“We already found the special arsenal,” Cyan said cheerfully. Ashlynn stared at her, surprised by the sudden change. “So we don’t need your help. Thank anyway! Goodbye!” She even lowered her crossbow to wave and blow a kiss. Ashlynn shook her head in wondrous concern.
The agent, Petra, didn’t look amused. “Not that mission, you dimwit,” she snarled. “Or did you forget about your mission with the DANE?”
This time Jude stepped forward. “How do we know you are who you say you are?”
“Right,” Lyssa agreed meekly. “We just had a mix-up with our chain of command.”
Petra rolled her eyes, annoyed. “Why they chose the Elites to work with these hopeless idiots I will never understand.” She glared at Jude. “I bet you don’t even know where the DANE are.”
“I do,” Venatora said. “They’re in Greenland.”
Petra smiled. “And how do you know that?”
“A SSAWPS agent put a tracker on one of the agents when we were attacked in the sewers,” Venatora replied proudly. “She gave me the device before she was transferred.” Venatora held up a tracker GPS.
“Good. Then we will rely on you to pinpoint their position until we find them,” Petra said approvingly. She put her hand to her ear. “Alright Elites, I’ve found the agents. Two are missing, but I’ve discovered that they dissented from the cause.” She lowered her hand and glanced over the agents. “You okay with meeting the team outside, or are you too stubborn?”
“I think we can handle it,” Ashlynn answered, encouraging the others. As the agents nodded, Petra turned on her heel and walked away. The agents followed, not sure what they were going to find outside the building. Ashlynn wondered for a second what happened to the rest of the guards in this place, but she decided she would concern herself more with the task at hand. She didn’t really trust these “Elites”, and she knew the SSAWPS agents needed leadership. None of them would trust Jude as much anymore because of what happened, and Ashlynn wanted to be ready if the lot fell to her.
***************
“Whoa!” Tyler shouted as his arm moved on its own power. A blade protruded out from above his hand and he resisted the urge to grab his arm with the other hand, the one Caitlin was working on. “Caitlin!” he shouted desperately.
“I know!” Caitlin shouted angrily, trying to hold onto Tyler’s arm and the phone, at the same time trying to dodge the sword he was waving around.
“Stop waving around!” Erica yelled, dodging out of the way. The blade came so close that as she leaped sideways towards the ground, the blade swished by her head and cut straight through a huge chunk of her hair.
“I’m trying!” Tyler shouted back.
“You said diagonally downwards!” Caitlin shouted into the phone. She hooked her elbow around Tyler’s arm to hold it still while still managing to hold onto the phone. “I did go to the right! You should have made easier commands on this thing!” She lowered the phone and shouted to no one in particular, “Someone get me an earpiece or something!” She put the phone back to her ear and said calmly, “Okay, how do I undo the blade thing?” There was pause, in which Erica produced a Bluetooth earpiece and worked on connecting it to the call. After a short while, Caitlin typed the commands into the keypad and the blade disappeared. Everyone started to breath more easily, and Tyler didn’t mind as much that him arm wouldn’t stop moving.
“Here,” Erica said, announcing her success. Caitlin took the earpiece from her and shoved it into her ear, then tossed the phone to Halee.
“Okay, now what?” Caitlin asked tensely.
Jacob glanced at Jake, who just shrugged. He had never seen Caitlin like this, so edgy.
Caitlin pushed three places and slid her finger across the keypad diagonally downward from left to right. This time the hand with the keypad opened on its own and shot something at Caitlin. She raised a hand to block her face and her arm was flung backwards. She crashed into Jake, and they both fell over. “Conner, it’s not working,” Caitlin growled, standing. At least, she tried to stand but found that handcuffs were attached to her wrist, and to Jake’s. “Great!” she shouted angrily, glaring at Jake. He put his hands up in surrender, then was yanked to his feet by Caitlin, who walked back to Tyler.
“Maybe I should do this,” Jacob said, putting a hand out in front of Caitlin.
“Excuse me?”
Jacob nodded at Erica, then stared at the handcuffs binding Caitlin and Jake together. “Well, you haven’t been doing very good so far.”
“I’ve been doing fine,” Caitlin answered through her teeth. She kept walking towards Tyler, dragging Jake behind her.
“I’m just saying, maybe you should give someone else a try,” Jacob said, not doing a very good job at hiding an arrogant grin.
“I trust Caitlin more than I trust you,” Tyler said through the mask.
“You really think you could do a better job than me?” Caitlin guffawed. “I’ve had way more practice in this kind of stuff than you, and I’ve been—don’t tell me to calm down, Conner!” Caitlin grabbed Tyler’s arm with a tight grip, and Jake stumbled to catch his footing. Being handcuffed to his sister was way worse than he would have imagined.
“Careful, Caitlin!” Jacob laughed. “Or you might give someone else a haircut!”
“Guys…” Tyler began.
“Shut up, Jacob,” Erica snapped.
Tyler sighed. Nobody listened to him.
“I’m just saying…” Jacob shrugged
“Well don’t say anything!” Caitlin yelled.
Suddenly, Tyler’s arm shot up, smacking Jacob in the face and knocking him unconscious.
Caitlin looked at Tyler with a look of surprise. “I didn’t…” Then she smiled. “You did that on purpose.”
“I’m not saying anything,” Tyler answered innocently.
Caitlin looked back at the keypad, then groaned. “I know what the problem is.” She lifted Tyler’s arm above her head and moved closer to him, dragging Jake along with her.
“What are you doing…?”
“The keypad is from your point of view,” Caitlin answered. “I’ve been doing this from the wrong side.” She tapped three places and slid her finger across the keypad diagonally again. This time, the suit folded in on itself from his back all the way down to his hand, where it snapped into disk form. The other agents cheered as she plucked the disk from his hand and tossed it to Erica, who stowed it away carefully in her bag. “Thanks Conner,” Caitlin said, and ended the call.
“Now what?” Halee questioned.
“We wait for him to wake up,” Caitlin said. She attempted to gesture at Jacob Johnson but glared down at her wrist when she found that her movement was restricted by the handcuffs.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a key for this, would you?” Jake questioned painfully, knowing what the answer would be.
*************
Daniel slammed his face into the pillow numerous times as he lay on the floor of the Japanese hotel room. When the sound wouldn’t go away, he picked his pillow up, shoved his face into the carpet, and compressed the pillow over his head. The sounds of Chris’s singing came a little bit more muffled through the pillow this way, but it wasn’t enough to let him sleep. “Shut up!” Daniel shouted, surprised by how gruffy his voice sounded because of lack of sleep. Where the heck had Hayden gone off to? Chris continued singing, so Daniel got up one more time and shook him. Miraculously, Chris became quiet and rolled over in his sleep. Daniel sighed with relief and lay back down on the ground. It was unfair that Chris got to sleep on the low bed only because he had hurt a muscle in his back during football practice. It was Chris’s fault, not theirs, that he had hurt himself. But now it felt like Daniel was being punished. And who knew Chris sang in his sleep!
The sounds started coming again and Daniel knew that soon Chris would be singing loudly unintelligible music and unattractive noises. He stood up and walked out of the room, wondering where Hayden had gone off to. Surprisingly, as soon as Daniel left the room, he couldn’t hear the sounds of Chris singing in his sleep. He wondered if these Japanese walls could be magic. He wandered down the hallway sleepily and knocked on the door to room number 436. He hated to wake the girls, but there had to be some way of getting some sleep without being interrupted by the singing giant. He knocked again, this time louder, and he heard footsteps shuffling towards the door. The door swung open, but instead of finding one of the girls standing before him, there was a small Asian man in a suit with blood-shot eyes standing in the doorway, looking like he had been staring at a computer screen for hours and hadn’t gotten any sleep either. As soon as the man saw Daniel, he started shouting and screaming at him in a language Daniel didn’t understand. Daniel figured he had said sorry about twenty times before he finally gave up and walked back down the hall towards his room. In doing so, he found that he had accidentally knocked on room number 437, so he turned back around and made sure he passed 437 before knocking on the next door, number 436.
There was a short pause before the door cracked open. He hadn’t even heard footsteps come to the door, and he couldn’t see inside until the door opened wider and Kate stepped out into the hall. She closed the door behind her softly. “What do you need?” she questioned.
“Is Xarissa awake?” Daniel asked.
“No, we were both asleep until you knocked,” Kate answered. “You should knock more quietly next time. I was afraid you would wake her. Xarissa isn’t happy when she’s woken up in the middle of the night.”
“Sorry,” Daniel answered, whispering instinctively. “But Chris…it’s impossible to sleep in that room with him. Is there a way…”
“We don’t have another room reserved,” Kate replied, a questioning look on her face.
“Right,” Daniel said sleepily. “Sorry.” He turned around and headed back down the hall towards his room. “I’m not really sure what I was thinking,” he said aloud to himself. He came to the room that he figured was his, but in order to be sure, he looked at the number on the wall next to the door. “Where are my glasses?” he asked, stepping closer to the number. He stared intently at it, but either because of natural blindness or his lack of sleep, he couldn’t see it clearly. He didn’t bother to knock. Instead, he curled up in a ball and lay on the floor in front of the door, making sure that he was a much out of the hallway as possible so that nobody would step on him. In a couple of seconds, he was asleep.
**************
As Zamyr stepped into the building where the SSAWPS supposedly were, he was confronted immediately by a girl with startling green eyes and golden blonde hair that cascaded down to the small of her back in naturally curly ringlets. She was wearing one of the black suits of what would be the ESCA. He stopped and stared. She noticed him and laughed. “You really don’t recognize me then?” she questioned. There was something in her smile that was familiar to him, but he couldn’t figure it out. She reached forward, took his hand, and shook it. “Hi. My name is Navaeh.” She laughed again and suddenly he knew who he was talking to. She was Nik.
“How the…what’s with…you look so different!” Zamyr stammered, surprised.
“I should hope that’s a good thing,” she answered.
“Well, yes. Of course it is. I’m just…”
Navaeh smiled. “You’re so easy.”
Zamyr realized she was jesting and smiled back. He followed her into the building, but fell back in step with the Indian boy from the SACLA. “So you going by Soul or Aggie-something when we meet the SSAWPS?”
The boy’s look was strained. “Which do you think?”
“Soul?” Zamyr guessed.
“Well, you can’t even say Agnihamsa, so I would hope so,” Soul answered.
“Sorry,” Zamyr responded. Feeling embarrassed, he fell back in line a little bit more until he was standing next to Ren. “You’re the leader of the ESCA team, right?”
Ren glanced at him. “Yes, for the time being,” he answered.
Zamyr wasn’t really sure what that meant, but he wasn’t going to ask. “Okay, I’m just making sure I know who to follow if stuff goes down.”
“Emilian.” Ren stopped and grabbed Zamyr’s shoulder to hold him back. “I’ve heard good and bad things about you. I need to know if I can trust you.”
“Of course,” Zamyr replied. He looked straight into Ren’s stern gaze. “I am not who they wanted me to be. You need to know that.”
Ren stared back at him for a long time, then his gaze softened. “Then I have a mission for you.”
“What?” Zamyr looked down the hall, but didn’t see Navaeh and the others anywhere in sight. “I thought this was my mission.”
“Think of this as a side mission, then, if you have to,” Ren instructed. “As soon as we find out who the leader is of this group, I need you to do something very important for me.”
“You want me to dispatch her?” Zamyr made sure his voice didn’t waver, but he wasn’t sure he would have the heart.
Ren smiled. “I can read into your every move,” he said. “You have courage, but your heart’s in the right place.” His smile fell. “That is why what you must do may be hard for you.”
Zamyr swallowed.
“No, I’m not asking you to get rid of their leader. We need these girls to trust us,” Ren said. Zamyr breathed out a sigh of relief, but was still tense, awaiting the command. “I need you to get close. I need you to make her believe that you like her. She will think she has found an edge with you, that she has somehow found a weakness in our group of Elites. If she won’t take the bait, try harder. Can you do that for me?”
Zamyr was surprised. A command like this hadn’t come to him since his work at the CGG when he had to distract and interrogate Laura. It was hard for him then, especially since he had ended up liking her. And he’d never had to dump a girl before, but he knew that dumping this one would mean something worse to her than she thought. On top of all that, he wasn’t even sure he had the skills to do this sort of thing. “I’m not sure how…” Zamyr started. But he couldn’t finish.
“You must have learned something of manipulation from your work at the CGG,” Ren insisted. He sighed. “I’m not saying it’s going to be pretty, but you need to do this. If you have to step outside of yourself to do it, that’s fine. Just think that it’s not really you playing this girl and that your character, Emilian, is the one who loves her. It’s imperative that you remember that you are Emilian—not Zamyr Sylaj or Jace Higgins or whatever other name you’ve gone by—in this place. And remember also, this girl will be a heartless assassin with years of training in this place. Whatever you do won’t hurt her, but you will also have to push hard to get her to come to you. She really needs tobelieve that you like her. Then she will think it’s safe to like you back, and that will become her weakness. If not, she will try to use your supposed weakness to her advantage, and that is where we will catch her. Now tell me—and tell me honestly—can you do this?”
“Yes,” Zamyr answered, too quickly. While Ren had been talking, he had finally worked up the courage and determination to do it. He considered it again and answered more slowly this time. “Yes, I can. One question, though.” Ren raised his eyebrows in expectancy. “Why me and not Soul or Vance?”
Ren smiled. “Vance is not accustomed to the art of femininity, and he can also be daunting to the women. We need someone who looks like they would be easier prey—no offense. In case you haven’t noticed, Soul is too caught up in his own romantic interests to pursue another of equal proportion, even in pretended. You are really the only one capable of this task, other than myself. But seeing as how I am the leader, I would not be able to fill that role. We need to catch up with the group before the SSAWPS become suspicious of our entrance behind the rest of the group.” With that, Ren ran off through the building and Zamyr worked hard to keep up, wondering what the SSAWPS leader would be like.
*************