Her eyes locked with Jasper's, pure challenge radiating from her tiny frame.Go ahead. Do it. I fucking dare you.
Jasper's hand trembled. His jaw clenched so tight I could hear teeth grinding. The gun barrel pressed harder against Eight's forehead, and she didn't move, didn't blink, just stared into him like she could see every broken piece inside and wasn't impressed.
The silence stretched. One second. Two. Three.
In my peripheral vision, Diego shifted his weight, calculating if he could close the distance before Jasper pulled the trigger. Rafaelhad gone completely still beside me, barely breathing. The moment crystallized into something sharp and terrible, the kind of crossroads where everything that comes after depends on a single choice.
Eight didn't blink. She didn't back down. She just stared into the face of death like she'd already danced with it a hundred times before.
If her training was anything like mine, she had.
Jasper's shoulders sagged, something inside him crumpling like wet paper. He lowered the gun, his arm hanging limply at his side as if he'd been defeated by that look. His face had shuttered completely, blank and locked down. Eight didn't move, didn't relax her stance, just kept staring at him with those empty killer's eyes.
The second Jasper's arm fully lowered, Diego moved like lightning. He materialized behind Eight with a syringe, driving the needle into her upper arm efficiently. She twisted at the last second, nearly evading it, but the sedative was already in her system. Her eyes flashed with fury, then glazed over as she dropped.
Diego caught her before she hit the ground, his face a perfect storm of rage. "What the actual fuck, Jasper?" he demanded, holding the unconscious girl gently despite the fury vibrating through every word. "You were really going to shoot a kid?"
Jasper holstered his weapon, face shuttering like someone flipped his off switch.
"Don't you dare go silent on me now," he spat, keeping his voice low despite the obvious fury. "You almost executed a little girl. In cold blood."
Jasper's jaw worked like he was chewing glass. He reached for Eight, trying to take her from Diego's arms.
Diego twisted away. "Not happening, amigo. You don't touch her until you explain what the fuck just happened."
Rafael stepped between them, ever the diplomat. "We don't have time for this," he said, all business. "Security could find us any minute. We need to move."
He was right. Whatever psychological horror show was playing out between Jasper and Eight could wait until we weren't in a facility full of people who wanted us dead.
"Three minutes until guard rotation," I reminded them, checking my watch. "Either we move these kids now, or we all die."
The hall outside the kids' quarters had medical gurneys, presumably for when the little future killers got injured during training. We commandeered them, stacking the sleeping children like morbid cargo.
"Four gurneys, eight kids," Diego counted, still glaring daggers at Jasper. "Two per gurney, plus Eight in my arms. I'm not letting her anywhere near him."
I couldn't blame him for that. Jasper was seething with some toxic mix of rage and guilt, shoulders rigid, jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle twitching. He refused to meet Diego's accusing stare, deliberately looking anywhere else.
Whatever was happening between them had roots deeper than this mission. Old wounds, ugly history existed here. The kind that ended in bloodshed.
Rafael and I each took a gurney, stacking the smallest kids together. The third gurney got the older boys, while Diego managed the fourth one-handed, Eight cradled against his chest. Jasper took point without being asked. Fine by me. Having the potential child-killer where I could see him was better.
We pushed through the corridors quickly, the gurney wheels mercifully quiet on the polished floors. The facility stayed silent, thanks to Jasper's tech wizardry. If the cameras were reactivating on schedule, security would be running in circles on the other side of the complex.
"Almost there," Rafael murmured as we approached the junction back to the maintenance tunnels. "Diego, charges ready?"
"Remote detonation, all set," Diego confirmed, adjusting Eight's weight. "One push of a button and this place becomes history. Very expensive, architecturally impressive history."
Jasper stayed ahead, scanning for threats, wound tight as a spring. His hand never strayed far from his gun, which didn't exactly fill me with warm fuzzies.
We hit the maintenance tunnel without trouble, the first real sign we might pull this off. The damp corridor stretched ahead, freedom just a few hundred meters away.
"This is going too smoothly," I said, my paranoia kicking in.
Rafael nodded. "I was thinking the same thing."
We pushed faster, eager to reach the drainage culvert and the snowmobiles waiting outside. One more turn, one more stretch of tunnel, and we'd be clear.
Then we heard it, a rhythmic thumping that didn't belong, growing louder. The distinctive whir of helicopter rotors echoed through the drainage culvert, sound waves bouncing off concrete and ice until they seemed to come from everywhere at once.
