The Valkyrie Project (31 page)

"Stop looking at my ass!" Freya hissed when Jrue caught up.

"It's too dark in here to see your ass," Jrue said.

"And yet you're still trying to look at it!"

Jrue sighed. "Next time, I'll get in first."

--

"Okay," Rani said from up ahead, "I found a vent that's above the hallway along the main block of cubes. That should give us access to most of the floor."

Without waiting, she pulled
up the slotted metal square and lowered herself onto one of the desks below. Freya followed, and then Jrue managed to manipulate his body through the opening, and regained his balance after a precarious landing on the desk a couple meters below. The two women ahead moved like felines, making him feel like an elephant.

Rani made her fingers into the shape of a gun, fired it a few times, and pointed around the corner. She was indicating that the armory was in that direction, but Jrue found it almost as entertaining as the thought of her waiting around for someone to come rescue her.
Jrue hung behind, figuring since none of them had any weapons his bulkier frame would help protect the ladies ahead from being hit if they were attacked from behind. It was the least he could do to take a couple bullets for them.

They reached the armory and Rani used a security override code to open one of the storage lockers. The Valkyries grabbed larger weapons while Jrue stuck with a couple of the handguns for which he had
some actual proficiency. He had learned his lesson in the Academy when other students would take the baddest-looking simulation weapon they found and end up with something that kicked back so hard it left them bruised physically and battered in the rankings.

Rani and Freya started heading back down the hall, but Jrue stopped.

"Do we have any sort of plan here?" he asked.

The both fixed him with an icy stare that said the answer should have been obvious.

"The same plan we have every mission, Jrue. We find people who need to be saved, and we save them. We are Valkyries. We show them who lives."

And with that, they continued back down the hall, leaving Jrue to catch up or find somewhere to hide. The odds
of surviving seemed slightly higher if he went with them, so Jrue jogged to catch up.

"So," he began again.

"We're going to the data center," Rani interrupted. "That's the only reason someone would come here unless they were after a particular agent."

"How do you know they're not after a particular agent?"

"I don't. I'm going with the odds, and the odds say they're going after something in the data center. There's enough people here that if they were wanted someone special, we wouldn't get to them in time even if we already knew the target."

Jrue shut his mouth and watched the back of their triangle formation as they advanced.

The next few moments passed too fast for Jrue's life to flash before his eyes.

Gunfire echoed from around a corner. A man yelled. It sounded like Justin. Then Marisol rushed around the corner like a tornado blasting across a plain and Jrue, Rani, and Freya all turned to run with her. Whatever they were running from, it was important to continue doing so. More gunfire. The four of them
kept running.

--

Marisol had considering setting her comm's alarm clock noise to the sound that the alarms in the Agency headquarters made, but worried that she might try to hit the snooze button in case of a real emergency at work. Whoever had designed the alert system knew well how to get someone's attention, and when the alarms sounded on the Valkyrie Project floor, you knew something major was happening.

Of course, the gunfire helped make that pretty clear too.

Marisol grabbed Justin by the hand and dragged him into the bathroom like an eager high-school student with a new boyfriend. Justin yelped, but Marisol threw him against the wall and covered his mouth. It was so similar she wondered for a second if she hadn't traveled back in time to her high-school days. Justin certainly could have been an apt target for her in those days.

The alarms continued
with more urgency and force than anything allowed in a building for secondary education. The sound of boots clomping grew and receded as a group of people ran by outside. Marisol wanted to peek out the door, but held Justin and waited until the sound was almost gone, then cracked the door. She caught the tail end of a few military-looking types headed toward the data center.

She moved her hand from Justin's mouth. "You got your shit together?"

"Yeah, sorry about that."

"No problem. You got a gun in your desk?"

"Yeah. Emergency pistol."

"Okay. Count of three, grab
it and meet back here."

It took only slightly longer than three
seconds after that before Marisol and Justin were back together at the bathroom door.

They crept through the small home of the Valkyrie Project, which seemed bigger than it ever had, with more twists and turns and desks and rooms tha
n Marisol remembered seeing before. The normally spacious hallways constricted around her, tightening their grip as the two Valkyries drew closer to the data center. She hoped that Justin was free from the tension and nervousness that sucked the moisture from her mouth, but guessed his heart was racing just as much as hers.

The data center's outer security door stood open, but Marisol saw nothing through the narrow pane of duroglass that
offered a preview for those waiting to enter. Security doors such as that were made without doorstops on purpose because, well, they were security doors. The infiltrators had propped it open, or someone was stationed on the other side to keep it open.

Marisol held her hand up in front of Justin, articulated her wrist to move the hand back and forth in a truly uncanny impression of a door, and the
n pointed the gun she held in her other hand and mimicked the effect on the door that would occur upon firing. Justin's answer was much simpler: he nodded.

Marisol
raised her gun and fired three rounds as close to the center of the door as she could make them. There was a chance they would penetrate the door; being an "outer" security door, it functioned like a condom for someone with a birth control injection. Condoms could break, but the door didn't. The slugs did what Marisol had hoped, though, and rattled the door enough to shake loose some ripe fruit in the form of an armed intruder. He reacted quickly enough to blind-fire a few shots in her direction, but they flew past her like little minnows searching for food. Marisol responded with fatal accuracy.

As she and Justin approached the door, propped open by the
fallen body of the man inside, Marisol picked up on the commotion coming from further inside the room. Then, closer, a skittering noise that Marisol recognized a second too late as a grenade rolling across the floor.

The force of the explosion sent her back into Justin, and as he sprawled backward they both ended up on the floor. Marisol went through a mental checklist of possible injury sites and could feel nothing other than a few possible bruises where Justin
had smashed her into the ground when they collapsed in a tangled heap. Justin was already back on his feet, running through the cloud of debris after the pack of foxes following their diversion in a bid to escape the henhouse.

"Just a concussion grenade!" Justin said, his voice coming as though he were shouting from inside a helmet.

Marisol pushed herself up and hustled as well as she could after him on what began to feel more and more like a sprained ankle.

She halted her hobbling run at the sound of more gunfire
and a yell from Justin. Marisol needed to
ice
her ankle, but the
ice
that ran into her veins at that moment would not do it.

From the shadows leading to a poorly lit emergency exit, Justin stumbled and fell at her feet.

Marisol stood stunned for a moment, the
ice
in her veins holding her frozen in place. Then she dropped to her knees beside him. She leaned close and a soft breath eased its way from his mouth, its warmth spreading slowly over her cheek. She put a hand to his neck and felt a weak pulse for a moment before it faded.

The
rattle of guns punctured Marisol's moment of silence for her fallen friend. Bullets whizzed by her and the sound of boots approached. Justin's body began to stiffen; soon he would be much more difficult to carry, especially on a sprained ankle. But unless the men coming were absolute monsters, his body would be there when they left. Marisol was still reluctant to leave Justin lying there, but she was more opposed to the idea of ending up on the floor next to him.

She got up, saying another quiet goodbye,
and took off in the opposite direction.

--

Ana stood for a moment in the angular door frame that opened into the home of the Valkyrie Project, surveying the random areas of destruction between untouched offices and cubicles.

Then Jrue appeared, his face ashen and somber, his shoulders slumped forward as he took several cautious steps while surveying the strange combination of technology and trash.

He looked up for a moment and spotted Ana and small creases of happiness flashed at the corners of his mouth, before falling back below the surface.

He walked in her direction while she couldn't help but jog.

"Is it—?" She hesitated, unsure if 'over' was the right word.

Jrue nodded.

"Yeah. They're gone."

"What's the damage?"

"What you see here, and"—he paused—"and Aerin is looking at the data center with a couple other techs to figure out what they took, and"—he paused again—"and they killed Justin."

Ana's heart disappeared and without anything to pump her blood, it
stopped moving. Her face paled to within a few shades of death. The dam that had been holding back the pain and chaos in her head split down the center and tears from the glacier of icy emotion rushed through forming rivers down Ana's cheeks. Her jaw clenched and teeth ground together to hold in the sort of wailing sobs that usually accompanied such tears. She had hoped it would get easier or that she could at least come to accept the casualties that came among team members. It was an implied part of the job description, but you couldn't go to a firing range to practice mourning the dearth of a family member.

And it
had happened in the sanctity of the ninth floor of the Agency building. It was like someone had broken into her home—not her tiny apartment, but her old, real home—and killed her family while they sat around the dinner table.

The hinge of her jaw released long enough to get a few words out.

"Were there any others?"

"No.
They got in and out before anyone else could go after them. Of course, that probably means they got what they came for."

"How long did the whole thing take?"

Ana knew the time the alert had gone out. Not more than forty-five minutes had elapsed.

"Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes tops."

"And you were here for the whole thing?"

"Yeah, I was in the Eastern Conference when everything got locked down."

"Where were you before that?" Ana heard her voice rise in pitch as the dread tension threaded its way up around and through her spine.

"I was at home. Made some pad thai. What's wrong?"

"I just saw you, but you were not here, and not at home."

"What do you mean? Where was I?"

"On the other side of a teleportation field in a Continuum base. But if you were here, then you weren't there. You couldn’t have been on the other side."

"A teleportation field? In
a Continuum base? Ana, let's get you some water."

"
Water? I don't need water. You were there! You threw me a gun because Etienne was trying to kill me. I left it in the car since I couldn't bring it up here. I'll get it; I'll show you."

Jrue grabbed her arm before
Ana could turn away. The confusion that blanketed his face turned to concern.

"Ana, it's okay. I am sure it's a
shock
, but you don't need to freak out. Let's just go sit down and we can talk."

"A
shock
? This is a
shock
? No. Learning that a Valkyrie was killed? I prepare for that. It is not an unexpected occurrence. Tragic? Yes. But not a
shock
. You know what was a
shock
? Natalya telling me that burying Etienne under an exploding building was just a test of the Continuum's control over me. That was a
shock
! Following Etienne—turns out she was still alive!—to a place that distorts the physics of our universe, that was a
shock
! Seeing you on the other side of a teleporter and having you give me your gun so I could kill Etienne—for real this time—that was a
shock
! And coming back here to find out you weren't on the other end of that teleporter because, oh wait, I guess it really was a time machine, well, that's a
shock
! So, I am in
shock
, yes. And I'm being super insensitive to Justin and everything he did for me, but there are kind of some big things on the agenda today."