Nadia
“Nadia!” Jared cried, rushing into the room and ripping the restraints off of her with a casual ease, more concerned with getting her into his arms.
“I’m so sorry!” she said immediately, throwing herself at him as he swept her off her feet, spinning her around before he pulled back and planted a not-very-chaste kiss on her lips.
Nadia didn’t care; she moved fully into it, her lips hungrily tasting his as they embraced.
“I’m sorry,” she said again as they broke apart.
“No need to be,” he said. “But we have to go. We won’t have much more time here.”
He took her hand and led her from the room.
A door marked Exit popped upon. “Hey guys!” Connor said, sticking his head out. “I went to look upstairs, and you’re going to love it! Come on!”
Jared looked at Nadia, as if to ask if she knew what was up there. She shrugged, and they moved after him, along with everyone else. His hand found hers automatically again as they went up, grabbing onto her tightly in a way that made her heart swell. She never wanted to let go.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to come for you,” he said as they climbed the second set of stairs to where Connor was waving frantically at them, holding the door open to the next room.
“Shut up,” she said, kissing his shoulder as they emerged onto the floor. “I was the one who ran off, instead of staying and facing what I did head-on, like an adult.”
Jared didn’t get a chance to reply. A whistle sounded from her lips.
“Wow,” she said softly.
“They all must have evacuated down the stairs when they heard us coming,” Connor said, throwing his arm out to show them all what he had found.
“This is their entire system,” she said.
Before them was a wall of monitors easily thirty feet long and eight feet high. Two banks of terminals were in set up in front of it on a raised floor to create a stadium-style atmosphere.
“And it’s all on!” she said excitedly, slipping into a central seat that looked slightly larger than the others.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard, learning their database as fast as she could.
“What does that mean?” Jared asked as he leaned over her shoulder. “What can you tell us?”
She looked up at him. “What do you want to know?” she replied with a grin. “It’s all here. They didn’t lock it down at all. I can find everything,” she told him, still in disbelief herself. “This is amazing.”
She started scrolling through file names, showing just how much they had access to.
“Wait!” Connor’s voice rang out, and she stopped her scrolling.
He pointed at the main screen, which was showing a larger view of her terminal. “Go back.”
She frowned, but Jared nodded, so she started to scroll back up.
“There. That one. Garrett Hoffman. Pull that up,” he said.
Nadia did as she was asked, though the name meant nothing to her.
“Who’s Garrett?” she asked Jared softly as the big shifter looked at her screen instead of the big one.
“A good friend,” he replied equally softly. “He lives in Genesis Valley, and helped lead us against some very evil shifters and their dragon overlord. He is the Alpha of a group called the Jade Crew, and ever since he came to us, he’s not had any memory of his prior life.”
The depth of emotion in Jared’s voice told her this was important, so she pulled up the files. “There’s video files labeled Interrogation, along with some science-sounding ones. Hmm,” she said, scrolling through it. “What’s this?” She opened up a text document labeled End of Study.
Title Subject: Garrett Hoffman
Length of Stay: 4 months
Objective: Conversion to suitable sleeper agent
Progress: None. Subject has resisted all attempts at cranial manipulation. Subsequent attempts have rendered subject unconscious for increasing periods of time. Final attempt also resulted in complete memory loss. Recommend termination of subject.
Director’s Note: Recommendation overruled. Dispatch subject to border of Genesis Valley and encourage him to head there, in case manipulation attempts prove successful in the long-term. –J
End Report
“Well holy shit,” Jared said. “The tough old bastard was supposed to be an Agent, but they couldn’t convert him to their cause.”
Connor laughed. “And then they tried to infiltrate him anyway instead of ending him. I bet they kicked themselves pretty hard over that one when he ended up becoming the focus of the resistance to their invasion!”
The Sentinels shared a laugh, which brought a smile to Nadia’s face.
“What do you want me to do with all this data?”
“Can you download it to something, so we can take it?” Jared asked.
She shook her head. “No, there’s petabytes of data here. That’s far too much to carry with us. Maybe if I had a few hours to sort through it…”
The big shifter shook his head. “No, we need to go. We’ve already delayed too long.”
“I could dump it all onto the internet,” she suggested as the idea came to her.
“How long would that take?”
“Ages, but I could write a simple program to automate it in perhaps five minutes,” she said, her fingers already flying across the keyboard as she started to code.
Something caused her to look up. Jared was staring at her.
“What?” she asked.
He smiled. “You are more impressive every time I turn around. I’m just so happy I found you, in all the ways that can mean.”
She blushed. “This was my job, you know. I’m a bit of a computer nerd. You’re going to have to get used to that.”
“I’ll never get used to it. You’re too amazing for that,” he said, leaning in and giving her a kiss on the cheek.
“Connor, Hannah, Chad. Go upstairs. Start a fire, burn everything you can. The rest of you, watch the exits while Nadia works.”
She bent over her terminal and called up long-unused memories of program coding. Dumping files onto the internet was easy when she was present. Having a program do it on its own after she was gone was the trickier bit.
Three minutes later she hit a key and the screen began to flicker as it started scrolling through the files from the top, making them available for anyone in the world to see. She hoped that was a good thing.
“Time to go,” she said, moving to the stairwell, not waiting for them.
Jared directed her to the elevator. “Faster.”
She shrugged and got in as the rest of the team piled into the two cars and descended back to the ground level.
The doors dinged, and Jared moved her behind him as they emerged onto the top floor of the lobby.
“Oh my,” she said at all the bodies lying around the floor, clearly dead. The sight was almost too much for her, and she forced her eyes straight ahead.
Which meant she made eye contact with a tall man, clad only in black, who was standing at the base of the stairs, surrounded by a lot of men. Something about the cut of his outfit and the way he stood set him apart from the others.
Jared and his team moved to the front, creating a wall between her and the other men. She could see them rolling their shoulders, flexing muscles and generally getting ready for a fight.
You need to help!
She was only human though. How was she supposed to help? This fight was so far above her pay grade that Nadia didn’t know where to begin. What could she possibly do to stop one of the powerful shifters?
Her eyes glanced around at the bodies on the floor, drawn to the scene as if by magnetism.
Something near one of the bodies caught her eye.