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Everyone nodded and reached for their tranq guns and knives, making sure they were in place along with their backup weapons.
“Maria, stay with me and Dice,” Fry said. “You hear me?”
The girl nodded, a little of the old Maria coming back as she gulped.
The group moved out. They backtracked two blocks around the warehouse, slipping through a large abandoned field behind the structure. The grass and weeds came up to their thighs. They squinted toward the building, large windows half busted and open to roosting pigeons.
No one patrolled the perimeter, and only a few figures paced in front of the windows, the same people they’d seen before.
Lila peeked through her binoculars. “I don’t like this. I can’t see anything new, and we can’t get any closer. Even without cameras they’ll see us the minute we try to cross the field.”
A gun cocked behind them, a tiny little snick carried on a frigid wind. “We saw you long before you got to the field.”
The entire group spun, lifting their tranqs.
Six well-armed men dressed in black trousers and blackcoats surrounded them, pointing guns at their chests. Guns loaded with bullets. Cold guns made of cold steel held by cold men who had used them to kill.
Had Natalie even seen them before she died?
“You come armed with cute toys,” the leader said with a heavy accent. “I will never understand how the empire hasn’t beaten you already. Arms up, please.”
Lila lifted her arms, cocking her head to side as she tried to place his accent. It sounded like a mix of German and something else, caught up in a warring mix of tones.
The mercs took the group’s tranqs from their holsters, and their leader jerked his gun to the warehouse across the field.
Lila stared about her as she marched on. The others would come. Tristan’s people would interject themselves into the fray before they entered the warehouse.
But no shots rang out.
No group charged.
No one intervened at all.
Had the others been taken too?
Lila squinted into the dusty warehouse as the group filed inside. The large space had been cleared of all machinery. A few tables had been pushed to a side wall, filled with notepads, computers, temp palms, maps, and food. Another table had been moved to the center, playing cards scattered on top. In the front lay five wire dog cages all in a row. One contained Oskar, and three young girls filled the others. The children’s eyes hardly focused on the influx of new people. One merely drooled on a pillow in her lap, her head pushed up against the side of the cage at an awkward angle.
Another empty cage sat beside Oskar’s, its door hanging open.
A man at one of the tables stood up to greet them, a silver band tied around his upper arm, a gun strapped to his hip. He thrust his hands behind his back and nodded at his men. “Good work, you’ve managed to find the last of the set.” He crooked his finger at Maria. “Come here, child. You’ve saved us an awful lot of time.”
Maria’s bravado had greatly waned upon their capture. Whatever had been left of it melted as she shuffled toward him, her gaze falling demurely to the floor. While one of the mercs piled the tranqs and knives on the table, she raised her faltering, trembling voice. “Are you going to bring me back to my father?”
“Eventually. You’ve prov
ed quite difficult to find. We almost left you, but now you’ve been delivered to our doorstep. You won’t be any trouble, will you?”
Maria shook her head and strode closer. “They yelled at me and made me clean all the time, just like the others. Are you going to make me do that?”
“Of course we won’t. The cages are here to keep you all safe until we can return you to your father.” The man smiled an oily smile. “You’re a princess, not a slave. We don’t practice such barbarity in the empire.”
Maria stood beside him and looked down at the ground, the picture of innocence, the epitome of the wronged.
The pacing mercs guarding the warehouse left their posts, joining the rest of the captors. Nearly twenty women and men glared at Lila and Tristan and the rest of the group as if they had been mistreating children, rather than saving them.
Maria was going to get them all killed.
Painfully.
