Lee
“Long time no see,” my tech geeks are in the lab, hard at work when I walk in.
“Fuck you very much,” I growl, slumping into my desk.
Marta and Jeremy exchange knowing looks, but don’t say anything at first. That’s fine. The silence is welcome after spending days trying to figure out exactly what we’re dealing with at Lucky. My biggest fear is that this fucking organization is going to come swooping in and either kill or steal away all of the dragons. They’ve got tech. They’ve got drugs. They’ve got it all, but every organization has a weakness.
I just need to find theirs.
Dragons can breathe fucking fire. Well, some of us can. If we can figure out where their main headquarters is? We can destroy them. We can take them down. None of this by-the-books bullshit. I’m not going to hire a lawyer. I’m not going to go to court.
No.
I’m going to lead my dragons to safety.
I’m going to lead them to a new tomorrow.
I’m going to save them.
And I’m going to do it properly: hacker-dragon style.
Jeremy and Marta still aren’t speaking. They’re just sitting quietly, staring at me. Finally, the silence is killing me.
“Just spit it out,” I say. I know they’ve been talking, planning, thinking. They’ve been researching. My team is fantastic and while we’re nowhere near as tech-y as Thunderstorm is, we’re getting there. One day at a time.
“We found something,” Marta says finally.
“What?”
“Something big,” Jeremy says. He points to his laptop screen, which is sitting on my desk. I didn’t even notice. That’s how fucking distracted and worn out I am.
“Explain.”
Marta jumps in. “We’ve been going over the notes from the rescue at the small Lucky facility. Clan Thunderstorm sent us their notes, as well. We all thought the rescue was too simple, too easy. Then we realized it was all a set-up so we’d bring their sick shifter patients back to the clan. Then everyone would be infected.”
“Tell me something I don’t know, Marta.”
She ignores my gruffness and continues, unaffected. “We thought maybe they were hoping to damage the clan, to hurt us. We didn’t know if they were going to try to kill us off completely or if they wanted to wound us, then come in and attack.”
“Okay.”
“What if it’s something else?”
“Get to the point.”
“What if they happen to sell an antiviral medication that stops the illness?”
“What the fuck?”
I turn to the screen now. When our clan fell sick, Natalie left to find Donald. He’s one of the best shifter doctors in the world and he was able to create a medicinal potion that saved both us and the Thunderstorm dragons. Now I’m staring at something on my screen I never thought I’d see.
Sure enough, it’s a description for a new medication that’s just been released.
“Dragon-X,” I read out loud.
“It’s a medication that stops symptoms of a couple of viruses. Based on the description, one of them is what our clan was infected with,” Jeremy tells me. “And look at the name of the pharmaceutical company.
“Providential,” I say. “It’s a fucking synonym for Lucky. Are we sure it’s the same people?”
Jeremy pulls up an interview with the head of Providential Labs. It’s a tall, lean woman with vicious eyes. He presses play and the reporter starts asking a question. When he finishes his question, the woman laughs. My blood runs cold because even before she starts speaking, I know exactly who it is.
I know exactly who we’re dealing with.
We’ve found them.
We’ve fucking found them.
The voice matches the one that’s been running through my head for the last few days. It’s the woman from the phone: the one at the end of the number Peggy gave me.
“How did you find this?” I ask Jeremy, looking up sharply.
“Each of the reports about the Lucky facilities talked about seeing a lot of teal medicine bottles.”
“I remember,” I tell Jeremy. It was one of the oddities about the witness reports regarding the infiltration and attack. “But I didn’t think anything of it.”
“We started pulling at strings while you were gone,” Marta says. “And this one started to unravel.”
“It turns out that Providential has a trademark on teal medicine bottles. They’re the only ones who use them. They also only have this one drug on the market, at least officially.”
“So we’ve found them,” I whisper, hardly able to believe it’s true.
“We’ve found them.”