and black hoods, they look fucking fierce. I would be with them, if not for the bum leg.
My buddy, Axel, sees me on the mat and heads over.
“Hey, how’d the check-up go?” He plops down beside me while I pound out a few more crunches. In the middle of an intense set of crunches and planks, I speak in single word sentences.
“Not. Good.” The timer on my phone beeps and I spin around to plank. I’ve got five minutes to hang out doing nothing other than strengthen my core. “She wouldn’t clear me.”
“Dude, you’re barely a few days out from major surgery.”
“Not major. Just a bit of repair on a vein.”
“If you say so.” Axel joins me on the mat, moving seamlessly into working out with me.
Teamwork is imprinted on our Guardian brains. At our most base level, we buddy up in pairs. Axel is Alpha-Three and I’m Alpha-Four. On a mission, we back each other up. We’re so in tune with each other that I know what Axel’s going to do before he does.
As for the rest of our team, Max and Knox take positions at the chin-up bars. They jump as one, hands gripping metal and rise together. They’ll do a hundred pull-ups before going to the mat for a hundred push-ups. They’ll repeat that a few times, just like I shift from crunches to planks. Max is team leader. Knox is his second. Liam and Wolfe round out our team as Alpha-Five and Alpha-Six. They work in unison and begin a brutal session of free weights.
We’re a tight team and do pretty much everything together, but there’s more to the Guardians than Alpha team. If the operation calls for it, we double up with another team and harness what we need to succeed. I can’t think of a mission when all four teams engaged, but I suspect it could happen.
We’ve worked with Bravo team many times, like the op in Manila, the one that went south with Forest. Talk about an ass-clenching moment. It’s never good when you lose the boss on a mission, but we rescued a score of girls forced into sexual slavery.
One of those girls was Moira.
I’ll never forget her vacant expression when I strapped her into the helicopter. All the other girls cried, overjoyed with their rescue. Moira simply sat there. At first, I thought she was in shock. Only later did the truth come out.
As for losing Forest, Alpha and Bravo redeemed ourselves when we extracted him a few months later. Not too long ago, just before Moira and Zoe were kidnapped, we partnered with Charlie team to rescue a dozen girls caught up in the same sex-trafficking operation that originally kidnapped Zoe.
Our teams did a HALO drop into the Gulf of Mexico and rescued those girls off a cargo container ship. We’ve yet to work with Delta team. It’s the only Guardian team with female Guardians.
Jenny leads that team as Delta-One, while Charlene is their newest recruit as Delta-Six. They tend to work on the domestic front, often teaming up with federal agencies on high-profile kidnapping cases—cases where the government needs the help of a private organization who’s able to work outside the law.
I’ve seen the females but never interacted with them. In general, the teams tend to be very team-centric. We don’t tend to mix unless it’s on a mission.
A glance at the timer on my phone reveals another three minutes to go on the plank. This is the time to dig in deep. The lactic acid burn is just starting to kick in.
“What did Skye say?” Axel is the only one of us who calls the doc by her first name. He’s more familiar with her than the rest of us.
“Doc Summers said to stop pushing myself.”
Axel and I exchange a look and bust out a laugh at the same time. We’re Guardians. We always push ourselves.
Three and a half minutes and the burn intensifies. Axel grows quiet beside me. The last ninety-seconds are hard. The final thirty seconds are nothing short of brutal. Our conversation degenerates into short, snappy sentences.
“No run?” Axel shifts his hands. It’s the only movement we allow during a plank.
“No run.”
“And?”
“If I. Bust. A. Stitch…” I pause to take a breath. We’re closing in on the last minute and the burn sets in. “She’ll take. One of. My balls.”
Axel turns his head; his eyes grow wide. He blinks as if he’s trying to process what I said. When it hits him, his arms go