the end of the hall, and his entire body went rigid. His jaw clenched, hands curling into fists at his sides. He stared at that door like he'd been searching for it his entire life.
Then he yanked it open, and Jasper stepped inside without hesitation.
The crack of impact that followed was immediate and brutal. Jasper went flying backward, skidding across the polished floor on his ass, eyes wide.
A small figure launched through the doorway in pursuit, moving like a predator that made my own skills look clumsy by comparison. She couldn't have been more than nine, blonde hair cut short, her expression glittering with feral rage.
There was a tattoo on her shoulder—the number eight.
As soon as I saw it, my hand went instinctively to my shoulder, where I'd long ago covered up the number four that'd been put there against my will.
These fuckers didn't see us as people. We weren't even weapons until we proved ourselves. This little girl didn't even have a name. She was just Eight.
She went for Jasper's throat without hesitation, her small body a blur of perfect combat technique, each movement lethal. Jasper barely managed to block the first flurry of strikes, rolling backward to create distance.
Jasper scrambled to his feet as Eight launched another attack, this one a spinning kick that would have shattered his kneecap if it had connected.
He countered brutally, his movements precise and deadly.
Each strike was designed to disable, to create an opening for a killing blow.
He wasn't holding back just because she was a kid. He wasn't holding back at all.
The girl moved like nothing I'd ever seen. She didn't seem to register pain, twisted and flowed like gravity was merely a suggestion. She evaded his deadliest strikes with an animal instinct that defied training, her small body contorting in impossible ways to avoid fatal damage.
Rafael appeared at my side, eyes widening at the scene unfolding before us. "We need to stop this," he said, already moving forward.
I grabbed his arm. "Careful! She's dangerous!"
Diego rounded the corner at a run, taking in the situation quickly. "Fuck me, what did I miss?" he asked, already moving to intervene.
Eight sensed the shift in dynamics, the three of us now surrounding her.
She backed up slightly, body still coiled to strike, tracking every movement with inhuman focus.
She didn't retreat, didn't surrender. If anything, she looked more determined, like increased odds just made the game more interesting.
"We're not here to hurt you," Rafael said in that calming voice he'd used with the other children. "We're here to help."
Eight snapped her attention to him for a split second, just enough time for Diego to try to circle behind her. She sensed him instantly, whirling with a kick that caught him square in the stomach, driving the air from his lungs with an audible whoosh.
"Fuck," he gasped, staggering backward. "She's fast."
Jasper's hand moved to his waistband, producing a matte black pistol I hadn't even realized he was carrying.
"What the fuck?" I hissed as he pointed it right at Eight.
Rafael tensed beside me. "Jasper, no!"
Diego lunged forward but froze mid-step when Jasper swung the barrel slightly in his direction. Message received. We all stopped moving, like some fucked-up freeze tag game.
Everyone except Eight.
The girl didn't flinch or cower. No fear, no pleading, no childish terror existed in her expression.
Instead, she assessed Jasper coldly, her gaze narrowing slightly.
Then, in a move that would've made me proud if it wasn't so fucking disturbing, she stepped forward deliberately, pressing her forehead against the barrel of the gun.
Her eyes locked with Jasper's, pure challenge radiating from her tiny frame. Go ahead. Do it. I fucking dare you.
Jasper's hand trembled. His jaw clenched so tight I could hear teeth grinding. The gun barrel pressed harder against Eight's forehead, and she didn't move, didn't blink, just stared into him like she could see every broken piece inside and wasn't impressed.
The silence stretched. One second. Two. Three.
In my peripheral vision, Diego shifted his weight, calculating if he could close the distance before Jasper pulled the trigger.
Rafael had gone completely still beside me, barely breathing.
The moment crystallized into something sharp and terrible, the kind of crossroads where everything that comes after depends on a single choice.
Eight didn't blink. She didn't back down. She just stared into the face of death like she'd already danced with it a hundred times before.
If her training was anything like mine, she had.
Jasper's shoulders sagged, something inside him crumpling like wet paper.
He lowered the gun, his arm hanging limply at his side as if he'd been defeated by that look.
His face had shuttered completely, blank and locked down.
Eight didn't move, didn't relax her stance, just kept staring at him with those empty killer's eyes.
The second Jasper's arm fully lowered, Diego moved like lightning.
He materialized behind Eight with a syringe, driving the needle into her upper arm efficiently.
She twisted at the last second, nearly evading it, but the sedative was already in her system.
Her eyes flashed with fury, then glazed over as she dropped.
Diego caught her before she hit the ground, his face a perfect storm of rage. "What the actual fuck, Jasper?" he demanded, holding the unconscious girl gently despite the fury vibrating through every word. "You were really going to shoot a kid?"
Jasper holstered his weapon, face shuttering like someone flipped his off switch.
"Don't you dare go silent on me now," he spat, keeping his voice low despite the obvious fury. "You almost executed a little girl. In cold blood."
Jasper's jaw worked like he was chewing glass. He reached for Eight, trying to take her from Diego's arms.
Diego twisted away. "Not happening, amigo. You don't touch her until you explain what the fuck just happened."
Rafael stepped between them, ever the diplomat. "We don't have time for this," he said, all business. "Security could find us any minute. We need to move."
He was right. Whatever psychological horror show was playing out between Jasper and Eight could wait until we weren't in a facility full of people who wanted us dead.
"Three minutes until guard rotation," I reminded them, checking my watch. "Either we move these kids now, or we all die."
The hall outside the kids' quarters had medical gurneys, presumably for when the little future killers got injured during training. We commandeered them, stacking the sleeping children like morbid cargo.
"Four gurneys, eight kids," Diego counted, still glaring daggers at Jasper. "Two per gurney, plus Eight in my arms. I'm not letting her anywhere near him."
I couldn't blame him for that. Jasper was seething with some toxic mix of rage and guilt, shoulders rigid, jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle twitching. He refused to meet Diego's accusing stare, deliberately looking anywhere else.
Whatever was happening between them had roots deeper than this mission. Old wounds, ugly history existed here. The kind that ended in bloodshed.
Rafael and I each took a gurney, stacking the smallest kids together.
The third gurney got the older boys, while Diego managed the fourth one-handed, Eight cradled against his chest. Jasper took point without being asked.
Fine by me. Having the potential child-killer where I could see him was better.
We pushed through the corridors quickly, the gurney wheels mercifully quiet on the polished floors. The facility stayed silent, thanks to Jasper's tech wizardry. If the cameras were reactivating on schedule, security would be running in circles on the other side of the complex.
"Almost there," Rafael murmured as we approached the junction back to the maintenance tunnels. "Diego, charges ready?"
"Remote detonation, all set," Diego confirmed, adjusting Eight's weight. "One push of a button and this place becomes history. Very expensive, architecturally impressive history."
Jasper stayed ahead, scanning for threats, wound tight as a spring. His hand never strayed far from his gun, which didn't exactly fill me with warm fuzzies.
We hit the maintenance tunnel without trouble, the first real sign we might pull this off. The damp corridor stretched ahead, freedom just a few hundred meters away.
"This is going too smoothly," I said, my paranoia kicking in.
Rafael nodded. "I was thinking the same thing."
We pushed faster, eager to reach the drainage culvert and the snowmobiles waiting outside. One more turn, one more stretch of tunnel, and we'd be clear.
Then we heard it, a rhythmic thumping that didn't belong, growing louder. The distinctive whir of helicopter rotors echoed through the drainage culvert, sound waves bouncing off concrete and ice until they seemed to come from everywhere at once.
"Fuck," Diego muttered. "That's not ours."
We kept moving, but the sound was getting closer, more defined. There wasn't just one helicopter. Multiple aircraft were approaching, judging by the overlapping rhythms.
Then Constantine's voice came through a PA system. "Lorenzo. How disappointing. Did you really think I wouldn't know the moment you set foot in Alaska?"
"How did he know?" Rafael whispered, moving faster.
"Doesn't matter," I said, though my mind was racing through possibilities. Tracker on one of us? Mole in Jasper's network? Maybe Constantine had just been waiting, patient as death, knowing we'd come eventually.
Constantine's voice continued, unhurried. "Dionysus trained you better than this. All those years teaching you to think three steps ahead, and you walk into the most obvious trap imaginable."
The casual invocation of Dionysus's name made my jaw clench.
"Keep moving," Diego ordered, repositioning Eight in his arms for better mobility. "We're not stopping."
We burst out of the culvert into the brutal Alaskan night. The temperature drop was immediate and vicious, so cold it seared my lungs. My breath crystallized instantly, hanging in clouds that caught the strange light overhead.
The sky was alive.
The aurora borealis rippled across the darkness in sheets of green and purple, dancing and writhing like something sentient. It would've been beautiful if it weren't illuminating the nightmare waiting for us.
Circling overhead, silhouetted against the aurora like something out of a fever dream, were Constantine’s two massive golden eagles.
Caesar and Augustus.
In the distance, Constantine's helicopter hovered just beyond weapon range, a black insect against the green and purple sky. Two more helicopters flanked it, searchlights beginning to sweep the tundra.
Constantine's voice continued through the PA system, still conversational. "You're trying to save children. How noble. How sentimental." A pause. "How very much like Dionysus in his final days."
"Load the kids," I ordered, already moving. "Now!"
The facility's heavy maintenance snowcat sat where Jasper's intel said it would be, a boxy tracked vehicle with a covered passenger compartment and two bench seats facing each other. Diego had gotten us the key codes days ago. Beyond it, two snowmobiles waited for the escort riders.
We worked frantically, carrying sedated children into the enclosed cab and arranging them on the benches.
The machines were designed for maintenance crews, but we could make it work.
Diego positioned himself inside to brace the children, Eight still cradled against his chest. Jasper moved to the driver's seat without a word, already starting the ignition sequence.
"Lorenzo, Rafael, take the snowmobiles," Diego ordered from inside the cab. "You're faster, you can draw fire. We'll push straight for the tree line and onto the extraction point."
The enclosed cab would protect the kids from the eagles and the brutal cold, but it made them slow. Maybe ten, fifteen miles per hour across the tundra at best. Rafael and I would be completely exposed, but we could move three times as fast on the snowmobiles.
The eagles banked, descending in a lazy spiral that was somehow more terrifying than a direct attack. They weren't in a hurry. They knew we were trapped, knew we couldn't outrun them on open tundra.
The searchlights swept closer, illuminating patches of snow and frozen earth. Rafael's eyes met mine for just a second in the darkness, and I saw the same calculation I was making. We were the bait.
The searchlights found us, three brilliant beams converging on our position. We were fully exposed now, lit up like a stage.
Rafael threw his leg over one snowmobile, engine roaring to life. I mounted the second. The snowcat's engine coughed once, then caught, deeper and louder than our smaller engines.
"Go!" Diego shouted from inside the cab.
Jasper hit the throttle, and the snowcat lurched forward, tracks biting into snow and ice.
"Caesar. Augustus. Jagen!"
Both eagles folded their wings and dove.