me with a needle, and pulled me through a black hole. A. Black. Hole. And then they put me in a cage. There are portals and other worlds, and an Interverse Agency, and all I want to do is go home.
“But I’m not going to feel safe there if I’m always worried about someone else grabbing me and abducting me into slavery!” She takes a deep and shaky breath, blowing the air up into the strands of hair that fall into her face. “I am a part of this whether you think it’s safe or not.”
I look at Barclay because he’s the one everyone is going to listen to—at least usually.
Our eyes meet briefly, then he looks at Cee. “I say she’s in. She’s right, but more than that, we need two teams. It’ll throw security off and give at least one of us a fighting chance. And Elijah should stay here.”
“She’s never used a gun,” I say.
“Neither had Ben or Elijah until recently,” he says. I open my mouth to say more—that she’s never run from the law or had to do something this dangerous—but Barclay cuts me off. “Look, I’d rather have three agents with tactical training and experience at my back, but I don’t. I have three people who have a lot to lose, and it might not be ideal, but it’s going to work.”
Now that he has a course of action and a purpose, his determination is back.
I look at Cecily and my eyes sting. This was never supposed to happen to her. She should be planning more movie nights, taking care of people in Qualcomm, bossing Marines around and making them fall in love with her.
But she’s here now, and I don’t have the right to take her choices away from her. She’s smart and she knows how dangerous this is going to be. The best thing I can do is make sure she’s prepared.
“All right,” I say, and I’m not sure who I’m saying it to or what I’m talking about. But it’s what everyone needs to hear.
Barclay takes a deep breath. “So here’s how we’re going to do this.”
He knows IA headquarters inside out. Now he just has to teach it to us.
Before time runs out.
01:02:38:27
We’re up the rest of the night, going over the specifics of the plan, anticipating how we’re going to deal with the various things that could go wrong, and memorizing the layout of IA headquarters.
When we break for a few hours of sleep, sunlight is peeking over the corners of the horizon. I wander the halls aimlessly. Time has been draining away, we’ve only got about a day left, and if things go wrong when we break into IA, I won’t make it out alive.
Maybe none of us will.
I’ve only made it about ten steps when I turn down a hallway and find myself face-to-face with a teenage girl about the same age as Jared, with long, wavy blond hair and big green eyes.
She’s startled at first, and she flinches away from me.
The sight of her—doe-eyed and flinching—makes me feel like I’ve just been punched.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I want to add something else, but I don’t know exactly what I’m apologizing for. For startling her, for not being able to get her home, for this happening to her in the first place—it’s all a blur.
I give up and move around her, still muddled in my own thoughts, and when she’s safely behind me, I hear her say, in a soft, tentative voice, “Thank you.”
I look over my shoulder to see if I heard right or to say “of course” or ask “what for” or something—I’m not sure what—and I realize her eyes are glassy and she’s smiling.
Her face is flushed, and she hugs her arms around her body. “I thought I was going to die in that place.”
She’s not, but she might end up dying here if we can’t figure out how to get her home.
As if she knows what I’m thinking, she adds, “No matter what happens, anything is better than that place. I’m glad you got us out.”
“Me too,” I say, and I mean it.
Looking into her face, I’m struck by how many more people like her are out there. It’s what I need. Energy manifests in the pit of my stomach with that realization and starts to spread throughout my body. I stand up a little straighter, I seem to lose some of the weight pressing down on me.
We have to succeed tomorrow.