“Apologies, I’m late.” He strode up to the strategy table. “Wyatt’s just finished up with an antenatal appointment, he’ll be here any minute.” He folded his arms and inspected the glass screen. “This is where you think Max is being held?”
Sloan’s stomach fluttered. “It’s where Daisy was phoning Sara from.”
“And you found the data buried in Sara’s phone.”
“Together with Wyatt’s cell,” she corrected.
He arched an eyebrow but said no more. “That was months ago.”
“We know.” Don’t remind her.
“Okay. What’s the plan?”
Sloan opened her mouth, but Griffin held up a finger for her to wait. He lifted his hood to cover his head and tapped the microphone activator on his breast pocket emblem. The micro-speaker was inbuilt into his hood. “Yes?”
Griffin’s gaze turned dark.
“What is it?” Sloan asked.
“Lilo,” was all he said, and then he walked out of the operations room and into the hallway, no doubt wanting to focus his attention on the call.
Sloan shared a worried look with her two brothers. Lilo, Griffin’s mate, rarely called and asked to be patched through to their suits. She knew if he was in a suit, he’d be in the field and not to be disturbed. Lilo was a news reporter. Calling like this might indicate bad news…
Griffin came hurrying back from the hallway, a hard look on his face.
“AIMI,” he said. “Turn on the channel four news on the middle wall monitor.”
One of the giant screens flickered to life. With it came pictures of a disaster unfolding in the municipal district of Cardinal City.
Sloan’s whole world came crashing down.
“Looks like we found Max,” Evan said.
Twenty-Nine
A warm breeze tickled Max’s face and arms. He was lying down. When he opened his eyes, blue sky peeked from the gaps between tall buildings. As his awareness began to focus, sounds of traffic, birds and conversation flowed over him. Frowning, he strained his hearing. It was more than conversation, it was panic. The whoop of a police siren had him jackknifing upright.
His head swam, his stomach rolled, and the weight of his body almost pulled him back down. Looking down at his torso, he knew why he was so heavy. There was a bomb strapped to his middle. Kilos of C4 explosives, wires, and a cell phone with a timer running.
Twenty-five minutes and counting.
Thirty
In the Lazarus basement headquarters, pandemonium broke loose around Sloan, but she couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. She was underwater, watching everything from a muffled distance. She could only watch the video footage, blurring in her eyes: Max sitting in a lonely courtyard in the municipal district, bomb strapped around his chest… bruised, beaten, about to die.
Then something surreal happened. A warbled ring penetrated her underwater doom.
Ring ring.
Ring ring.
Each shrill decibel grated down her spine and brought her closer to the surface of sanity. The sound came from Sara’s old phone. Parker, Evan, Griffin and Sloan looked at each other.
“Answer it,” Parker ordered her.
She hit the connection button and quickly put the call on speaker. “Yes?”
“You have twenty-four minutes and thirty seconds before the bomb goes off.” The sexless timbre of the voice was unmistakable as their eldest sister. “If anyone but Sloth approaches him, I’ll sniper shot them.”
“It will take us at least ten minutes to get down there,” Sloan said, surprised her voice wasn’t shaking. “I need more time.”
The call ended.
Sloan’s fury broke loose. Red crowded her vision. She shook with bottled rage until it bubbled up and she screamed. She hurled the cell at the wall and watched it break into a million pieces.
Her brothers swiftly lifted their hoods over their heads for protection—hoping to insulate themselves from her ability, but screw them. She had it leashed. She did.
“Calm down, Sloan.” Parker’s dark brows drew together.
“Don’t you fucking tell me to calm down,” she shouted at him.
Griffin and Evan both tensed and shared a look.
She knew that look.
She goddamned knew it. They thought she was being hysterical. They thought she couldn’t handle this.
Wyatt entered the room, stalled, and slowly tensed as he scanned them all. Immediately, he looked to her brothers for direction. Not her. He thought Sloan had messed up. She could see it in his eyes.
Screw them.
With a profound sense of deadly purpose, she stood, and she stood tall. She planted her palms on the cool glass table. She met each of her brother’s individual gazes.
“You think I’m going to lose it again, don’t you?” she accused through clenched teeth.
Parker lifted his chin slightly. “Your recent track record isn’t inspiring, Sloan.”
She gasped an almighty motherfucker-you-did-not-just-say-that gasp. Her eyes snapped narrow.
“You can all suck it.” She rounded on Wyatt, slowly edging closer to her, and pointed at his face. “Especially you! I’ve spent the past fortnight training, working on my ability, and fighting to find my mate. That’s the only track record you all need to worry about. No… you know what? How’s this for a track record? How’s this for control!”
She knew she had no time. She knew she was doing exactly what they accused her of, but she couldn’t help it. Using the technique Tony had taught her, she conjured the vision of that nail file stabbing into her palm. Then she fired that pain at Wyatt. She fired it at Evan. And she fired it at Griffin and Parker. It all took mere seconds. Each of them grunted in varying degrees until one by one, they tensed, squeezed their eyes shut and groaned as they doubled over.
“And for the record, that’s not me losing my shit. That’s me teaching you mansplainers to think before you speak.” She wrenched that pain reflex tighter, feeling satisfied at their grunts of surprise. “Next time you accuse your sister of being lazy or not pulling her weight, you’d better open your eyes first. If any of you had looked beyond your own male pride, you’d have noticed I’d been working my ass off to get my skills under control.”
A slow clap came from the hallway and Sloan instantly let go of her hold on her brothers.
It got louder. And louder. And then Mary entered, a broad grin on her face. “Mija, I’m proud of you.”
Parker cleared his throat and straightened his uniform.
Wyatt had the decency to look ashamed. Evan and Griffin avoided her gaze.
But Mary was the epitome of motherly pride. She stared her sons in the face, coming to land on Parker. “I think you owe your sister an apology.”
A mumbled chorus came at her, then Wyatt came to Sloan. “Mary’s right. We all owe you an apology. Especially me. And I will—after we get to Max.”
“You’re right. Shit.” Then the panic set in. Max. The bomb.
The truth was, Sloan’s little display of power was full of false bravado. Yes, she could manage her powers, but she was out of ideas.
“Sorry,” she bit out and braced herself on the table, breathing hard. How the fuck was she going to get Max out of this? What if she’d just wasted the precious seconds she needed to save him? She squeezed her eyes shut, but the sight of his despairing face was there, front and center. Max. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Signal jammer,” Flint said, jogging into the room. “That will stop her remote detonating.”
“Signal jammer?” But the hope was short lived as something came to her. “There’s a hardwired timer on the bomb. That jammer won’t work. It will disrupt everything within the radius, even emergency services.”
“Can you hack the phone?” Evan offered.
“No,” Parker answered. “The code on a cell is a minefield. It would take her months to find the relevant program that controls the timer.”
“Oh my God.” Sloan jolted with
an idea. “My visual code program.”
“What’s this?” Flint asked.
“I’ve been working on a program that converts binary code into abstract visual patterns.”
“You said the what now?” Evan scratched his head, but Parker understood.
“It might work.” He nodded. “You can recognize the code in hours, not days.”
“We don’t have hours,” Griffin pointed out the obvious.
“It’s our best bet.”
Evan lifted his moss green face scarf to cover his nose and mouth, then lifted his hood. “Right. While you two geeks do that, Griff and I will head down.”
“I’ll come with you,” Sloan said, gathering her iPad. “I can work in the car.”
“No,” Parker replied. “You’ll work faster here.”
“Did you hear Daisy?” Sloan’s voice was high. “I’m the only one allowed near him.”
“That’s what she wants, Sloan. It’s a trap!” Parker replied, deep voice reverberating off the walls.
“Fuck you, Parker. I don’t need your approval. I know I can do this and whatever the case, I’m not leaving him to die alone.” She strode toward the garage. “Who’s driving?”
Thirty-One
Parker ended driving Sloan and her brothers to the municipal district. Night had fallen and time was running out. The mood was tense inside the black-armored Escalade as her brothers watched her work like a madwoman on her iPad, trying to source the frequency of the cell strapped to Max’s bomb. It was a needle in a cybernetic haystack. But this was her jam. This was Sloan. A badass hacker who approached any hack with tenacity.
She found the frequency.
She connected.
“I’m in,” she murmured, then continued her hacking onslaught.
When the vehicle rolled to a stop, she’d only been linked to the bomb-cell for two minutes. It wasn’t long enough for her binary-to-visuals program to provide results. It had only just begun unpacking the data she’d received and, deep down, she feared there just wasn’t enough time.
Zeroes and Ones.
If the program took too long to unpack, then she would not have time to find the offending code. Simple as that.
They’d parked down a side street—just outside the police blockade area. Griffin and Evan split and found high ground, hoping to combine their powers to create an electro-magnetic field to contain the blast... if it came to that. Wyatt got out and disappeared into the shadows. Without removing her eyes from her screen, Sloan allowed herself to be pulled out of the car by Parker, and in the direction of the municipal district. Toward Max.
The sound of traffic and people gasping bombarded her.
Eyes on the screen. Eyes on the visual code.
Someone bumped into them, and she vaguely noticed the thickening of bodies as they approached the event. Parker gave an animalistic snarl that scattered people, clearing a path. A jolt of panic surged through Sloan, but she refused to take her eyes from her running program. It was imperative she watched to look for the pattern that signaled the bomb timer.
Another jostle.
Another jolt of panic.
“Keep your ability leashed, Sloth,” Parker murmured under his breath. It was purely meant to help. “I feel your fear.”
If he could sense her, then she wasn’t controlling herself. The next step could be a mass sleepover party for the citizens of Cardinal City... or worse. If they all felt her fear, it would be chaos. They’d evacuate en masse. Remember your training. She took a deep breath and exhaled, concentrating on the way her breath warmed the inside of her face mask. Compartmentalize. Deal with that fear later. I’ve got this.
Get to Max. Hack the bomb. Get him out. Don’t hurt anyone in the process.
Easy.
Right?
When the two of them, disguised in Deadly suits and armed to the teeth, burst through to the main courtyard, people began to make way for them—they cut ominous figures.
Device in her hands. The sidewalk became overcrowded, and she couldn’t stop the instinct to look up, for only a few seconds, but she caught glimpses of faces she knew. Street lights illuminated local cops desperately trying to hold back bystanders stupid enough to stick around. News networks. Lilo with a cameraman, and her bodyguard—one of Max’s men. The big one with the red-tinged beard. Daymo, Max had called him. Flashes, that’s all she received, and then she forced her gaze back to her program as they pushed through to come to the base of the concrete steps that led up to the Skyscraper courtyard where Max sat alone.
Her breath caught.
Three flag poles stood proudly behind him. One with the national flag, another with the state’s and the third Sloan didn’t catch, except that Max had propped himself against the base of its pole. His face was a Pollock painting of bruises and welts. His shirt, stained and ripped. The tape holding the C4 to him was wrapped around his torso like a bandage. His face was drawn, his skin color, pale. But his beautiful brown eyes… they were alive. He hadn’t given up.
A white piece of paper pinned to his front lifted in the breeze.
Back to the program!
She forced her eyes to ignore everything else but her screen, only catching in her periphery a local police officer as he rushed over. “Is one of you Sloth?”
Parker must have indicated her because the officer addressed her next. “The note says only you can approach. The victim shouted it down, and when one of the squad tried to get close, he was shot by a sniper.”
That meant Daisy was watching… or one of her Faithful.
Parker cursed and immediately relayed the information to Evan and Griffin through his internal hood communication. Griffin’s power was metal manipulation. If a bullet was fired, he would sense it and halt its trajectory before it hit anyone approaching... but they didn’t pass that information onto the officer. As far as the Deadly Seven were concerned, letting Sloan approach on her own first was the best option.
“Keep your officers away,” Parker ordered. “Let us handle this.”
“The bomb squad is on its way. We have men searching for the sniper. When they get here...” The officer didn’t finish. He knew time was precious. He must have signaled for his squad to let them through, because Parker guided Sloan swiftly up the steps.
“Cover me, Greed. I’m taking Sloth up.”
A mild panic twisted her heart. “You’ll get shot.”
“She won’t shoot me.”
“That’s your pride talking. You can’t be sure.”
“You keep your eyes on the program.” Parker continued to guide Sloan up the steps and mumbled observations about their surroundings, so she could keep her eyes on the program. Every second counted. “Liza’s here, twelve o’clock, near the ambulance. An officer down. Must be the one the sniper shot. About five in riot gear approaching from the East.” Almost at the top, Parker cursed. “Bomb squad. Damn. Arriving in full force, pushing through the crowd. One approaching.”
Sloan’s heart rate picked up.
“Greed. You on it?” Parker said.
“I still don’t know where the sniper is. I can’t say I’ll feel the bullet in time.” Griffin’s voice came through their hood-microphones.
“He’s going to get shot if we don’t stop him. Do it, Sloan,” Parker ordered.
“Do what?” she replied.
“What you’ve been training to do. We can’t risk relying on Greed. It’s safer if you remove the squad officer from the equation. Let me take over so you can concentrate.”
She shoved the iPad into his hands. “You’re looking for a pattern shaped like an Atari Space Invader.”
“Got it.”
Sloan cast her gaze down the steps. It was as Parker had said. Already a man dressed in bomb-disposal protection was making his way up, despite the wild gesticulations of the officer in charge. Sloan didn’t let him get far. She jogged down a few steps until she was sure she could target him specifically. She conjured the image of herself getting sleepy, of how
she acted it out in the training room, and then with laser focus, she let her power loose.
Invisible energy whooshed from her body as she continued her descent. The bomb squad officer slumped to the ground. Sloan barely made it to him in time to stop him falling hard on his head. She guided him down gently.
“Night. Night,” she murmured, and then launched back up the steps toward Parker and Max. A shout from another cop stilled her. She paused, looked back over her shoulder to see a row of police aiming their firearms at her. “Greed?” she barked into her hood-mic.
Within seconds, guns flew out of hands, hovered in the air and then dropped to the ground. Good. She raced up the steps to relieve Parker of the tablet. “You better go. We’re pushing our luck with you here. Daisy still might shoot.”
He made to leave before hesitating and turning back. His brows drew low over his eyes. “Obviously, I found nothing, and… there’s a deadman’s detonator in Max’s hands. You can’t cut the C4 off unless you’ve disarmed the timer, and then the bomb. I’ll talk you through it when you get to that point.”
Then he jogged back down the steps to haul the bomb squad officer away, booming at the police: “Consider that a warning. Next time you pull a weapon on one of us, you won’t get it back.”
She couldn’t let that new complication affect her, so shoved the panic aside and continued. As she crested the concrete steps to the platform, Max’s eyes flared wide with relief. Then panic flittered, then anger. Before he had the chance to open his mouth to no-doubt admonish her for putting herself in danger, she sat down next to him.
“Shut it, Max. I’m here.”
“You shouldn’t have come. It’s a trap.” He lifted his hand, the one with his thumb trembling over a detonator wired to the bomb around his chest.
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