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By the time Gus awoke the next morning, Alex had ironed out all of the details of her plan.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” Gus asked groggily as he sat up, rubbing his eyes.
Alex shrugged. “Sleep wasn’t going to get the plan finished.”
Gus frowned. “No, but you know that it’s important to stay in good health. I mean, were you eating properly on the road?”
Alex looked away, knowing full well that she couldn’t give him the answer he wanted in good faith.
Freya hadn’t had the healthiest of eating habits, and Alex hadn’t exactly fought against the constant stream of fast food.
Gus groaned. “You’re not going to be able to fight the other Enhanced if you don’t take care of yourself.”
Alex rolled her eyes. Why did he have to be such a mother hen? “I’ll take care of myself when there’s time to. For now, just hear out my plan. I need another perspective.”
“Okay, so what is your plan?”
“That Enhanced base you told me they were looking for.”
“Which one? They’re looking for all of them. All of the ones that were shielded to protect them from the timeline reversal, at least.”
“The one that had been newly built when the old timeline was erased. The one that hadn’t yet been staffed.”
“You mean the one in Russia? What of it?”
“We need a base of operations. Somewhere fortified that they can’t get into. An Enhanced base, with all of the security measures, but none of the people guarding it, sounds perfect.”
Gus frowned. “While I agree that there is a need for us to have a base of our own, I don’t think this one will be as easy to capture as you think. The Enhanced have already sent scouts to investigate it. I think we’re likely to meet more resistance than you’re anticipating.”
Alex just shrugged. “It’s the best that we have,” she told him simply. “Once we have a base of operations, we can start building from there. For now, any move we make against the rest of the Enhanced directly will be suicide. To go after a base where they most likely don’t have many guards, where we will probably only be facing a couple of scouts, is our best bet for striking the first blow.”
Gus’s frown deepened. “I’m not saying that there’s a better target to hit for our first blow against them. I’m saying that the two of us won’t be enough. We will need more allies, we will need to recruit more Enhanced to our cause if we want this to work.”
Alex glared at the suggestion of recruiting more Enhanced. “I have been gone for almost two years now,” she reminded him. “And for most of that time, the older Enhanced have considered me a traitor. You were there, listening to the things they were saying about me. Do you honestly think that any other Enhanced would side with us?”
“I sided with you.”
“You’re my brother.”
“And we have other siblings,” he pointed out. “Not to mention, I know of a few others who are less than enamoured with the way the older Enhanced have been running things. Who aren’t keen on the idea of another war with magical beings.”
Alex sighed, shaking her head. “Even if we wanted to track them down, it would take too long. They’ll be spread out across the globe, remember? And with Enhanced having access to so many security systems, we can’t just waltz through an airport. The security is too tight.”
Gus grinned. “About that, I might have disrupted their spiders. By the time they figure out that there’s an internal problem, not that you’re still avoiding transport hubs, we should have recruited more than enough of the others to our cause.”
Alex frowned, less than happy that she had been unable to dismiss his plan with technicalities. “Even if the others are a little disgruntled,” she eventually said, “I will not make the mistake of trusting another Enhanced. I trusted my monitor – he was supposed to protect and watch out for me – and he used that trust to kidnap and torture Freya.”
“But you trusted me after that.”
Alex looked away. She didn’t want to admit that her trusting Gus had been a combination of her own tumultuous emotional state and her confidence when she’d had Freya beside her.
As much as Freya probably couldn’t take on more than one or two Enhanced at once, the two of them likely could have dealt with Gus if he hadn’t trusted Alex.
And if she’d had anything close to a clear head, if she hadn’t just run away with Freya, her bruises and cuts still healing as she found herself in denial about the betrayal she had suffered, she wouldn’t have contacted Gus at all.
But she didn’t want to tell him any of that. He was on her side now, and that was all that mattered to her, not that she might have mistrusted him in the past.
“I’m not going to approach any other Enhanced until we have a secure starting point,” Alex said eventually. “I will not ask them to join us until our mission appears less suicidal. If anything will sway them to our cause, it will be thinking that we actually stand a chance. Capturing the base will do that, and between the two of us, we should have no problem dealing with a couple of scouts the other Enhanced have sent. Not when we have the element of surprise on our side. Surprise that could be jeopardised if we try to approach other Enhanced and they choose not to join us.”
Gus sighed, clearly not happy with the plan, but having no argument.
“Just tell me where the scouts will most likely be, and we can stop them before they ever reach the base.”