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Bryan’s face fell as he realized his plan had gone wrong. Imraan was supposed to be the only one captured. He knew that blonde girl with him. Her name was Rebecca. Agent Rebecca Stapley. She was one of the very best. Secretly, he’d always wished that she and Conner would somehow hook up, but then she had joined the HIA and all hope of that had been lost. But now, they might be able to spend some time together.
What was he thinking? He had to keep his mind on the job. He knew Rebecca would be able to handle things on her own—she had always been a good girl—so he set a new priority on his to-do list. He had to find Conner.
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Laura followed the agent’s eyes and saw the Taser. She pressed her arm onto the girl and reached for the Taser with the other arm. Finally, she grabbed it and shocked the girl. The FNTTMS agent shook violently for a few seconds before collapsing. She stood up and that’s when Laura realized how much that agent looked like the blonde lady she had seen with Adm. Taylor in the cage when Armaan was being tested. This girl looked like a slightly younger version of the lady, and Laura guessed this must be her little sister. But if this agent was one of the FNTTMS, what was the other woman doing here? And why had she been talking to the Administrator?
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Xarissa downed the last agent in the front of the school and wiped her hands. Now she could go find her trainee and see how he was doing.
"Connor? Person? Trainee? Where are you?" Xarissa called out. She stepped into the nurse's office and found Connor quickly typing something into the nurse's computer. The room didn't look like the nurse's office anymore. It looked more like the computer room downstairs where all of the geek agents lived. Connor was typing something with lightning speed. He quickly grabbed the pencil that he had in his mouth and wrote something down.
"What are you doing?" Xarissa asked suddenly. Connor jumped so high, he almost hi the ceiling.
"Oh my gosh, don't scare me like that!" He replied. "I'm finding out what's going on. Let's see, the strange non-HIA agents are leaving, but they have Rebecca and Imraan. Rebecca told me not to leave the room, so I couldn't do anything..." Connor slowly finished. Xarissa was fuming.
"So you just see Rebecca and Imraan, or whatever his name is, being carried off and you didn't do anything?"
"Whoa! Calm down, they're being carried off right now. You have enough time to stop them!"
"Let's go then!" Xarissa shouted, clasping on to Connor's wrist, and dragging him out of the room.
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Laura was inspecting the bodies when she saw Xarissa and the new recruit being taken somewhere. She followed them. She saw Rebecca and what looked like the chubbier version of Armaan being taken away by the enemy agents. Xarissa and Connor then attacked the back of the group, where Rebecca was. They seemed to be having a bit of trouble, so Laura decided to help them out.
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Bryan had searched everywhere. Connor was nowhere to be found. He then found a rather obvious clue. What appeared to be a nurse's office had turned into a computer room. This was definitely Connor's work. But where was Connor?
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Rebecca glanced at Imraan. He looked at her for a second, then nodded. Rebecca swung out and kicked one of her captors in the face. Then she flipped another one over her back and pressed a button on her watch. A blade shot out, and she used it to cut the ropes. An agent tried to attack her while she was busy, but she round-house kicked him. However, she lost her footing when she landed and fell over onto the gravel. It hurt, but she continued to cut the ropes.
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Conner froze. He knew he’d been trained very well in fighting, but he didn’t want to fail, and that made him freeze up. He just looked at the agents helplessly as they fought. After all his time as a tech rat, he felt…insufficient? His self-esteem had been sufficiently low lately, and he felt like if he failed it would make things even worse. He knew self-preservation was bad in these kinds of situations, but he just couldn’t get himself to move. He had enough will-power left in his mind, but it was almost as if his own body was telling him he couldn’t do it. His whole life he’d been practically ridiculed and discredited, and now he was doing it to himself.
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Xarissa effortlessly kicked the legs out from under the agent that had been running towards Rebecca, and risked a glance over at her trainee. Her victorious smile fell when she saw him standing there with a frightened look on his face. What was he doing?
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Finally, Rebecca’s hands were free and she rolled onto her stomach to pick herself up. Suddenly, an agent kicked her hard in the side and she fell back down, coughing and gasping for air. The agent tried to grab her arm and pull her up, but someone attacked him from behind, grabbing his neck and putting him in a headlock. Pain spread through her chest, but she knew it wasn’t a cracked rib because she had experienced that before. This was different. She cautiously pressed her hand to the spot, and something wet seeped to her fingers. She looked down at her hand and saw her fingertips wet with blood. The agent must have had some kind of blade on his boot, and Rebecca had been wounded.
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Bryan saw Rebecca lift her fingers from her side, and he caught a glimpse of the blood. Keeping the agent in a headlock, he began kneeing him in the side over and over again until the agent offered no resistance. He let go and the agent dropped to the ground. “Rebecca!” he shouted. She began to pick herself up from the gravel. An agent punched Bryan in the cheek from the side and he was forced to turn his attention back to the fight.
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Rebecca was even more confused to see a man who must be the HE of the GCA there, and he looked concerned for her, which she thought was a bit odd for a man so unfeeling as him. She stood and made a path out of the fight, sitting down on the edge of the sidewalk. Rebecca always thought the HE was so ignorant, thinking that the HIA had killed his wife, and so immature to hold such a long grudge. She would never be able to live with herself if she were to separate from all her friends like that.
But now she had a slightly different view on him. The fact that he was Conner’s dad was unbelievable, but their resemblance was uncanny. Like the rest of the lower-classmen of the GCA, she had never seen his face until now. It was odd and random that he had finally decided to get over his wife’s death and come help the HIA. Rebecca wondered how Conner was handling this.
Speaking of which, where was Conner? She had seen him arrive with Xarissa, but she couldn’t see him in the fight now. She looked around, and then she heard a voice calling her name. She turned around painfully to see Conner being dragged off into a car.
“Conner!” she yelled, and clutched her side in pain, trying to stand. “Conner!”
“Rebecca!” she heard him call back as he was being shoved into the car.
“Conner!” She tried to run to him, but it hurt immensely, and she knew she wasn’t going to make it. The cars doors closed, the agents hopped in, and the car sped off.
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