10. 10
Elias and I didn’t speak much when we woke for the second time.
We showered in silence, together but separate, the weight of only a few hours ago heavy on both of our minds.
Things were different somehow, what we felt laid so bare.
I’d known how deeply he cared for me, he’d shown me in a multitude of ways.
Even before we’d decided to be together, he sacrificed himself for my safety, demanding to be included in any mission I would receive.
The way he said it, that I was it for him, echoed in my mind.
I already knew that, didn’t I? Nothing should have changed between us.
Maybe Elias was feeling vulnerable, having said the words aloud.
I protected myself to a fault, eliciting Elias’s secrets while I safeguarded my own.
I should have said more, I wanted to say more, and I couldn’t understand why I didn’t come out and just say what I knew to be true.
In retrospect, it was the right time, and I didn’t know what I was afraid of.
He’d say it back, wouldn’t he? I was it.
Changing in our room, I ignored how I felt naked beyond even my body.
Elias was on the edge of the bed, focused on lacing his boots.
He hadn’t watched me dress, respecting the odd distance I felt.
In a sense, we’d never been closer, but what was said, or the lack of what was said, sat there in the space between us.
I holstered the Glock to my hip, my plan for the day the most dangerous so far.
I hadn’t discussed it with Elias yet, but I wanted to break into the locked section of the outpost and have a look at what Dr. Novikov was hiding from us.
Not that I had the slightest idea on how to get past the locked door, I just hoped we could figure it out as a team.
“Come here,” Elias called.
He stood up as I walked to him, his hand coming to rest on my cheek as I gave him a light kiss. “What is it?”
“Let me braid your hair,” he said.
I smiled. “You wanna do my hair?”
He nodded, holding up a hair tie. “Found one.”
“Okay.” I grabbed my brush, handing it off, and faced away from him.
He brushed my hair methodically, starting from the ends. My hair was still wet from the shower, and I’d already brushed it out, but a few tangles had formed as it began to air dry. He was gentle, using his fingers to separate the hair that the brush had caught on.
He braided my hair in a simple plait, his fingertips making me shiver. My hair was so long, and he was so tall, he had to squat near the end so he could see what he was doing. When he was done, he flipped it over my shoulder, planting a kiss on my cheek.
He stepped back as I turned around, leaning against the metal frame of the bunk. “What are we getting up to?” His eyes glanced down at the gun on my hip, then back up to me. “It looks like you’ve decided we aren’t staying here to read.”
“I want to get through that door.”
“The door that’s password protected?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said.
Elias hung his hands loosely from his hips. “And how are we doing that?”
“Let’s fiddle with it.” I smiled. “You always tell me to fiddle with stuff, let’s go try to fiddle.”
“Why not?”
I skipped to the door of our room, a little too excited to break the rules. We hadn’t made any true progress in the lab, even with the addition of the samples I’d requested, so a few hours of being up to no good was well deserved.
Just after nine, most of the workers had evacuated the dining hall and were back to work.
A few lingered in the hallways, quickly finding somewhere else to be as they caught sight of us.
Elias had better manners than I did, hiding his weapon underneath his clothing.
He'd only brought the one holster for under his jacket, and I definitely wasn't shoving a loaded weapon in my pocket.
While I was confident in my ability to not fire a weapon accidentally, we practiced gun safety like normal, rational people, so holstered out in the open it had to be.
The hallway near the locked door was not a popular place to be, and because it was an addition, I theorized that the labs that people used were further off anyway. There were a few doors around, but most of them were storage and unused living quarters.
I looked down at the small screen, tapping it once and waking it up. There was no hint, no prompt, just the digital keyboard and a blinking line where a letter would go.
“How'd you get the hint about the dog's name?” I asked.
“I hit the enter button.”
I did the same. A prompt popped up on the screen
What was the name of your first dog?
Why it was written in second person I hadn't a clue.
“Don't you think it's weird that it says ‘your’ and not ‘my?’ I wouldn’t write my password hints that way.”
Elias pursed his lips, considering it. “I hadn't really thought of that. I thought the entire thing was weird, made a note of it, and moved on.”
“The Special Agent leaves a locked door unopened? Seems like you should've spent more time on it,” I teased.
“I certainly intended on it but there’s a lot of distractions in this place. Most of them have to do with you. I can list them if you like: your safety, your work, the way you fill out your pants. . .”
A hand reached for me, but I smacked it away. “We’re working.”
“Right, right,” he said, crossing his arms. “Go on.”
I didn’t know where to start. I hadn’t a clue who set the password, and I certainly didn’t know their childhood pet's name. The keypad was in English, so I started with the classics. Fido, Spot, Bandit. All were failures.
“Did you have a dog growing up?” I asked.
“A little terrier mix. My dad named him Manuel.”
My face scrunched up. “Isn’t that your dad’s name?”
Elias laughed. “Yeah. My mom got to name me after her father, so my dad wanted a Manny Junior.”
I tried Manuel not believing it would work, but figured it was worth the attempt. “Sorry, it’s not Manuel.” I pushed a few more buttons. “Or Manny Junior.”
“What about you? You have a family dog?”
I typed the four letters into the panel. Nothing.
“A chocolate lab. We called him Polo, but his real name was The Great Polonius of Cumberland.”
Elias stared blankly at me. “That is the whitest shit I’ve ever heard.”
I cackled, my laugh too loud for someone trying to be sneaky. “We didn’t name him. His parents were champions or something, and his name had to be in line with theirs. I don’t remember really, I was a kid.”
He shook his head. “Champion dogs? I’m sorry but you’re just proving my point.”
I pretended to be offended. “Elias, you’re white-ish.”
“Barely,” he muttered. “My white nonsense is limited to the ring on your finger, babe. Speaking of fingers, go ahead and use them to type your poor dog’s long ass name in there. May he rest in peace.”
I rolled my eyes but typed it in anyway. As I hit enter, the door opened. My smile evaporated like it had never been there.
Frozen in place, my eyes flitted to Elias. The humor on his face was gone, puzzle pieces in his head fitting together, creating a picture he wasn’t ready to see. I was reaching the same conclusion he was.
“That’s not good,” he murmured.
“No shit.”
He took a deep breath. “Do you want to go in there or do you want to go beat Novikov until he tells us why this door code was made specifically for you?”
“Get information, then torture the doctor,” I said, stepping over the threshold. “He could change the password if he knows we’ve been here.”
After Elias joined me, I hit a small button on the wall, and the door sealed us in.
Elias unzipped his jacket and removed the gun from his holster, holding it low at his side.
“Do you think you need that?” I asked, my fingers twitching toward my own weapon.
“Probably not. I’m just preparing for the worst,” he said. “I’ll guard, you investigate.” He walked ahead of me, entering the closest room to us. I waited a moment in the doorway. “All clear.”
It was a bedroom.
The bed was made up, corners pressed crisp. A small desk was against the wall, and I walked to it first, pulling on each drawer. None of them were locked, but they were all empty. I slammed my hand on the desktop. “He was here,” I nearly shouted. “I can feel it.”
Elias was in the empty closet, feeling around for loose boards in the paneling. “I think you’re right.” He kicked lightly at the wall, gun firmly in place at his side. Nothing must have sounded out of the ordinary to him because he rejoined me in the middle of the plain room. “Move on?”
“Yeah.”
Leading with his gun, the Special Agent peered out into the hallway before the rest of his body followed, and he walked to the nearest room across the hall.
Twisting the doorknob, he let the door fall into the room.
His flashlight was in his left hand, nestled under the gun in his right.
Keeping his focus on his sights as he whipped from left to right, I watched the hand that held the flashlight reach over to feel for a lightswitch.
The light flicked on, then off, then on again, likely from the incandescents sitting unused for so long.
I stayed in the doorway, waiting for the signal to enter. Filing cabinets littered the wall, and four desks were pushed together in the center of the room. White clinical walls and gloomy concrete floors. The ceiling was low, so the lighting was that much harsher on my retinas.
“Okay,” he said, his gun dropping down.
I ripped open the drawer of the closest filing cabinet.
The labels were in Russian, and as I rifled through the paperwork, I saw only the Cyrillic alphabet.
No photos, just papers, essays, research findings, and thousands of pages in a language I couldn’t read.
There wasn’t enough time in the world to take a photo, upload it into whatever translation program Elias had on the computer, and read each one.
I opened another filing cabinet, and another. Nothing was in English.
“Oh, what the fuck is this?” Elias's voice jumped an octave.