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Nami’s long, black hair was pulled up in her customary pigtails that made her look all of twelve years old. The Naruto T-shirt she wore didn’t help. I wasn’t sure what a Naruto was, didn’t really care either, but I assumed it to be one of those weirdo Japanese cartoons she fawned over.
“Douche canoe?” I asked.
Nami walked through a secondary security door, which she never actually used, and stepped into the digital forensic center. “I have two gifts, Gigantor. I can hack computers like a boss, and I can come up with interesting ways to dump on your life. I’m not sure which one I’m better at.”
The forensic center stretched twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. A dull drone filled the room from the dozens of desktops, servers, and data backups Nami had running at all times.
Nelson had installed a secondary industrial-level air conditioner just for that room due to the heat baking off all the hardware.
Nami plopped down in a chair in front of her primary workstation. It had four monitors stretching end to end, each running a series of windows full of computer mumbo jumbo that I didn’t understand. Code scrolled through several of them like a series of film credits.
A fifth monitor, connected to yet another PC, sat on the edge of her desk with a bizarre anime playing on the screen.
I nodded at the cartoon. “Glad to see you’re working hard.”
“Says the guy who was rubbing one out in the gym.”
I laughed and leaned against her desk. “What do you want, Short Round?”
Even though we gave each other flak all the time, Nami and I had grown to become the unlikeliest of friends. We had little in common other than our penchants for foul language and hunting down Smith, but we got along like siblings. I thought of her as the annoying sister I never had.
Nami didn’t have a husband or boyfriend, but she was extremely close with her mother. After she’d moved into our new facility, Nelson had transferred her mother into a type of witness protection program. He feared that Smith would go after our loved ones.
Melissa, Drew’s girlfriend, had received the same. She didn’t take the news positively, however, and ditched his ass. I didn’t much care for Melissa and watching her skip out on Drew during such a rough time in his life really cemented my feelings.
I couldn’t blame her, per se, but it still pissed me off. Who would want to stay with a man whose mere proximity put her life in mortal danger? Apparently not Melissa.
He handled it decently. Better than Nami dealt with the relocation of her mother, anyway.
“The final signal detectors came in from CAIS. They’ve supposedly cut the lag down to milliseconds.” Nami swiveled around in her chair, her feet dangling almost a full foot from the floor. “I need to test this shizzle out on your noggin.”
I grunted. “Fine.”
CAIS was a massive military contractor that specialized in computer and information systems. After Smith’s cell phone signal in West Virginia had sent an entire town into a murderous tizzy, CAIS had been granted a several billion-dollar contract to figure out how to detect and prevent another broadcast from happening again.
It had taken them several months, and a handful of faulty prototypes, but they’d eventually managed to get a working system in place. Nami had explained how it worked to my dumb ass, but I didn’t fully grasp any of it.
What could I say? I punched and shot things for a living.
She’d spewed a lot of buzzwords like end-to-end encryption and microchips, which didn’t mean a whole lot to me. Basically, they were soldering some kind of system into cell phone towers that would automatically scan any outgoing calls or data for the madness signal. If the call was clear, everything would work normally. At least, I thought so. Hell, I didn’t know. I drank beer and lifted weights during my free time. Tinkering with nerdy stuff wasn't even on my radar.
The first prototypes had introduced a significant delay into the system and made phone calls a garbled mess full of people talking over one another. Using the Internet was almost impossible. Nami couldn’t watch her nonsense cartoons on her phone without wanting to throw it across the room.
“You have that constipated look on your face again,” Nami said, peering back at me over her shoulder. “Thinking really does hurt you, doesn’t it?”
“What, exactly, keeps me from twisting you up like a pretzel and depositing you in this trash can?” I tapped the receptacle beside her desk with the front of my shoe.
“My cuteness. That and the fact that I’d whoop your big ass.” She grabbed a set of headphones from under the rank of monitors and handed them to me. “Put these on like a good boy.”
I snatched them from her. “If anyone ever listened to the way we talked to each other, they would think we were mortal enemies.”
“Who says we aren’t?”
“The fact that you’re still alive is a good indicator.” I pulled the headphones down over my ears and gave her a thumbs-up.
Nami didn’t trust CAIS to get the job done right, so she had Nelson secure her each version of the prototypes for testing. And by testing, I mean she would blast a version of the signal at me.
We’d learned I was immune to the insanity-inducing effects of the signal, much in the same way that another telepath couldn’t read my mind. That was great and all, but it gave Nami a reason to use me as a guinea pig. Even still, she always got nervous that the signal would work on me one of those times, and I would actually follow through on my pretzel-twisting threats.
Her fingers blurred across her keyboard for a second before she looked back at me. “Ready?”
“That’s what a thumbs-up means.”
“Fair warning, Gigantor,” Nami said, pointing up at my face. “If you go all psycho on me, I’ll have to put you down.”
“I’m quaking in my boots. Get it over with.”
She grabbed another headset with a microphone attached and slipped it on.
Took the computer’s mouse in her hand.
A series of small clicks came through my headphones. I paused, listening. Even though I knew that nothing would happen to me if the system failed, the idea of the madness signal blasting into my ears always made me anxious.
Nami pushed the microphone in front of her face closer to her mouth. “Goddess to shitbird, Goddess to shitbird. Do you read me, shitbird?”
My body went rigid.
I stared straight ahead.
Mouth fell slack.
“Respond, shitbird.” Nami glanced back at me. “Shitbi—?” She gaped up at my unresponsive face. “Ashley?”
I didn’t respond, just stared at the wall above her monitors.
“Balls!” Nami tore the headset off and jumped from her chair with the nimbleness of a drunk. Agility wasn’t an attribute of hers. She hissed a long stream of curses, the words blurring together. “Fuckfuckfuckfuck!”
My hand shot out, grabbed hold of her tiny wrist.
She tried to tear out of my vice-like grip.
My eyes cut down to hers, drilled into them.
Panic lit across her face.
Then I smiled. “So much for putting me down.”
Nami stared at me for a full second, and then deflated, slumping against the wall. “You son of a bitch. I think I just unloaded in my pants.”
“Charming.” I took the headset off. “I didn’t notice any lag in the signal that time. I think they’ve got it down.”
“To hell with the signal. My heart is jackhammering like a Chippendale on ladies’ night.” Nami took two shaky steps back to her chair and hopped into it. Putting her forehead on the desk, she mumbled, “Gods, I hate you.”
I almost felt bad for scaring her so much.
Almost.
It was too funny.
“Just remember that the next time you feel like giving me ‘tude.” I grabbed another chair from the desk adjacent to hers and pulled it over, sat down. “Besides, you took on Murdock—you could handle me, no problem.”
Nami lifted her head. A sticky note stuck to her forehead. “You killed Murdock, not me.”
“Only because you brought that big-ass pistol back for me to use.”
“That’s true.” She pulled the square piece of paper from her face and dropped it into the trash. “I am pretty awesome.”
We sat in silence for a moment, both focused on the sticky note in the garbage can. I felt awkward. There was rarely a moment when we weren’t trashing each other.
“Ashley—” Nami paused, then closed her mouth. She stayed quiet for a moment. “How do you get those images out of your head?”
Even though she hadn’t come out and said it, we both knew she meant the things we’d seen in that mountain town not so long ago.
“I don’t know that you can.” I thought about Barker, a soldier who had died while under my command. “I think you just learn to live with it.”
“Well, that sucks.”
“It does.”
“Do you ever... talk to anyone about it?” She turned and looked at me with a nakedness that took me off guard. It was a rarity that Nami exposed herself as anything but a cynical smart ass. She kept her feelings at arm’s length, hidden behind her sharp wit. “About the things you’ve seen?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Maybe Drew if I’ve had a bit too much to drink. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. I’m a moron, so you should probably do the exact opposite of me.”
Her eyes dulled, gaze growing distant. “I keep seeing that woman trying to plant a severed head in her flowerbed. No matter what I do, I can’t stop thinking about it.”
I wanted to tell her about my battles with Sammy. She wasn’t alone in her struggles to cope with what we’d gone through. But I couldn’t. I feared the consequences of letting even Drew know about the new occupant in my head.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said.
Nami’s eyes focused again. “For what?”
“Getting you involved in all of this craziness. You should be at home watching weird-ass Japanese game shows.”
“Did you attack the forensic building I worked in?” Nami asked. “Did you make my coworkers kill themselves?”
“Well, no. But—”
“If ifs and buts were candies and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.”
I blinked. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means shut up. We’re in this together, much to my dismay, and the only person left to blame is Smith since we already laid Murdock down for a nice dirt nap.” Nami turned toward her monitors. “Anyway, I’m glad to hear that the lag in the decryption system is fixed. They’re already deploying the new chips into cell towers. The entire network should be secured in just a few weeks.”
I considered pressing her more about the emotions she struggled with, but I decided against it. You couldn’t make someone open up if they weren’t ready. Besides, talking to me about it might make things worse.
When I got involved with something, it inevitably went downhill.
“When are they going to announce it to the public?” I asked instead.
“No idea. Hopefully soon so people will calm down.”
The new system was supposed to guard against Smith pulling another job with his monstrosity of a weapon. We could only hope that it would do as advertised. Smith was a smart bastard who always seemed to be a step ahead of us.
The whoop of an approaching helicopter cut our conversation short.
Nami turned toward another array of monitors mounted to the wall behind me. “Drew’s back. Hopefully, he got that tough chick to agree to work with us. I need some more estrogen around here. All of this testosterone is making my skin break out.”
I swiveled around in my chair and watched the monitors.
The screens were connected to a series of security cameras around the building. Most of them showed closed doors and empty hallways. Several were pointed at the chain-link fence surrounding our compound.
The monitor in the upper right hand corner of the array had the helipad on the roof in view. We sat and watched as the chopper eased down until it landed on the white H painted in the middle.
I felt the presence of Drew’s mind, and that of the pilot, Jack Shea.
And they had a woman with them. An excited, confused, and resolute Bree Manning.
“They do,” I said. “That means it’s finally time to get the team together.”
Nami pumped a small fist in the air. “Avengers, assemble!”
I’d started to stand, but stopped in a partial crouch. “What?”
“Good gods, man. You need to get out more.”