Boy, That Escalated Quickly

I was almost terrified to admit to myself that things were getting better.

As if, once I did that, I'd jinx it and everything would go back to being a disaster. But nothing went back to being a disaster. Things were . . . almost normal.

Varvatos continued training me with the serrator, and I was beginning to enjoy it. The weapon was remarkably, and cleverly built. Eli had gone nuts over the layout of it. And I did too. Almost everyday, Varvatos was showing me a new way to hold it. A different way for the blade to lock into place.

Fascinating, Krel would've said.

I loved sparring with that weapon, even if we had to put guards over the blades and weren't allowed to fire the guns at each other. It was a thrill, to switch between such opposite styles of fighting in a way that complimented both. More than that - it was lively.

And for the first time since I'd arrived in LA, I felt lively too.

Eli and I were basically attached at the hip between classes, talking and laughing endlessly about almost anything. We'd talk about Steve and Krel and how terribly we missed them. We'd talk about the instructors and make up ridiculous backstories for them. We'd talk about Eli's new teammates and how they absolutely despised me.

"What is with these guys?" He threw up his hands from where he sat on the desk in Varvatos's office. "It's like, just because you're Orange it automatically makes you a Xenomorph right out of the Alien movie."

I spun myself in Varvatos's swivel chair beside him. "I'm really starting to hate that word."

"Xenomorph?"

I stopped to look at him. "Alien."

"Oh," He muttered. "But that's just the tip of the ice berg. You should hear some of the things they say about you."

Another look.

"Okay, maybe you shouldn't," He backpedaled. "But you know what I'm saying! It's just frustrating. The world gives us enough shit, we don't need to give it to each other."

"Truly inspiring, Gandhi."

He shot me a glare. "You're worse than Steve."

"Forget your stupid teammates," I said, kicking myself in another circle on the swivel chair. "And what they say. Besides, you'll win them over with all your conspiracy theories one way or another."

"You really don't care about the reputation they give you?"

I sighed, shrugging a little. "I have better things to worry about."

Namely, the rehabilitation camps.

At the very start of October, Zadra helped me propose an alternate program in the League dedicated to getting kids out of camps. Though the vote for it passed, it was almost immediately pushed to the bottom of the priority list. But Zadra and I had refused to let it die.

I spent hours upon hours, writing out every detail I could remember about Thurmond. The ways the cabins were ordered. The number of fences. Even the guard rotations. I'd rack my brain till it was mush to draw out endless amounts of diagrams and blueprints. Anything that could help get kids out of there.

Krel would've been proud of me.

Speaking of which, Eli didn't get the full story of what happened to Krel all at once. He got it in pieces. A little one day. A little more a few days later. Bit by bit until he could lace it together.

I kept expecting him to corner me on it. To pull the story out of me interrogation style. But he never did. Each time I told him a little more, he would give me a small nod. His silent way of telling me he could be patient.

It meant so much more than I thought it would.

But Eli was good at a lot more than just being patient. He quickly became one of the best Greens the League had seen so far. He could repair any piece of technology they handed him, no matter how unsalvageable it seemed. He could build too. Given any set of blueprints and a few tools, he'd work endlessly on developing new technology for Ops.

Of course, that came as no surprise to the agents, considering his reputation.

What did come as a surprise, though, was how many conspiracy theories the boy could cook up. Multiple times, I would walk into the locker room to find him standing on the benches as he preached to the multitude. Unsolved true crime. Paranormal cases. Bigfoot. Aliens. Illuminati. You name it, he could convince you of it.

"You've got yourself quite the rep, Creepslayer," I said to him one night. I was laying on my back, my legs straight up against the wall while Eli worked on the broken computer behind me.

"You mean as opposed to yours?"

I craned my neck to shoot him a glare. "I'm trying to pay you a compliment."

"My reputation is based on facts -"

"Yes, that 'Hitler is still alive' theory is definitely based on facts."

"As I was saying," Now it was his turn to glare. "People know me by what they've seen me do. They know you by what they're afraid you'll do."

I bounced my heels against the wall. "Maybe they're right to be scared."

He paused, looking back at me. "What are talking about?"

"Do I really need to spell it out for you?" I focused on a spot on the wall. "I basically brain washed my whole family. It's only common sense to be afraid of someone like that."

Eli put down the screw driver. "Come on, Aja," He replied softly. "We both know that's not the full version."

My voice dropped to whisper. "Doesn't make it not true."

"Look, Aja," He sighed. "You did what you had to, and I think you're pretty brave for it. As a matter of fact, Steve used to go on and on about how brave you were."

I felt myself blush. "Really?"

"Oh yeah," Eli adjusted his League issued glasses. "The boy had it bad way before you broke into our van."

I giggled a little, turning my gaze back to the ceiling.

"What I'm trying to say," Eli picked up the screw driver again. "Is that it doesn't matter what these losers think about you, it matters what Steve and I think of you. 'Cause we know you. And we think you're a badass."

I giggled again, though it didn't chase away the pain in my chest. "Thanks."

"Besides," He added. "They're probably just jealous you're an undefeated sparring partner, with or without a serrator."

We didn't go on our first Op until the very beginning of November.

According to the rules, you have to finish basic training and be at least sixteen before they send you out on Ops. Once Eli's sixteenth birthday passed mid October, we were only waiting for the next available mission.

And code names.

You had to have one to go out. It was basic procedure. The day we got ours, we both received bright red Op folders in our lockers. Eli opened it, took one look at his code name, and couldn't stop beaming.

"What is it?" I asked, peeking over his shoulder:

CRYPTID

"I love it," He almost whispered, his voice was so high, bouncing up and down in his toes.

"How appropriate," I giggled, gently elbowing him.

He was instantly bouncing over my shoulder. "What's yours? What's yours? What's yours?"

I flipped open my own folder:

PRINCESS

Eli snickered a little. "I guess that fits."

I smacked him with the folder. "Har, har."

November was the month of Ops. We did one almost every week, going back and forth between the LA building to different bases around the US. A few days in Texas, a few days back at LA. A few days in Alaska, a few days back in LA. And so on.

We did jobs from raiding hospitals to destroying labs. As good as I was with a serrator on tactical Ops - not to mention how much easier I made getting passed security - it was the intelligence missions the League would save me for.

Breaking into government buildings, taking whoever had our information, then letting the Akiridion scramble their brains for it.

Sometimes I wouldn't even have to go out on an Op. Another team of Psi kids would bring someone in and I'd be forced to rifle through the filing cabinet of someone's mind at two or three in the morning.

They didn't care how exhausted it made me. How I'd wake up with other people's nightmares. The endless migraines and gushing bloody noses. They didn't care what it did to my own mind. All they cared about was a few coordinates. A passcode. A file number.

Then they'd let me go again. And whether it was day or night, I would lay down in my bed, close my eyes, and wish with all my being that I could erase my own mind for once.

I knew it was one of these 'house calls', as they called it, as soon as the senior agents wanted to see me.

That's the odd thing about the League, they didn't have one, sole leader. I think they did at one point, but then he died and nobody could agree on who should take his place to they just let the five most senior agents call the shots. Like a council.

I was with Eli when we received the message, packing up our equipment from the Op we'd barely returned from.

"You want me to clear your schedule for tonight?" He asked as I walked away.

I stayed long enough to give him a nod, then headed for the top floor. I could hear them yelling in the conference room from down the hall. Slowing my steps, I came to a stop at the hinge of the door, catching the overlapping voices from within.

"- many times do we need to repeat the word for it to join your vocabulary? The answer, is no."

"You're not thinking this through -"

My eyes widened a little. That was Zeron's voice.

"We will focus on Lightning In A Bottle for now, on finding the Professor's work."

Lightning In A Bottle, my mind repeated. Professor. Those were code names. Every Op had one along with the people that completed it. I'd participated in so many, I had heard near all of them. But not those two.

"You think we can keep this up without making a big statement?" Zeron threw back. "How many of these things do you have sitting around HQ, wasting our time and energy?"

"They are not things, as I'm sure you are well aware of," A female voice quipped back. "This is nonnegotiable. Our ends will never justify these means, no matter how you try to pitch this. Never. They are children."

"Joan," A new voice chimed in. "Let's not dismiss this entirely. This is a tactic that's been employed before and it is effective. No one would be able to tell. We have ways of hiding the mechanism -"

"Lightning In A Bottle!" The woman near shrieked. "We are focusing on that Op, and that Op alone!"

"Lightning In A Bottle is a lost cause," Zeron said. "We don't even know if the Professor is alive. We warned him, but of course he didn't listen."

"Who cares if he's alive?" Yet another voice, a man's voice. "We can still find his work."

"Lost. Cause." Zeron spat. "Don't you understand that all these agents are waiting on you? For you to decide something?"

There was a tense moment of silence.

"I'm only warning you," Zeron continued, "that I've heard agents wondering what kind of policy we're moving forward with. A good number think that a few of you want to rekindle things with Morando. That you miss your old friend."

That struck a nerve, I could almost feel it in the air. A few members of the senior staff had a personal history with President Morando, that was common knowledge. One of them had even been the Secretary of Homeland Security. But using that against them seemed like a low blow.

Classic Zeron.

"Aja."

A hand rested on my shoulder, making me whip around to see Zadra. She'd just returned from an Op of her own, soot still smudged on her cheeks from the grenades. She gave me a sly look.

"You know you're not supposed to spy."

"No," I replied. "I'm just not supposed to get caught."

"And you're lucky that this time, it was by me."

"As always," I snickered.

Zeron stormed out of the room, along with several other agents, all looking equally frustrated. He paused for a moment to bore a glare through me, then turned and stomped down the hall with everyone else.

"And they say I'm the child," I muttered.

Zadra steered me towards the door. "Let's just get this over with."

The senior staff was visibly distraught when I walked in, but as soon as they saw me, they regained their composure. "Ah," The man at the front said. "Miss Tarron, I wish we could wait until you've fully recovered."

I looked down at my bruised hands, feeling the sore places crying out to me all over.

"But we require your services."

I took a breath, lifting my chin to stand like Mama, giving them a single nod. Zadra put a comforting hand over my shoulder. When I looked at her, she gave me a silent apology with her eyes. But it didn't change what I had to do.

"Who is my subject?" I asked. "And what will I be looking for?"

"There is information we have been trying to get a hold of for sometime now," He said. "But it was stolen before our agents could get a hold of it."

Behind me, Zadra became very stiff.

My brows pinched together. "It was stolen? By who?"

No one else had the means the League did to obtain that kind of intel, let alone be able to use it.

"That is what you will be looking for," A second man chimed in. "In the mind of Miss Zadra behind you. This time, she is your subject."

My head whipped back towards her. She had not been told this, that was obvious. She'd probably thought she'd been called in with me for moral support. It didn't happen often, but it was more probable than this.

"May I ask why?" I finally managed.

"I already told you," Zadra said, ignoring my question. "I didn't recognize the person I saw while in Philadelphia. I saw someone download the intel onto a flash drive, but the grenade was set off almost immediately after."

I looked back at her again. "Grenade?"

"A triggered explosion," She said. "It destroyed any evidence the thief left behind."

Thief, I scoffed in my head. Like we're any different.

"Which is exactly why we require Miss Tarron's assistance," The man replied. "You know as well as all of us that she has been instrumental in finding wayward memories."

I saw an anger fall over Zadra's face, one I recognized. The way her hands clenched. The way her spine fell rigid. She was scared.

"Oh come now," A woman said. "It's painless, isn't it? Besides, you know how valuable this intel is. If there's a chance our Princess can find it, we have to take it."

I tried very hard not to cringe. That code name was starting to get old.

"We don't have all day," The man waved his hand. "May we begin?"

It's not like we had a choice after that.

Swallowing, I lowered myself into a seat at the large table with Zadra right across from me. The staff sitting at the head of the table watched us steadily, making me want to crawl under it to hide from all this. But instead, I reached out to take her hands.

"Let's hope we get lucky," Zadra said, giving a light smile to the staff. But the look in her eyes gave me a different message.

I took her hand.

I'd gotten pretty good at cutting through memories, at filtering through the flood. Zadra's filing cabinet was simple to rifle through, only leaving the absolute necessities for me to find. I pulled up the memory of last night's Op and let it play before my eyes.

I saw long, dark corridors. Smelled a mixture of blood and bleach. Watched the gleam of a dim light reflecting off the metal of a gun.

Loud shots. Buzzing computers. Shouts across the hallways. My fingers tapping quickly against a keyboard. Looking for something. The information, the research Leda Corp had done on Psi.

But someone else was in the system. Another hacker, downloading and deleting all the information. They'd beat us to it. It was like watching the intel vanish down a drain. The frustration was hot in my hands as I threw them up. Hot in my legs as I sprinted to the main computer - the only computer the hacker could be on.

Running.

Ducking.

My throat burns from smoke. My feet sting from blisters.

Shooting.

And I'm there, in the entrance of the room, watching a figure type madly across the control panel. The intel vanishes from the software. The figure pulls a black flash drive from the computer.

The gun is heavy when I lift it, my arms burning. My voice is raw and it tears when I yell, but I do it anyway.

"Hands behind your head! Turn around!"

The figure freezes.

"Turn around!" I command again. "Turn around or I'll shoot!"

So they do. The dim light washes over them, illuminating how small they are. How terrified and how determined. How familiar.

Mama's eyes. Mama's skin. I'd know him anywhere.

Krel.

The hacker, was Krel.

(A/N): i know it's not *that* much of a shock, since, it's in the summary, but, enjoy the cliffhanger anyway! :D