She obviously wants to say something more, but she hesitates, fiddling with her sleeve.
“Anything else?” His lips twitch with humor.
“Do you like games?” she blurts out, and I bite my cheek to stop from laughing.
“Not only do I like games,” Xavier says gravely, “but I also throw very intense tantrums if I lose them.”
Poppy breaks out in a smile. “I just learned how to play clash poker. We should play.”
“You’re on.” He takes a quick sip of his coffee, watching her over the rim of his cup before setting it down with a heavy sigh. “Fuck.How old are you again? It just occurred to me you might be infatuated with me because I saved your life. Is that what’s happening right now?”
Her jaw drops. “What? No.”
I break out in laughter, attracting several curious glances from neighboring tables.
“I was beingnice,” Poppy sputters, her cheeks turning pink.
“Oh, in that case, I’d love to play cards with you,” he says.
Once Poppy is gone, I jab Xavier in the side. “Why’d you have to embarrass her like that?”
He grows defensive. “Just needed to make sure she isn’t locked on me. She’s, what, sixteen? I can’t have her scary-ass mother hunting me down and accusing me of making moves on her teenage daughter.”
I forgot my comm in our quarters, so I head back there after breakfast to collect it, walking through the door just as Cross attempts to link with me. He doesn’t ask if I’m good, getting right to the point.
“Travis is moving all the Modified prisoners out of Ice Canyon.”
I furrow my brow.“Why?”
“Too much chaos. The Primes at the mine are refusing to work with the Mods, so Travis is designating it a Prime facility. He’s ordered the Mods to be transported to the coal mine in Ward K.”
My guard snaps up. K is a southern ward. In the Program, we learned all about the southern facilities. They’re tiny. The salt mine in Ice Canyon is by far the largest on the Continent, housing two hundred and fifty prisoners, fifty or so of them Modified. Most of the mines in the south house fifty workers each, total.
“The mine in K doesn’t have enough room for fifty Mods,”I point out, feeling uneasy.
“They won’t all be going.”
Outrage sizzles through my veins.“Some of them will be killed?”
“The ones Travis doesn’t deem useful, yeah.”
“We can’t let that happen, Cross.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“How?”I demand.“You lost all your clearance.”
“I still have some levers I can pull. I’ll handle it.”
He cuts the link, and a gust of anger slams into me. Seriously? He’s going to leave me hanging like that?
Fuck!
I hurry down to the Operations floor in search of Gray. I find him in the hangar, of course, lying underneath one of his sleek gray fighter jets, tinkering with a wrench.
“Get out here, ace,” I tell his lower body. “We need to talk.”
Chuckling, he rolls out from under the belly of the aircraft. He’s wearing an olive-green flight suit with the top half stripped off and wrapped around his waist, leaving him bare-chested.
