Total pages in book: 40
Estimated words: 36214 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 181(@200wpm)___ 145(@250wpm)___ 121(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 36214 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 181(@200wpm)___ 145(@250wpm)___ 121(@300wpm)
Kraken turns around slowly. His eyes are gray and flat and very, very controlled. "Excuse me?"
My heart is hammering but I keep my voice even. "I said you're welcome. I know you'd prefer I sit quietly in the corner and wait to be rescued, but I handed you something useful twice now and you've taken it both times without acknowledging that I gave it to you. So. You're welcome."
The silence stretches. I can hear the camera feeds cycling.
"You're a civilian," he says. "In a dangerous situation. My job is to keep you alive, not to—"
"Brief me? Trust me? Treat me like a person who can contribute something?" I cross my arms. "I'm not asking to go out there. I'm asking you to stop acting like I handed you a drawing from a child."
Something moves across his face. Not anger exactly. Something more complicated, kind of like I've pushed on a wall he didn't know he'd built.
"Sit down," he says. But it comes out different than before. Less like an order.
"I am sitting down." I pull the chair out and sit in it. "See? Perfect prisoner. But I'm right about the intervals."
"I know you are." He holds my gaze for one long second. Then he turns back to the console.
It's not an apology. It's not even close to an apology. But it's the first time he's said I know instead of I'll have someone look at it, and in this room, with these men, I think that's the closest thing to one I'm going to get.
I uncross my arms and look at the screens. "The interval suggests they're on a timer. Which means whoever's running the camera kills has to execute within a fixed window. If you change your rotation by twelve minutes in either direction—"
"It breaks the pattern," Mace says slowly. He's looking at me now. Actually looking, not the polite-nod-at-the-civilian look. "Forces them to improvise."
"Or tip their hand," Ghost says from the wall.
I shrug. "I'm just good at anomalies."
Nobody laughs at that this time.
Kraken is still facing the screens. But I can see his reflection in the dark monitor on the left—the set of his mouth, the way his eyes have gone somewhere interior. Thinking. Working through it.
He glances at my reflection. Catches me watching him in the glass.
Neither of us looks away for a long, charged moment.
Then he says, to the room, "Change the rotation. Twelve minutes. Starting now." And everyone moves.
I stay in my chair. The compound outside settles into a tighter, quieter kind of vigilance. The camera feeds cycle. I watch them and don't say anything else.
Kraken doesn't look at my reflection again. But before he leaves he sets a cup of coffee on the table next to me. Black. No comment. Just sets it there and walks away.
I look at the coffee.
Kevin would absolutely have something to say about this.
I drink the coffee. It's very good.
Whatever comes next I know one thing for certain. I'm exactly where I shouldn’t be.
And for the first time since I got here, I feel useful.
8
Kraken
The rotation change goes out at 2200. Brothers adjust without complaint. The west perimeter gets two extra bodies. I head back to the control room. I watch the feeds cycle and feel the room recalibrate around the new timing.
Tia’s still at the table. She's watching the screens the way she watches everything, like she's looking for the thing that doesn't fit. She's on her second cup of coffee. At some point she borrowed a pen from Mace's side of the table and started making notes on a fresh napkin, and Mace let her, which tells me something about how the room has shifted in the last two hours.
I don't look at her directly.
"Feed three," Ghost says.
I look at the screen. The west camera, the one that's been dropping on the eleven-minute interval. It holds. Normal. Grass, fence line, the dark tree line beyond.
Then it flickers.
Not thirty seconds. Two seconds. And when it comes back the shadows near the base of the fence have rearranged themselves in a way that shadows don't.
"That's not a test," Mace says.
"No." I'm already moving. "That's a breach."
The room snaps. Ghost is at the door before I finish the word. Mace closes his laptops with both hands in one motion. Two prospects materialize from the hallway. Weapons check, the fast practiced kind that happens in the hands before the brain catches up.
Tia pushes back from the table and stands. She's not panicking. Her face has gone still and focused in a way I haven't seen before, the same look she gets when she's reading the camera feeds, turned outward. "What do you need from me?"
It stops me for half a second. Not what's happening, not I'm scared. What do you need from me.
"Stay in this room," I tell her. "Lock the door behind us. Don't open it until I knock three times."