AFTER the dimly lit passages, the brilliance of Graves HQ was dazzling. Or maybe dazing was the better word. The light ignited a brand new headache, right behind Gid’s eyes. She tried to stay focused on the blips on her lens monitor’s map overlay and on moving without tripping. She told herself she was just stubbornly determined to do her job.
But there were mental images Gid was overwhelming with lines of code, of unmoving bodies and looming gray uniforms. And gas masks. Damned gas masks were in all the nightmares, now.
Multiple green blips converged on HQ. Gid decided she didn’t need that extra info anymore, so she deactivated those ones. That left two yellow blips, in motion now but not coming toward HQ.
Softer lines of solid blue glowed in pairs across the map. Blue was good.
“Nothing’s been breached.” Gid squinted against the brightness of the room formerly known as Alex’s office. “The failsafes are locked down and untouched.”
Daria glanced back as she opened the door leading into the ready room. “Any way to tell if our missing team is down or just out?”
Gid shook her head. “Not definitively. But the locator chips are still broadcasting. They’re heading for South Tower.”
“Protective Services.” Daria held the door. Val and Seven and Gid filed past her.
Alex came through the main door as the other four entered from their side.
“Wen and Karim.” Alex sounded as unfazed as ever. “That’s who was caught. Karim is wired.”
Daria looked at Gid again. “Anything from Karim’s recorders?”
Gid minimized the map overlay and checked the list of live feeds before responding. “Nothing yet. Could be he’s too unconscious to run the programs. Or he’s afraid to risk it right now.”
“APS would want them alive.” Kaiden stalked into the room behind Alex, his boots thumping too loudly, as usual. “They can’t answer questions if they’re dead.”
“There was gunfire.” Daria’s voice rose at the end.
Kaiden stopped long enough to look Daria in the eye. “APS rifles are default set to non-lethal force on operations.”
“Tell that to the people in the shuttle tunnel,” Gid murmured.
“Assuming they’re still alive, we wanted Karim caught anyhow,” Alex said. “This might not be a complete failure.”
Daria sighed. Took a deep breath. Let it out again. A sense of waiting filled the room.
Gid could see the cracks—the circles under Daria’s eyes, the permanent tightness of her jaw that made her look even more like Kaiden. Gid knew Daria was scared.
Gid was, too. She got more sleep than Daria, usually, but she had nightmares about Protectors and gas masks and woke up smelling a phantom bitter-almond scent. The headache took a few more stabs at Gid’s eyeballs.
Seven stopped behind Gid, accidentally bumping her arm. Except Seven didn’t do anything accidentally, and the bump was more like a touch. Gid tossed a glance over her shoulder that was intended to be gratefully reassuring.
Yeah. I hear you. I’m good, she tried to say without saying.
Nunes and Jager crowded into the room through the main door, behind Alex and Kaiden. Nunes was fair and tall and square-jawed, with her blonde hair pulled into a braid. Jager was short and heavy and olive-skinned, with her auburn hair cropped close against her skull. Despite the physical contrast, the two were peas in a pod. They pulled up short, side by side, and frowned in intense concentration at Daria. The two remaining teams straggled in behind them.
“We need to get people to APS. Get eyes on Wen and Karim and determine their situation.” Daria lifted her head and glanced toward Nunes and Jager. The pair of them practically saluted before they turned on their heels and herded the other two teams right back out the door they’d just come through.
Eyes on people.
Something about those words and about what she’d witnessed in the sub-level combined and wrestled Gid’s headache into the beginnings of compliance.
“What we need is a better plan.” Kaiden crossed to the desk across the room and peered at that same monitor he’d been watching before they left for the sub-levels. He planted his palms on either side of the keyboard hard enough that it sounded like a fist slam. “Even if we confirm Wen and Karim are captured and not dead, there’s nothing we can do to get them out again. We can’t get anyone out. We can’t stop the arrests from happening in the first place. And now, we can’t even slow them down anymore, not without leading the Protectors straight into Graves passageways.”
Alex pulled himself into classic Alex stance, arms crossed and biceps on display. He gave Kaiden a looking-over that probably took in the same things Gid was seeing—Kaiden’s gaze fixed on the monitor that showed messages coming in from and going out to Muire, his fingers tapping the edges of the keyboard as if they’d like to dance across the keys instead.
“I know you’re not foolish enough to try reaching Muire right now,” Alex said.
Kaiden scowled. “She’s as much at risk as anyone else.”
“And you will only make that worse if you try to contact her.”
Eyes, and a better plan. The pain behind Gid’s eyes throbbed, but a glimmer of inspiration struggled to rise from it. She stood very still and tried to capture it.
Seven padded across the room with his usual grace, planted his back against the wall beside the main door, and crossed his arms. His eyes met Gid’s, and his eyebrows lifted the tiniest of fractions.
“Your girlfriend is pretty competent. She’ll figure out how to play this,” Gid said to Kaiden, ignoring Seven’s silent question for the moment.
At Gid’s words, Alex shifted his stance and frowned. Gid noticed, not for the first time, that Alex was watching Kaiden. And not just watching, but watching, in a mildly intense and lingering sort of way. Wrong tree, Alex. Kaiden was already interested in someone, and it wasn’t Alex. Too bad for Alex.
No, not too bad for Alex. Gid was still pissed at Alex. Alex deserved everything he got. Or in this case, didn’t get.
“Our father was in the line of fire this time.” Kaiden deliberately slammed his palms against the desk this time. He tossed a scowl toward Daria. Gid had been hanging with the siblings long enough to recognize an opening salvo when she saw one.
Daria stood up straighter and frowned at Kaiden. She was smaller than her brother, but when she went all wolf-like like this, with her tawny eyes ablaze, Gid believed she could take him.
“You think I can get Father out of there?” Daria asked. “I’d love to. When was the last time you won an argument with him?”
Kaiden’s upward glance at Daria was sharp. His face reddened.
Daria put her hands on her hips and tilted her head to one side.
Kaiden sighed and shrugged and shook his head. “It’s just so messy. Too many people could get hurt. Are getting hurt. We can’t help them all.”
There. That. Gid glanced at Seven and his still-raised eyebrows. Then she strode across the room to the table display projector, desk-sized and flat-topped and brand spanking new thanks to a recent “donation” from Swinton’s. There was not a lot Gid missed about home, but it was nice to have a decent piece of high-end tech to work with.
“Your dad seems pretty good at taking care of himself,” Gid said. “All the folks down there, actually, seemed pretty inclined to help each other out.”
“Oh, well. Then I guess we’re not needed at all.” Kaiden aimed his infamous scowl at Gid. “We should just pull up stakes and go home.”
“Kaiden.” Gid wasn’t looking at Daria, but Gid recognized the big sister tone.
“Hey.” Gid intercepted before the two of them got going again. “I’m all about helping out the underdogs. But when it comes down to it, none of us can count on anyone. We all have to look out for ourselves.”
“You sound like my father,” Daria murmured.
At the edge of Gid’s vision, Alex shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
Gid couldn’t help herself. “Because you could be going along, doing a good job, having a good time, trying to help a guy out, and wham! He almost gets you killed.”
“Gid.” The big sister voice came for Gid this time.
Alex shuffled his feet again. What he didn’t do—what he had never done—was ever even once say he was sorry for nearly getting Gid killed.
Gid tapped the table’s on switch. It powered up silently with a blue glow beneath the flat surface that rose in silvery tendrils to project the display up and above the table. Gid shut down her lens monitor and direct neural interface and transferred her personal display feed to the table’s mid-air display. The pain jabbing at her temples relented a little.
“My point is this,” Gid said. “I like looking out for myself. It’s my responsibility, and I want to take it. Other people must feel like that, too. Right? I mean, those people in the sub-levels today evidently do. Your dad was helping out, even.”
Gid could have kept using her DNI with the table display, but there was that headache she was battling, so she switched control over to the table’s keyboard and touchpad. She opened the tracking map with its two lone yellow blips at South Tower and soft blue lines indicating that the failsafe doors were still in place.
The map floated over the table. Gid flipped it up to one corner, where Daria could see it while Gid worked on other things.
Daria crossed the room and stood beside Gid. “You have an idea.”
Daria didn’t end that with a question mark. Gid quirked one corner of her mouth.
“Of course she does.”
Gid couldn’t tell if Alex was being sarcastic or if he meant it but couldn’t help sounding like he was being sarcastic. There had been a time Gid had thought she understood him. Now, she doubted she ever had. How many times had she defended him to Daria?
“At least she’s doing something.” Daria was still using her no-nonsense voice. “What have you come up with lately, Alex? Aside from unrelenting negativity?”
“I did something.” Alex sounded earnestly serious. Gid was tempted to feel bad about refusing to forgive him, which was a good indicator she should not listen to him. “Look how it ended. If you can’t recall the outcome, ask Gid.”
The smile Gid had been trying out faded. Her headache resurfaced, throbbing in her temples. “Don’t act like we’re friends, Alex,” Gid said over her shoulder. “We’re not.”
“Enough.” Daria frowned first at Gid and then at Alex. “We don’t know yet that everyone you sent ashore before that last attempt died, Alex.”
“We don’t know that they didn’t.” Alex sounded like he was clenching in response to Daria’s reassurance. “I started sending them months ago. We don’t know how long the… whatever it is they’re doing to the exiles has been going on.”
“Exactly. We don’t know. You’re assuming the worst.”
“It’s what I do best.”
It was all Gid could do to keep her mouth shut. Every time Daria played the kindness and forgiving card for Alex, Gid wanted to scream at her to let the son of a bitch feel guilty.
Instead, Gid raised a new screen on the table display and threw herself into building searches and following leads. Windows opened, text flew, lines scrolled.
Beside Gid, Daria leaned closer. Gid could feel Daria’s breath against her upper arm and practically hear her brain trying to follow what Gid was doing.
“What exactly are you looking for?” Daria finally asked, but it was that slow kind of asking that Gid knew meant she had it half figured out already.
“Ammunition,” Gid replied. “To help Val do what he does best.”
Gid glanced back over her shoulder. Val stood a little straighter, blinking like a waking man.
“Which is what, exactly?” Kaiden cast one last longing look at the monitor in front of him.
It was Daria who answered. Satisfied that they were on the same wavelength, Gid turned back to her work.
“There’s a revolution trying to start. Maybe it’s time to fan the flames.”