Chapter 29

THE THIRD FLOOR IS SILENT, eerily so. Maverick, Ghost, and I move as a team from room to room, finding absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that might be this mysterious package. All the rooms we come across are mostly dark. Except one. Halfway down the hall, light seeps under a closed door. We zero in on it slowly, approaching with care to flank the doorway, Ghost on one side, Maverick on the other, and me next to Maverick—all of us with weapons at the ready.

Ghost signals that he’ll enter first, and Maverick signals back an acknowledgment that he’ll provide cover. I’m tasked with watching the hall. Maverick counts down on his fingers from three, but I’m far from ready when he gets to zero.

Maverick reaches for the knob and throws open the door. Ghost disappears inside, and Maverick drops to a kneel and slides around the doorframe to aim his gun into the room. I cringe, clench my eyes shut, and wait for a thunderstorm of gunfire.

Instead, Ghost calls out a surprised, “What the heck?”

“Seriously?” Maverick says before slipping into the room. Whatever is happening in there must not be dangerous. I waste no time following, but I stop short just inside the room.

A man is tied to a chair in the center of the room—correction, a guy, young enough that he could have been a fellow recruit. A large male body is slumped against the wall inside the door, and another is facedown at Chair Guy’s feet—and kneeling behind him, struggling to untie his bindings, is Legacy. She looks up at us with wide blue eyes, as if single-handedly navigating the building, finding the room, and taking down two armed guards is something she does every day.

“What are you doing here?” Ghost asks.

“Retrieving the package,” she says as she ducks behind him to work on the rope tying his wrists behind him.

“Where’s Redux?” Maverick’s voice is quieter than Ghost’s, and the question is almost lost in the room.

“Redux took a bullet and went down.” Her voice is devoid of emotion, like she’s reciting mathematical theorem or telling us it’s going to rain soon. I know my face is a mask of surprise, and Ghost and Maverick’s must match because she follows up with, “Not my bullet. Someone was shooting at us, and he wasn’t fast enough.”

Probably the same someone who had shot at Maverick and me. This mission is definitely no practice assessment. It’s the real deal. Life or death.

“You were just going to get the package and go?” Ghost is obviously frazzled by Legacy’s priorities.

For some reason, I’m not as surprised. I guess I kind of expected something like this from her. I can’t picture her being the type to sacrifice the whole mission by going back for a member of the team.

But seeing Legacy’s lack of emotion through Ghost’s eyes sends me spiraling back through the last six weeks. She’s been with Team Sever since day one, and she’s a legacy recruit. She said her mom was killed by terrorists, which means it was probably her mom who was in The Program. Could she have been so messed up by her mom’s death that she’d be willing to kill her way through The Program just to follow in Mommy’s footsteps? I mean, the one time she’s been left alone with a fellow recruit since this mission started, that recruit has turned up dead. She says it wasn’t her, but what if it was? What if it is?

My nerve endings tingle as my muscles tighten with energy, preparing for the possibility that she could turn on us at any second.

“The instructions were to get the package, not get myself killed trying to protect Redux’s dead body.” Her tone is even, unfazed, by Ghost’s clear judgment of her character.

“This is the package?” Ghost asks, and Legacy nods as the last of Chair Guy’s bonds fall away.

He stands, rubs his wrists, and looks anxiously from one of us to the next to the next. “We getting out of here or what?”

“Who are you? Why did they send us to get you?” I challenge, barring the path between him and the door with my body.

Chair Guy looks me up and down before answering. “You can call me Aero. I was a recruit like you. Last year.”.

“Where’s the rest of your team?”

He looks at me like I’m wasting his time. “Dead. Can we go now?”

Maverick steps to the door, looks up and down the hallway. “We’ll take the south stairs and circle back to the front door. Ghost, is Anomaly still at the extraction point?”

“Yep. Van’s ready and waiting.”

Legacy grabs Aero by the upper arm and ushers him toward the hallway. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

Maverick leads the way, with Ghost running cover right behind him. Legacy stays in the middle with Aero, refusing to take her hand off his arm. I bring up the rear, mostly because I want to keep an eye on Legacy in case she tries anything weird. Or psychopathic.

The trip back to the first floor is uneventful, but I can’t shake the feeling that danger lurks around every corner. We’re almost back to the lobby when I finally start to relax. We’re going to make it. A tiny whisper of sound echoes in front of us a split second before the roar of gunfire crashes in around us, blocking our escape. We have no choice this time, nowhere to run. We have to get through the lobby and outside the building. I aim in what I hope is the right direction and pull the trigger. The rest of my team shoots back, too. Shot after shot, we do our best to defend ourselves while also keeping our bodies low. We never stop our forward progression toward the exit.

Ghost cries out in pain, slams into the wall behind him, and drops down into a squat behind a bench upholstered in ancient, threadbare, floral fabric. He’s holding his arm, and blood seeps through his fingertips.

I inch over to him. “How bad is it?”

“It doesn’t matter, we have to get out of here. We can’t stop here.”

Maverick slides up next to us, pulls his shirt over his head, and wraps it around Ghost’s arm. He ties it off, a makeshift tourniquet. I catch myself running my gaze alone the lines of Maverick’s bare chest. As much as I would love to look my fill, this is neither the time nor the place for ogling. The look on Ghost’s face is an even mix of pain and frustration, like if he weren’t shot, he’d be upset that Maverick is literally giving him the shirt off his back to stem the blood flow.

Maverick, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to notice Ghost’s dissatisfaction. “Let’s go.”

I slip my body under Ghost’s good arm and position myself to be able to help him out of the building, but he shakes me off and puts a few extra inches of space between us. “I got this,” he grumbles.

“Fine.” I move into position, preparing to make a break for the exit as soon as he does. Maverick is already popping up over the back of the bench to fire back, and I scan the area for Legacy. She and Aero are just a few feet from the giant glass and wood doors that lead outside. Then they’re outside. It’s just us, and I have a sinking feeling Legacy isn’t even going to so much as look back. She’s going to take “the package” and keep right on going. Leaving us here to die.

Every time Maverick pops up to fire across the room, the gunfire aimed at us lessens in frequency just the tiniest bit. He must actually be taking them out, giving us a better chance of escape without taking a bullet. Or another bullet, in Ghost’s case.

I hold my gun with both hands near my shoulder, count to three, and snap up to shoot over the bench. Three shots and I drop down again, but it was enough for me to pinpoint at least two shooters behind a concierge counter across the room and another inside the open elevator. “They have much better coverage than our crappy little bench.” As if to prove my point, wood splinters just above my head.

I picture the lobby in my mind and mentally run through how and where to aim. Count to three. Snap my head up. Fire once, twice, three times. My third shot connects with one of the shooters behind the counter, and I duck down again. Maverick takes another one down, and best I can tell, the only one left is the guy in the elevator.

Maverick waves to get my attention and motions for us both to fire at the same time, giving Ghost the opportunity to crawl across the floor to the exit. Maverick counts down from three, and we rise up together. Ghost takes off for the door.

I fire five more shots, and when I pull the trigger a sixth time, nothing happens. “I’m out!” I call and sink back down to the floor.

Maverick moves down next to me. “I should have two bullets left. You go. I’ll cover you and follow when I’m empty.”

I’ve never been more conflicted about anything in my entire life. I can’t bear the idea of leaving Maverick here, but I also don’t want to die. Something in Maverick’s expression tells me this isn’t up for debate, and he doesn’t wait for me to agree before starting his countdown from three again. He counts zero, and we move at the same time: him to provide cover fire, and me to escape.

I’m almost to the exit when I come face to face with our salvation. Legacy is there, leaning into the room but using the door as cover to lay down extra fire on our behalf. When I get there, she steps back to allow me through. Once I’m safely on the other side, I peek through the glass to look for Maverick. He’s running toward us, ten feet away, five, one. Then he’s there, praise God. I wrap my arms around him in relief, and he hugs me back so tight we’re almost one person in this space.

“Okay, lovebirds, we’re not out of the woods yet. Don’t make me regret coming back for you.”

Maverick releases me and leads us down the block. Ghost and Aero are a few yards ahead of us, peering into every shadow and every dark doorway on our way to the van. Legacy follows behind, keeping her gun at the ready in case anyone follows us out of the building. No one does. By now, Cipher and Hack should already be at the van with Anomaly, and we can all get the heck out of here. Mission complete.

When Aero and Ghost get to the van ahead of us, Ghost opens the side door and starts to climb in, but a second later, he’s back out on the sidewalk. Then he’s circling the van, opening the driver’s side door. We’re barely ten feet away when Anomaly slides out of the driver’s seat and lands face-down on the asphalt. The back of her head is a bloody, gory mess, and I can’t bring myself to look closer, but I’m pretty sure the back of her skull is missing altogether. Anger, pain, sadness at the loss of yet another life, even one I barely knew, tangles inside me and threatens to come up my throat, to spew across the ground at my feet along with the last meal I ate.

If Anomaly is dead, that means Legacy can’t be the killer. She’s been inside with us the whole time. Maybe Redux really was just a mission casualty.

Actually… the only person who had time to blow Anomaly’s brains out was…

“Did you do this?” Maverick charges Ghost, pressing him back against the van with a hand wrapped around his wounded arm.

Ghost cries out in pain and uses his free hand to try to pry Maverick’s fingers from him. “Come on, man, let go! If I were in the business of killing people, I wouldn’t have gone in to save you guys.”

He’s got a good point. Not to mention the fact that he was in the wrong house when Prodigy was killed and with me when Mirage died. So, unless he had a partner from day one, he’s not the guy we should be worrying about.

Maverick must realize it, too; he considers Ghost for a moment, then lets go. Ghost folds in on himself, clutching his arm protectively. Aero watches all of this in silent interest.

“Where are Cipher and Hack?” Legacy asks, looking down the street in the direction of our safehouse apartment. “They should be here.”