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The screen went blank for a second before returning to the news teams, who were already dissecting the message of the Freedom terrorists.
“What’s the likelihood of Miriam Shepherd giving in to Freedom’s demands?” Striker asked his wife.
“Not likely at all. No one on that dais is irreplaceable. Losing any one of those scientists would barely make a dent in CommTECH’s schedule and nothing more than a ripple in the news. Freedom have sorely overestimated just how valuable those scientists are to the company.”
“If Miriam doesn’t care about her scientists, she’ll send Enforcement in to deal with the terrorists. That building is going to turn into a war zone.”
“And we have a man inside,” Sandi said.
Striker felt the weight of responsibility. Mace wasn’t only Sandi’s brother, he was his best friend, and he was family to every team member who had survived the bomb that ended the Technology War.
Each one of them should have been dead. Hell, they’d expected to die. Their commanding officer had given them five minutes’ warning that an experimental weapon of mass destruction was being deployed.
There had been tears in the man’s voice. “They told us not to contact our teams,” he’d said. “Said there wasn’t any point. Fucking bullshit, all of it. A man deserves the right to say goodbye, even if that’s all he can do. I’m sorry, Striker. I’m so fucking sorry. I argued that we needed time to get our people out, but…”
Striker hadn’t said anything to console the man. There hadn’t been time. Instead, he’d cut the communication dead and turned to his regiment, his team, the friends he respected and cared about, and told them that their country had decided they were collateral damage in an attempt to end the war.
Those words were the hardest he’d ever had to utter.
And he still had nightmares about the silence that followed. Silence that morphed into the sound of Gray’s strained voice as he frantically tried to contact his wife and children. To say goodbye. To tell them he loved them. To hear their voices one last time. But all communications from the area had been blocked. And Gray’s teammates had to restrain him while dealing with their own grief.
Each had coped in different ways. In the corner of the cave where they’d set up camp, Jeremiah, their ex-chaplain, sat silently praying, tears running down the big man’s face. Ignacio’s prayers were loud, calling on God in Spanish to protect his mother and rain down retribution on the government that had betrayed them. Zane hadn’t said a word but had punched the wall until his hand ran with blood. Hunter, new to the team and the youngest among them, had hugged his laptop tight to his chest.
“Is this real?” he’d asked Striker, his eyes wide with shock.
Striker put a hand on his shoulder. “Yeah, mon ami, it’s real.”
As he looked around his regiment, seeing some of them sitting alone, some huddled together, his eyes came to rest on Mace. He’d wrapped his sister tight in his embrace, keeping her between him and the cave wall, as though he could protect her from the blast. Their eyes met, and over the distance that separated them, Striker saw pure determination in his friend’s gaze.
“See you on the other side, brother,” Mace promised.
“Si le bon Dieu veut, mon ami,” Striker replied. If God is willing, my friend.
And then the world as they’d known it ended.
But they hadn’t died as they’d expected. After a hundred years of sleeping in a cave, being changed genetically in ways that no one could ever understand, they’d woken to a new world. One without their family and friends. One where they only had each other to rely on. Where they could only trust each other. They were family now.
Which meant none of them were ever left behind and forgotten.
Ever.
“We need a way to get Mace out of there, and fast,” he said. “We can’t go in to retrieve him. Not without running the risk of Miriam getting her hands on all of us.”
Friday tugged on her husband’s shirt. “Can we fly some drones in close to see if we can spot him? That would give us a better idea of what we can do to get him out.”
Hunter answered for him. “The signal’s jammed for at least a block’s radius around the building. It wouldn’t work.”
“We might have another problem,” Gray said. “You notice anyone else missing from that little show?”
“Keiko.” Sandi groaned. “My dumbass brother must have snatched her when the shooting started. I told him to stop thinking with his dick. It’s going to get him killed.”
Striker pinched the bridge of his nose. “We can’t know for sure he took her. She might be hiding somewhere.”
“We know,” Gray said. “We all know he nabbed her. She’s a woman in danger, one he knows personally—no way he’d leave her to fend for herself. She’s his kryptonite.”
“What does that mean?” Friday said, again missing the reference to a culture that happened long before she was born. She was a child of the new world. Born as a foundling, raised by the charities run by the government, and educated by CommTECH to join their stable of pet scientists. Now she was Striker’s pet scientist.
“It means that Mace has a history with this.” He hesitated, drawing his sensitive wife close to him, knowing how she would react to Mace’s story. “His dad killed his mom when he was a kid, and his granddaddy made sure Mace thought he was evil, jus’ like his dad.”
