TWENTY-FOUR
Talon
“What good isyour fucking facial recognition if it can’t find who we’re looking for?” Garrison groused at Blaze, who was typing on his laptop frantically in the back seat next to me.
“I’m working on it.”
Julius turned in the driver’s seat, his eyes smoldering with tension in the darkness. Only a faint glow reached the inside of the car from distant streetlamps at the edge of the vacant lot we’d parked in.
“Work faster,” he demanded. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”
Our leader always kept a controlled front, but I knew Julius well enough to tell he was struggling as much as any of us, maybe more. He expected perfection. He took pride in our missions, worked out every minute detail of the operation, and they always went according to plan. We made sure of it.
Then Dess had come into the picture, and nothing had gone completely according to plan since.
Blaze stopped and looked at Julius with a cold expression that rarely came over his face. “If you can get the job done better, do it yourself.”
I’d never seen Blaze talk to anyone—let alone Julius—that way. Maybe we were all unhinged by Dess’s intrusion tonight. She must have been distressed by the bloodbath that she’d seen, but when she’d spoken her final words to us, she hadn’t been staring at the corpses that littered the floor. She’d stared right into Julius’s eyes, and we’d all seen the fury there.
She knew it’d been us who killed her friend and everyone else in the mansion. She knew that we’d been lying to her from the start.
It wasn’t a total surprise that Blaze’s nerves were frayed. He’d seemed to be forming some kind of friendship with her—and he’d spoken up for her from the beginning. I’d almost have said his eyes had been brighter and his steps a little lighter after they’d spent time together yesterday morning.
What did surprise me were the shifting tides inside me. I hadn’t said a word since Dess had run off, and I wasn’t sure I could even if I wanted to. The strange pang inside me wasn’t anywhere near crippling, but… I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt even that much about anything.
Julius inhaled slowly as if gathering his cool. He spoke more evenly than before. “Why isn’t it working?”
Blaze didn’t bother looking up. “The same reason it wasn’t working an hour ago and three hours before that. I can’t scan faces in the dark, so unless she walks right below a streetlamp and looks toward the camera at the same time, we’re not going to find her until dawn. Which is… about a half hour off still.”
“We’ll find her,” Julius said. “We have to. We don’t leave loose ends.”
“Assuming she’s even still in the city, let alone the state,” Garrison muttered.
There it came again—the slight discomfort in my chest that grew each time I thought about Dess hating us. Leaving us. As if I’d lost something.
But that didn’t make sense. As close as we’d gotten during our heated encounter in the exercise room, as much as I’d enjoyed it, it’d been purely physical. We’d barely talked, and she hadn’t seemed to mind that.
Blaze jerked his head toward Garrison. “If she isn’t, then I’ll find her wherever she went. But there’s no reason to assume she’s gone that far.”
Garrison raised his hands. “I’m just saying, no one would stick around here knowing that we’re going to come after them, having seen what we can do. Even I can admit she’s smarter than that.”
“She’s obviously smarter than any of us gave her credit for,” Julius said, raking his hand through his hair. “How the hell did she even manage to follow us? Did you see anything out of the ordinary during the drive?”
Blaze shook his head. “I saw you lock the penthouse behind us. She couldn’t get into the passages without us noticing, let alone the garage. I’ve already checked the cameras down there—no sign of her.”
“Then she went out the main entrance. But how the hell did she get there, and how did she know where to go afterward?”
“What does it matter?” Garrison asked. “She did find us, she’s seen what we can do, and now we’re screwed.”
“She only knows our aliases,” I pointed out. “Not our real names or anything that would identify us to the actual cops.” Talking eased the discomfort inside me just a little, as if it helped that I was contributing. But a small ache remained. Exactly as if a hole had been carved out of my chest, one only she could fill.
No, it didn’t make sense at all. It would probably fade in a matter of hours anyway.
“If she got out of the building, then she knows where the penthouse is,” Blaze pointed out. “So much for that being our secure base.”
“And she can pass on physical descriptions to the police.” Julius scowled. “Or whoever else she might want to tell about this. I’m even more sure now that we never got the full story about who she is and how she’s involved. Which is why we need to track her down, fast.”
“I’m trying,” Blaze grumbled.