by Stone, C. L.
I studied him. His messy hair, the rough start of a beard on his chin, the cerulean eyes that were focused on the screen. On top of the ever-present sadness was something more. A drive. Determination.
Anger.
I recognized that all too well. It echoed inside of me. They’d pushed us around enough. Pushed us into a war that wasn’t ours to start with. Our lives were at risk, and all we wanted was our people back and to go home.
“Do you guys just keep cell phones everywhere?” I asked.
“Comes in handy, doesn’t it?” He pushed a button on it and started thumbing in a text message.
“Can we talk now?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, looking up at me. I caught the bruises around his shoulders then, the one under his chin.
I sucked in a breath at the sight. Amid the chaos, I’d been completely oblivious to it. Before, all I saw was that Brandon was back and was too excited to see him.
I reached out slowly, touching a purpling spot on his arm. “What happened after you left the warehouse?” I asked.
He tilted his head down, looking at the phone, frowning. “They tried to beat me until I agreed to help them. And when that didn’t work, they told me why they were trying so hard. They thought Corey was friends with this other team. That’s why they did what they did. They’d had enough of their own team killed and were willing to do almost anything to save themselves.”
“Who... I mean this other team. Who are they? I only met Alice, but there has to be more of them.”
“We don’t know,” he said. He looked up at my face with those determined, angry eyes again. “I almost felt sorry for them, but they brought this on themselves. They were originally going to exploit these secret phone lines, listen in on passwords and things like that. Now they’re being hunted, told they’ll live only if they pass over access to this core. Every time they fail to get the core, one of their members dies. There’s only three left on the team now, I think. That’s all I’ve seen.”
“Alice may have Axel,” I said. “And Marc. Or someone does. I don’t know for sure, because I didn’t see them with her. She just said she had them. She also said she poisoned them.”
“If they aren’t with her, they’re laying low for a reason,” he said. “Something tells me, though, that if Axel was still standing on his own, he wouldn’t have left you for that long, and he wouldn’t let us run off like that. I was with Eddie and his team, but I only ever saw Eddie. The others on his team were usually in the dark or gone doing something. They kept themselves at a distance. Didn’t want to take too many risks so they limited who talked to me.”
“They didn’t trust you?”
“They thought I was Corey. They thought “I” could have been working for the other team, until they realized I really did have no idea what they were talking about.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked. I sat on the desk. I drew my feet up and curled up with my knees against my chest. The crop pants started to slide off my butt, but I had given up trying to look presentable. I was surprised I still had the flip-flops on. “How are we going to find Axel and Marc? Even if she was lying about a poison, we already know her team will kill to get what they want. We’ve only got a day. We’ll need Corey to get it and he doesn’t even know what’s going on right now. And Raven and Kevin…”
“On it,” he said, showing me the phone. He’d sent a text to a phone number with some message about a hockey game and the score last night.
“Uh...” I lifted a brow, looking back at Brandon. “Did you hit your head?”
“Code. Corey will understand,” he said.
My heart lifted in the moment he said something about Corey.
Sure enough, a moment later, the phone buzzed.
Corey: “Yeah, great game. That girl in front row was pretty hot, wasn’t she?”
Brandon smirked at the phone.
“What?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
“He’s asking about you,” he said. He typed in a message.
Brandon: “She had a nice ass, yeah, but remind me how much you owe me for that bet? That big guy took out two of our players. Adam and McCarthy didn’t stand a chance.”
Corey: “Randy was pissed. He’s going to be hitting hard in the follow up game.”
I didn’t understand any of this, except who A and M and possibly who R was, because something told me those weren’t who they were really talking about. It must have been some twin brother code.
I stared at Brandon as he focused on the phone and continued to type messages to his brother. “Should we find this core, then? Give them what they want?”
“We need to get Axel and Marc back, or at least confirm where they are. We may need to make contact.”
“How...”
“I was going to work with Eddie to figure out what was going on and possibly help them, but we need to work faster than they were. I was willing to play along before, but Eddie and his team have absolutely no clue. And we’re dealing with real murderers now.”
“What do we do?”
He tapped at the phone, staring hard, and his jaw clenched. “If needed, I’m going to offer myself up,” he said.
My feet slipped off the desk from my curled-up position. “You can’t.”
“I’m who they want,” he said. He turned and looked at me. “Or who they think they want. They need someone to get access to this core. That’s the only playing card we have in our hand right now. They think I’m the key.”
“So you’re going to offer them yourself instead of the core? Can’t we just give them access for now?”
“We may not be able to. If I offer myself up, we can make a trade. That’s how we find them.”
He had to be crazy. He’d just escaped and now he wanted to dive back in again. This time with murderers. “Am I supposed to sit here while someone’s got a timer on your life? Do you think we can just walk up to her with you and she’ll just as easily pass over Axel and Marc? No way. Find out where this Alice lives. Find the German.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to find a set of Tasers, first off,” I said, going with my original plan. “But this time, we offer up the team to these new guys and walk away. This isn’t our business. They’re fighting over who steals this stupid core thing. Well let’s either give them the team, or the core, and we trade them for Axel.”
“No,” he said, “they’ll kill us on top of it all.”
“Who are they? That’s what we need to know.”
He grunted, sitting back in the chair and kicking at the desk. “Corey sounds like he’s been searching for this core, but he’s not having much luck. The Academy will want to pull us both back out of harm’s way. I don’t want to go in if I can help at least figure out where Axel and Marc are. The fastest way is to call them out to get me.”
I understood his impatience. I wanted this to be over, too, and he might have been willing to sacrifice himself to get to the end, but I wasn’t willing to take that risk. Not now. Not when I’d already made a huge mistake letting Axel and Marc go when they’d told me before to be careful.
“What would the Academy do next?” I asked quietly.
“The Academy can’t even help if we don’t know where these guys are.” He sighed, closed his tired eyes and pressed his palm to his face rubbing at his jaw. “I don’t know. I guess they’d go back to the aquarium. They’d look for… this Alice girl. Find out who she is.”
“How do we find out by going back?”
“Security footage,” he said. He sat up and then started typing into the phone. “I can get Kevin to direct some people there to grab copies. Corey and Raven can search through the footage.”
It was a start. I liked this plan. He was right; I didn’t want to sit around in some hospital waiting, either. “What can we do? I don’t know if Alice and her team might follow us. And Eddie might be looking for us now, too. We have to avoid them, but we should probably at least find wher
e this core is. Axel said locating it would mean we might find them breaking into it later and catch them at it.”
“We need a backup just in case we can’t find it.” He showed me his phone where a text message had come in. Corey was sending some code I didn’t understand, but I was guessing it meant he was getting Kevin to go pick up security footage. “We need to do it alone, too. We can’t risk anyone else, not even from other Academy teams. We don’t want anyone else getting picked up.”
“Are we not telling anyone else?” Were we going to let Corey know?
He squinted up at me. “Limited liabilities.”
Protective brother. Marc had said the same thing. Why get Corey involved if the two of us are only going to get killed as a result? Or for that matter, if we limit what even the Academy knew, they wouldn’t send out a fleet and get us all killed. “But we can’t get the core and break into it without Corey...”
“The first thing this other team is going to want is information. They want to know who Axel and Marc are and if they’ll be useful. I don’t know about this poison or her threats. I’ve got Corey doing what he can from where he’s at. I can still trade myself in later, I guess. So we’ve got a little time to go after this core. We just don’t have a way of guaranteeing that they won’t just kill us all after we deliver. That’s why we need to be ready for minimal sacrifices. If they only have one, that’s better than two.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” I said, wanting to say more, because it was a ridiculous thought.
But if anyone had to be the sacrifice, it probably should have been me. Who was I? A thief without a family. My own brother didn’t even want to talk to me. Brandon had a brother and friends and so much more potential. The only thing was, I wasn’t valuable enough to be even considered a trade. Alice had a chance and she sent me back. They wanted Corey.
Brandon grunted and then focused on the phone. “I just need a starting point.” He rubbed his face again and yawned. “And a whole lot of coffee.”
“And an army.”
“I don’t need an army when you have secrets and resources neither team knows about.”
“Like a secret garage in North Charleston?” I asked. “Are there cars in here?”
“Bikes,” he said. He leaned over, grabbing a business card out of a holder and passing it to me.
Henshaw Customs.
Unique motorcycles and supplies.
Brandon’s name was on it, along with an email and phone number.
He never told me. I’d been with the guys for a couple of weeks, and even while I travelled in my own little world for a while, I still had daily conversations with the guys. Not once did Brandon mention he had a garage where he worked on bikes. And for having a business, he wasn’t at it often. One of the other guys once said he goes to the shop, but for some reason, I didn’t picture this. “You started all this yourself?”
“Yep.”
“You live in a tiny apartment.”
“It’s not that small. And so what?”
“This might sound like a weird question… but do you make much money at it?” It sounded rude, but if I had cash from a business, I thought I’d live somewhere nicer. Maybe that’s why he kept his shop in North Charleston. It wasn’t making much money.
“I like spending my money on better things than where I sleep.”
“Like what?”
“Like nosy girls who ask me too many questions.”
I kicked him.
“I like travelling,” he said.
“Where?”
“Wherever there’s a nice place to surf. Or wherever I’m sent by the Academy when on assignment. It’s up in the air.”
He returned his attention to the phone, talking with Corey about plans in a secret code. I leaned over, keeping my foot on his chair for balance, trying to read what he was typing. After a text, he switched windows and dug through an email box and the trash bin inside it.
“There were thousands piled up in the bin,” he said. “He never cleaned it out.”
Corey’s trash bin was filled with thousands of messages. “You’re going to check all those? For what?”
“I just need to find a way to communicate with Eddie without him getting our location. I want to try to get info on this Alice if he has any. I’m also hoping Eddie maybe sent another email to Corey that we’ve missed. If you’ve already investigated Randall, maybe there’s someone else with a phone that can lead us to the core. Like someone with a live, working phone from this network. Corey’s been trying to find this signal, but there’s thousands of signals and it could take weeks to track down.” He sat back, and planted his hand against my calf, slowly sliding his palm up and down along my skin soothingly. “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. He’d had his life threatened, been beaten, never thought he’d make it out. Suddenly he’d made a daring escape. I’d been wildly trying to save him and then suddenly he was back.
And then he’d kissed me, and I felt completely reckless. If I was going to die, I was going to fight and do whatever and to hell with the consequences. Brandon was beautiful, the protective older brother and he owned his own business. The angry smoldering behind his eyes told me he was going to do whatever it took to make sure we got out of this. I was willing, but I didn’t want to sacrifice him. Knowing that it might be the only way to get Axel and Marc back if we didn’t find this core on our own wasn’t the solution I wanted, and in that moment, there wasn’t anything I could do to change it. I hated that idea. It drove me to want to do something, anything, but I was powerless.
He continued to stare up at me, massaging my leg, waiting me out. He wanted a real answer.
“You’re not going to make me run off to South America while you solve all this yourself, are you?” I asked. Deflecting was better than what I was really thinking.
His face tightened. “I…can’t do this alone. I want to. I don’t want you in danger, but you and I are here right now. We’re so close and letting anyone else in, like the FBI or someone else, that would mean we’d lose time, and we don’t have that luxury. Not with a poison on Marc and Axel. Not when they’ll continue to hunt for my brother even if we disappear. We won’t be safe until we get our team back and we’re locked away.” He bit his lip, his mouth twitching like he wished to say more, but couldn’t.
I was quiet for a long moment, waiting him out.
Finally, he sighed. “If I told Raven and Kevin how bad things are right now, they’d insist we go back. You’re the only one who understands how deep we’re in. You’ll work with me, won’t you? You’ll help stop this?” His eyes shimmered, showing me the depths of despair he was feeling, well beyond what I’d been feeling up until that point. I’d been scared, angry, but sorrow wasn’t among those feelings.
For Brandon, he was already worried we’d lost. If all of this ended badly, he’d consider it his own fault.
It killed me. I wanted to do anything to stop that look. I nodded, promising to go with what he wanted. I spilled what I knew, wanting to resolve it all as quickly as I could. “We need to go see Doyle,” I said. “You remember him? He works for Blake, I think. I was telling Axel we should go… and he was into it before he got kidnapped.” It was a lie, but that was the only other lead I could think of. Maybe if he was convinced that Axel was into it, he’d actually go. “Doyle listens in on phone signals. He might have noticed this underground system.”
Brandon’s intense eyes studied me. “Maybe. Give me a minute. Just in case Doyle doesn’t have anything, maybe I can at least get another name as a lead. And Corey can do some research. We need anything right now.”
He went back to checking messages. I’d let him have his minute, and explore a bit. I needed to do something besides sit around or I was going to pass out somewhere. I got up and went to the other door that had to lead to the rest of the garage.
“Don’t touch anything,” he said as I opened it.
“I’m touching the floor,” I said.
“You can touch the floor.”
The inside of the garage was dark. “I need to touch the light switch.”
“You can touch the light switch. It’s on the right.”
I flicked on the lights.
The vastness of the garage struck me first. It expanded back further than I originally thought it did. There was a long wall of tools, toolboxes and tables lined up in the back. There were motorcycles in a row on the far side, parked diagonally like the outside of a biker bar. Each bike looked complete and ready to go, parked just far enough apart so he could pull one out. Tall shelves broke up the interior space and blocked off part of my view of one corner, but seemed to hold various parts too big to put on the shelves. There were large wood crates, too, with parts and some looked big enough to hold entire bikes inside.
Then I found the bikes he wanted me not to touch for real. There were a few display cases around the garage, each one holding a shiny bike with a paint job that blew my mind. Flames, ice and snow, beautiful women, dragons. Some details were molded from metal, and then painted.
I looked up.
More bikes were suspended from the ceiling. More 3D designs he was showing off. I cringed underneath them, worried one would fall, but they were so still. An Ace of Spades, a bike featuring Wizard of Oz characters, one had aliens. He was an artist and bikes were the canvas.
There was one bike up on a table in the middle of the shop, unassembled. So he didn’t just design the art, he built the motorcycles from the wheels on up.
I shuffled forward in my flip-flops to one of the display cases to check out the bike in detail. It was designed to look like it was on fire, and I was trying to imagine what it would be like to ride it.
As I leaned in, a light flickered inside the box, and the floor of the display case lit up, and then the bike itself lit up. The LEDs were positioned so the glow of flames looked almost real, flowing back and flickering in a continuous wave.
