by L. C. Mawson
“The one that had been newly built when the old timeline was erased. The one that hadn’t yet been staffed.”
“You mean the one in Russia? What of it?”
“We need a base of operations. Somewhere fortified that they can’t get into. An Enhanced base, with all of the security measures, but none of the people guarding it, sounds perfect.”
Gus frowned. “While I agree that there is a need for us to have a base of our own, I don’t think this one will be as easy to capture as you think. The Enhanced have already sent scouts to investigate it. I think we’re likely to meet more resistance than you’re anticipating.”
Alex just shrugged. “It’s the best that we have,” she told him simply. “Once we have a base of operations, we can start building from there. For now, any move we make against the rest of the Enhanced directly will be suicide. To go after a base where they most likely don’t have many guards, where we will probably only be facing a couple of scouts, is our best bet for striking the first blow.”
Gus’s frown deepened. “I’m not saying that there’s a better target to hit for our first blow against them. I’m saying that the two of us won’t be enough. We will need more allies, we will need to recruit more Enhanced to our cause if we want this to work.”
Alex glared at the suggestion of recruiting more Enhanced. “I have been gone for almost two years now,” she reminded him. “And for most of that time, the older Enhanced have considered me a traitor. You were there, listening to the things they were saying about me. Do you honestly think that any other Enhanced would side with us?”
“I sided with you.”
“You’re my brother.”
“And we have other siblings,” he pointed out. “Not to mention, I know of a few others who are less than enamoured with the way the older Enhanced have been running things. Who aren’t keen on the idea of another war with magical beings.”
Alex sighed, shaking her head. “Even if we wanted to track them down, it would take too long. They’ll be spread out across the globe, remember? And with Enhanced having access to so many security systems, we can’t just waltz through an airport. The security is too tight.”
Gus grinned. “About that, I might have disrupted their spiders. By the time they figure out that there’s an internal problem, not that you’re still avoiding transport hubs, we should have recruited more than enough of the others to our cause.”
Alex frowned, less than happy that she had been unable to dismiss his plan with technicalities. “Even if the others are a little disgruntled,” she eventually said, “I will not make the mistake of trusting another Enhanced. I trusted my monitor – he was supposed to protect and watch out for me – and he used that trust to kidnap and torture Freya.”
“But you trusted me after that.”
Alex looked away. She didn’t want to admit that her trusting Gus had been a combination of her own tumultuous emotional state and her confidence when she’d had Freya beside her.
As much as Freya probably couldn’t take on more than one or two Enhanced at once, the two of them likely could have dealt with Gus if he hadn’t trusted Alex.
And if she’d had anything close to a clear head, if she hadn’t just run away with Freya, her bruises and cuts still healing as she found herself in denial about the betrayal she had suffered, she wouldn’t have contacted Gus at all.
But she didn’t want to tell him any of that. He was on her side now, and that was all that mattered to her, not that she might have mistrusted him in the past.
“I’m not going to approach any other Enhanced until we have a secure starting point,” Alex said eventually. “I will not ask them to join us until our mission appears less suicidal. If anything will sway them to our cause, it will be thinking that we actually stand a chance. Capturing the base will do that, and between the two of us, we should have no problem dealing with a couple of scouts the other Enhanced have sent. Not when we have the element of surprise on our side. Surprise that could be jeopardised if we try to approach other Enhanced and they choose not to join us.”
Gus sighed, clearly not happy with the plan, but having no argument.
“Just tell me where the scouts will most likely be, and we can stop them before they ever reach the base.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Gus
Alex wasted no time putting her plan into motion, dragging Gus across country borders, to the location of the base.
Or at least, the rough area where it should be...
That was the thing about the lost bases, no one knew their exact location. It had been a security measure, to make sure that if one was compromised, the others wouldn’t be. Back before the timeline had been changed so that none of the Enhanced outside of the shielded facilities had ever existed, there had been communication between the bases that made knowing their exact location irrelevant.
But that communication had been decimated when the timeline had changed, decades ago. Gus and Alex had been barely babies when the war had ended, growing up in secrecy so that no magical being would ever find out that any of their number had survived.
They had been weapons for a war that had no longer happened.
A war that they were more than happy to leave behind in the alternate timeline. For the older Enhanced, however, it seemed to be a war that they wanted nothing more than to fight again.
Without knowing where the base was, the scouts sent by the Enhanced would have to find somewhere to set themselves up, as near to where they suspected the location to be as possible.
Usually, that meant a hotel. Inconspicuous, but still defensible.
Each generation of Enhanced was improved over the last, meaning that even though they were young, Alex being the top of their age group meant that she was considered the peak of what genetic enhancements could achieve. So, when they had needed someone to find the lost British base, Alex had been chosen, despite having never been out of their home base before.
That had been how she had met Freya.
Thanks to that experience, she knew the protocol well, and they quickly narrowed down the possible locations for the scouts to be working from.
They went to each hotel in turn, with Alex keeping an eye out to make sure no one spotted them, while Gus hacked into the security cameras.
The Enhanced were trained to avoid cameras, but in some instances, they couldn’t be avoided. Not to mention, they were mostly trained to avoid facial recognition software, not someone manually looking through the footage for them.
“Found them,” Gus said after half an hour searching through the footage from the third hotel.
“How many?” Alex asked.
“Two.”
Alex smiled. “That’s great. We should be more than able to deal with them if we’re facing only two of them and we have the element of surprise on our side.”
Gus frowned. “I’m not so optimistic,” he admitted. “After you betrayed them, the Enhanced stopped sending out younger members as scouts. I recognise these two. See, that’s Effie. She used to train us just after we hit puberty, remember? And with her is Jay, who was one of the top tech experts at our base. Do you honestly think we stand a chance against the people who taught us everything we know?”
Alex shook her head. “Not everything we know. Not anymore. They may have trained us as children, but we have real-world experience on our side now.”
“So do they. And they are decades ahead of us. Not to mention, most of their experience is from an actual war, whereas ours is just from messing around playing spy.”
Alex glared back at him. “If you think I earned these scars from just playing-”
“I’m not trying to invalidate what happened to you,” Gus told her, shaking his head. Why was she being so stubborn? Did she have a death wish? “Facing your monitor like that must have been hard, but you didn’t win that fight, Alex. Freya won it for you. And how many fights did you get in before that? I saw the reports, you fought a couple of Demons. Demons who had n
o way of anticipating an Enhanced soldier even still existing. I would be willing to bet that you won those fights by nullifying their magic to catch them off-guard. None of those Demons had probably ever had to fight without their magic before. But that tactic won’t work against the other Enhanced, Alex. They’ve never had magic to rely upon; they have the same enhancements as us.”
Alex shook her head. “Not the same. They had decades to perfect the genetic code between them and us.”
“They did, but I don’t think it will make that much difference in a fight. I don’t think it will make up for our lack of experience.”
“I do. I think you’re underestimating us. If we catch them off-guard, we should be able to take care of them before they even realise what’s happening.”
Gus sighed. “I still think this is a bad idea.”
“Your objection has been noted. You still coming?”
Gus sighed again before reluctantly nodding. “Yeah, I’ve got your back.”
CHAPTER SIX
Alex
Alex watched the two Enhanced from a distance for a while, noting their daily route out of the hotel as they went to search for the base. They were heading to the same place, mostly, to look for local records of any strange, abandoned buildings.
Gus stood beside her the whole time, radiating unhappiness and concern.
It was getting on her last nerve.
She thought about saying something. Snapping and demanding to know just what exactly he wanted from her.
But she didn’t.
She needed him to believe that she could do this. That she had a cool head on her shoulders.
That they could win this fight without calling in any damn backup...
So, she stayed silent, and once she was reasonably certain that the Enhanced wouldn’t deviate from their route, she and Gus found the spot on said route that would provide the best conditions for an ambush.
A small, quiet street, with a narrow road that could be easily blocked.
Once they had that information, it was just a case of waiting.
Alex perched at the top of a building, looking down from the roof through the scope of a sniper rifle. She didn’t necessarily want to kill the other Enhanced if she could avoid it, but then she remembered how her monitor had fully intended to slit her throat as soon as she was no longer useful as a way to cause Freya pain. The man who was supposed to have been looking out for her had been more than ready to kill her, so she didn’t see why the other Enhanced who shared his views should be spared.
That just seemed like causing more trouble for her.
Alex checked her watch, knowing that the Enhanced always arrived at the same time.
Two minutes past the hour.
They were a minute late.
“Something doesn’t feel right about this,” Gus told her. “Maybe we should call this off. Figure out a different way to approach them.”
Alex shook her head. “No,” she said, as Gus got up and started scouting around the rooftop. “There are hundreds of reasons why they might be a minute late. They could have hit traffic or anything...”
“Or they suspected that they were being followed,” Gus said, his voice hard. “If they thought someone might be after them, this is the most likely place on their route for an ambush.”
Alex frowned. “But we’ve been following them for days. Why today? How would they know that today would be the day we would strike?”
“Because they installed sensors up here to see when we would try and ambush them,” Gus said with a sigh as he picked up a small, metallic device.
Alex cursed as she recognised the Enhanced sensor.
“We should go,” Gus said quickly. “Hopefully, they decided to avoid us entirely, but if they decided to face us instead... We need to leave before they find us.”
Alex clenched her fists at the idea of just walking away from their one opportunity to get the scouts. “No, they still don’t know that we’re onto them. They will be expecting to catch us by surprise. We can use that to our advantage.”
Gus shook his head. “Alex, I wasn’t happy about this plan when they didn’t know we would be here. Now that they do-”
Gus was cut off by a shower of bullets, aimed right at them.
Thanks to their quick reflexes, both Gus and Alex managed to duck down, out of the line of fire.
“We need to leave,” Gus told her firmly.
Alex shook her head. “Even if we try to leave, they will just follow. Better to stand our ground here, where we were expecting to fight, than have them give chase.”
Gus groaned but nodded. Even if he felt that they should have left before, staying was truly the best option now.
Alex waited until the Enhanced firing at them ran out of bullets, before launching herself down from the roof, to land in front of them.
She couldn’t see the second Enhanced but trusted Gus to take care of them as she focused on this one. She couldn’t tell who they were under their black armour and mask, but she decided it was no matter. She’d figure it out soon enough from their fighting style.
Alex grabbed her baton and used it to knock the empty gun from the Enhanced’s hand.
She heard fighting from behind the Enhanced and assumed that Gus had engaged the other beyond her line of sight.
The Enhanced whose gun she had knocked away responded with a kick to Alex’s middle, but Alex deflected the blow with both hands either side of her baton.
She tried to strike at the Enhanced, but they blocked her blow with their forearm before slamming their other hand towards her stomach.
Alex spun out of the way of their strike, bringing her legs around to sweep under the Enhanced and knock them off their feet.
Alex straightened, but before she got fully upright, she found herself knocked back by a sudden blow.
She flew back onto the hood of a car, hitting her head as her breathing went short and sharp with shock.
She looked in front of her to see the Enhanced that Gus had been fighting with a gun aimed right at her.
Alex felt the world swim around her as Gus struck the Enhanced who had shot her.
That was the last thing she saw before the world went dark.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Gus
The only thing that kept Gus on his feet after Alex went down was his training.
Every day, relentlessly practising for this exact scenario from as soon as he was old enough to walk.
And yet nothing could have prepared him for the sight of his sister collapsing like that.
He had to know if she was even still alive.
Pragmatically, he had to know to re-evaluate the situation.
Did he have to get her to safety, or would he be fleeing alone?
But even if that wasn’t a concern, he knew that he would never be able to just leave his sister.
He had to know.
Effie attempted to strike him again, but his hands were fast as lightning, catching hers before twisting her arm around her back.
While she let out a yelp of pain, Gus kicked her in the middle before bolting back towards Alex.
Jay tried to tackle him, but Gus spun out of his way, racing towards Alex.
When he finally reached her, his hand went to check her pulse, but his attention was drawn back to the sound of the two older Enhanced sprinting towards him.
One of Gus’ hands brushed the charm around Alex’s neck, as the other came up to defend himself.
A torrent of fire shot forward, knocking Effie and Jay back.
Gus blinked in shock, looking around to see the source of the flame before exhaustion and realisation hit him in tandem, the fire sputtering out.
The flames had come from his hand.
Gus’ chest restricted with panic as he struggled to wrap his mind around what had just happened.
That had been magic.
He had used magic.
How had he been able to use magic?
Effie and Jay stumbled
upright, both of them having managed to put out the flames.
Their armour was burnt, but they were still standing.
Gus’ hand went to Alex’s neck again, to check her pulse for real.
He needed to get her out of there.
As soon as his skin touched hers, however, the world seemed to slip out from under him, and he tumbled back onto a carpeted floor.
Alex was next to him, breathing ragged but there.
Gus could feel panic threatening to return. Had he just teleported them? Or what was it magical beings called it? Shifting. The name seemed apt, but he refused to let himself think on it, or the reality of how they had escaped.
Alex needed medical attention.
She needed him.
He had to focus on that...
CHAPTER EIGHT
Alex
Consciousness intruded upon Alex like a parade of angry elephants.
Everything hurt, especially her head and chest.
She groaned as she remembered being shot, and the subsequent blow she had taken to her cranium.
“How bad was my concussion?” she asked as she pried open her eyes and managed to make Gus sitting next to her in the hotel room.
When he had left the Enhanced to join her, he had brought as much technology as he could, including portable medical equipment.
They should be able to deal with any injury without having to deal with hospitals.
Alex had made the mistake of not taking tech like that with her when she had left, and even before she had defected, she had felt its absence.
She looked over to the faint scar on her arm, where Freya had stitched up a wound from a Demon for her.
She looked away as she began to feel her throat sting.
“Not as bad as it could have been,” Gus told her. “You shouldn’t have any permanent damage, though if you had been a normal Human...”
