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"Shouldn't we go get backup or something?" Mallory asked under her breath as they made their way through the halls of the hideout. There wasn't very much activity where they were, but they could hear cheering and slamming coming from a distance.
"Relax, we're not gonna bust the place up or anything, we're just looking around. I want to know what their deal is."
"Oh, you want to know, do you? Well, why didn't you say so? After all, Metropolis is practically your city now, isn't it?"
Roy raised an eyebrow, studying her face over his shoulder as he kept an arrow loaded in his bow. "What's with you?" he asked.
She rolled her eyes, shaking her head. "Nothing. Let's go." She darted across the hall, kneeling down to keep an eye out. Roy followed her a second later and they kept going.
"I don't get it, this place should be crawling with thugs. We haven't seen one since we broke through the door."
She nodded, looking around. In truth, she was glad they hadn't run into anyone. She'd already burned through the front door, that was enough of a calling card without anyone being able to confirm that it was her. She shook her head, trying to clear the thoughts away. She shouldn't be thinking like this. She shouldn't be letting her connection to Icicle Jr get in the way of her doing her job.
They made their way around the compound mostly blind. Roy had found some blueprints of the building before coming in, but they were old and the entire underground section they were in now had been added on since. They didn't find anything that jumped out. There was a room with weapons, but not enough to sell. They were probably just extras for the members.
"Hey, in here!" Roy hissed. She followed him into a room with monitors covering all of the wall space, and a single person in a chair staring at them. One arrow of knockout gas took care of that, and they walked up to take a look.
"If they have cameras in here, why haven't they tripped an alarm or something?" Mallory wondered.
"There weren't any cameras. I was looking for them the whole way down here, but I didn't see a single one," Roy replied, his forehead creasing with confusion.
Mallory narrowed her eyes, leaning closer to one of the screens. She jumped back in surprise when she recognized what she was looking at, and she started looking at the other monitors almost frantically.
"What?" Roy asked, the confusion turning to worry as he watched her dance around the room, identifying the scenes.
"This isn't the compound," she explained, spinning around again to look at the first screen she'd seen.
"Then what Is it?" he asked, starting to lose his patience.
She pointed to a spot on the upper left corner, where there was a small section of a circle with a word on it. "It's the SCUs headquarters," she said.
His eyes widened. "Are you sure?"
She nodded. "This is the bottom of their crest, it's mounted on the wall in the lobby. And here," she walked across the room in two strides and pointed to a screen higher up, "that's the desk that leads to the special containment units, the cell blocks." She turned back to face him. "Whatever they're doing, it's big."
The distant noise grew louder, and they both jerked their heads up to listen. When they were confident that it wasn't coming any closer, they relaxed a little, looking back at the screens.
"Let's see if this computer has anything useful on it," Roy suggested, pulling out a flashdrive. He hacked into the system and started sifting through the information. Mallory leaned on the back of the chair, reading the names of the files over his shoulder. Each one was only labeled with one letter, making it look like a word search as they flew by the screen. She recognized a word spelled across four files diagonal, and her eyes widened.
"Wait," she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. The cursor hovered, keeping the screen still, and she pointed to the files. "Take these four."
He gave her a skeptical look. "Why?"
She shook her head. "Just a hunch," she lied. He didn't look convinced, but he dragged the files onto the drive anyway. T-A-N-A.
"Anything else?" he asked.
She scanned the files, now seeing it as a wordsearch. Jr had a hand in this, and he had left her a trail. Now she just needed to find it. Another row spelled ICE going down, so they took them, and on the last row spelled backwards was PLAN. They took them all. Roy had just dragged the last one over when the sound spiked again. He pulled the flash drive and tucked it into his belt while Mallory grabbed the unconscious goon and propped her in the chair so that if anyone looked in the window in the door, they wouldn't know anything was off. They regrouped down the hall, going towards the noise.
"Ok, so, I got the words," Roy said under his breath as he leaned into the connecting hall to check for guards. There was one, and he shot an arrow. Mallory heard the gas hiss as it was released. "But what was the first one spalling? Tana? What's that?"
She darted ahead of him. The noise was getting closer now. They only had one more hallway to go. "Look," she said, nodding to a large, heavy metal door. It was practically vibrating with the cheering that was coming from behind it. They shared a look, and she led the way, testing the handle. It wasn't locked, but she worried that opening it would draw too much attention. Judging by the noise, there must have been close to a hundred people behind it.
They scanned the hall around it and Roy nudged her, jutting his chin to a large air duct about ten feet away. She groaned inwardly, but she followed the archer and boosted herself into the small space. She hated this. In her entire career as Inferno, she'd only had to crawl through two air ducts, and she hated it each time. They were dirty and cramped and she felt like she could easily get lost and never be found. She rolled her eyes and pressed her lips together as she crawled, breathing shallow to avoid being choked by all the dust they were stirring up.
"Left," Roy instructed quietly from behind her. She took the first left, and before long they came to an opening on the ground. She removed it as quietly as she could, but it didn't matter. There was so much going on below them they wouldn't be heard if they were shouting and banging on the metal. They dropped into the back of the room and crouched behind some crates that Mallory could only guess what they held. When they peeked around the crates, they saw a crowd of people around an elevated ring, with two people fighting in the middle of it. A little more looking and Mallory spotted Jr sitting on a table on the other side of the room, completely alone, barely even watching the fight.
"That's Icicle," Red said beside her, and her heart pounded in her chest and she jerked her attention to him, feeling like she'd been caught. But he wasn't looking at Jr, he was looking in the ring. She squinted, trying to make out the men punching each other. Sure enough, the one who was winning was Icicle Sr. "Wonder why he's getting his hands dirty," Roy muttered.
She shrugged, but suddenly the training place Jr took her to made more sense. She wondered if that was where the henchmen went to try to improve their skills against metas. "So…can we go now?" she asked.
He ignored her, staring at the crates they were hiding behind. "What do you think is in these?" he asked.
She shook her head. "Come on, Roy. We have the files, we know where this place is, let's just go."
He narrowed his eyes, still not looking at her, but she knew he heard her. "What is with you today?" he asked for the second time that night.
"Nothing, but we're not going to accomplish anything else here, unless we're supposed to round up all these people just the two of us."
He shrugged. "I mean, it's not like we haven't done it before," he pointed out.
Her eyes darted back to where she'd seen Jr, but he was gone now. Roy put a hand on her shoulder, forcing her to look at him. When she did, though, she saw the leg of a goona coming around the crates. She sprang up, tackling him without thinking. She had hoped that everyone would be so focused on the fight that they wouldn't even bother to look, but what she hadn't accounted for was the fighters in the ring. Icicle Sr just happened to be facing them, and he ended the fight by icing his opponent and pointed to the two heroes.
"Get them!" he ordered. Every goon in the room turned, pulling out guns and knives.
"Perfect," Roy muttered, loading his bow in one swift move.
Mallory winced, her heart pounding as she looked into the sea of opponents. Yeah, she thought, perfect.
"I told you we should have left," she yelled as they ran. They'd managed to take out the initial wave of goons closest to them and were now retracing their steps to the entrance. The halls that had been close to deserted were now crawling with goons, all armed and angry.
"Yeah, sure, but if you hadn't jumped out into the open, they never would have seen us!" Roy retorted, firing an arrow into the pack.
"Whatever," she muttered. She made a fire in her hand and sent it in front of them, setting the walls on fire. As soon as Roy made it through, she made the flames grow until the hall was impassable, and she jumped through them, pausing on the other side to turn it into a fire shield.
"Come on!" Roy called from a few feet ahead.
She nodded, sprinting after him. They turned the last corner and Roy threw the entrance door open, only to have to dodge a gun shoved in his face. It went off and hit the brick an inch from Mallory's head. Her eyes flew open and she scanned the alley. There were about twenty goons all lining the opening of the alley. They were in too tight for her and Roy to get up to the roof. They were going to have to go through them. She sighed and turned so her back was to Roy, and they started fighting.
It was harder than it should have been. Most henchmen were average at hand to hand combat at best, but these were much more skilled, and they were all much stronger than her. She decided that they must be on steroids and a harder training program, which only begged the same question: what was Icicle Sr doing?
She slammed her fist into a woman's stomach, but she barely moved, and the return punch caught the pyrokinetic on the shoulder. She winced, already sure that it would be swollen later, and tapped into her strength, catching the goon's nose and then slamming her face into her knee. As soon as she dropped to the ground, Mallory sensed someone behind her, and she spun around, her fist ready to connect.
Jr's eyes were wide as he prepared to block, and she stopped the punch an inch from his face. They stared at each other for several seconds, neither knowing what to do. An arrow came from over Mallory's shoulder, catching Jr on the jaw, and he dropped immediately.
"Inferno, let's go!" Roy yelled.
She was stunned, and she felt him grab her wrist and pull her out of the alley. Her brain caught up to her feet halfway down the street, and she managed to run on her own power. There were at least five goons chasing them, so Roy brought them to an alley just outside of the neighborhood and all but threw her into the phone booth. The computer scanned her, and she appeared in the Quitters' Bludhaven headquarters. She barely had time to register that Dick was sitting at the computer before Red Arrow was announced. He appeared a second later, his eyes narrowed as he walked towards her.
"What was that?" he asked. He wasn't mad, but he did want an answer.
"What?" she asked. Dick got up and walked over to see what the trouble was.
"What was that whole mission? You were acting weird from the moment you found out what we were doing."
She bit her lip. "I just, I just had a bad day at work, I guess I was a little off my game. I might be getting in trouble tomorrow."
Dick opened his mouth to ask about it, but Roy cut him off, shaking his head. "That's not it. It was the place that had you shook, and then you were just gonna let Icicle Jr get away? What–" His eyes widened slightly, and his face held understanding. "Ohh," he muttered, letting out a breath. "So that's why you were asking me about Jade."
Her stomach dropped. She couldn't deny it. Even if she was willing to lie, these were detectives she was dealing with. They would just find proof and throw it in her face. She looked at the floor and nodded.
"Wait, you're dating Icicle Jr?" Dick asked. She shrugged. They hadn't exactly called it dating, but that was close enough. "Huh," was all he said for a moment. They stood in silence as the boys wrapped their minds around it.
"So, wait, so how long has this been going on?" Dick asked.
She shrugged. "A little after I moved in with you," she admitted. "Well, I guess technically right before. I just kept running into him, so finally he asked if I wanted to go have some fun instead of fighting. We'd done that once before. When I was still in my apartment, he could have killed me. Instead, he brought me to Bibbo's and bought me breakfast because he knew I wasn't doing good. And he turned over the specs he was carrying even though he didn't have to."
Dick nodded a little. "So, Bibbo, he wasn't talking about Brek. He was talking about Jr."
She nodded, looking between them. "Look, I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't have gotten involved with him, but–"
"Please, Mal. We're not judging you," Roy said. "I can't. I'm married to Cheshire, for Christ's sake. And Grayson just doesn't have the heart to shun you."
Dick grinned, tilting his head in agreement, and she chuckled, some of the alarm passing. "Thanks."
"So, is that how you knew about the files in there?" Roy asked.
She nodded. "The first word they spelled was Tana. That's what he calls me, since I can't tell him my real name. The others were just words."
"You got files?" Dick asked, almost eagerly.
Roy nodded and tossed the flash drive over. "Here, have at it."
Dick nodded and went back to the computer, plugging in the drive. "Does anyone else know?" he asked, his fingers flying over the keyboard to decrypt the files.
"Just Conner. He figured it out after Bibbo slipped up."
He nodded, focusing on something on the screen for a second. "You know, I love you, so I would never tell anyone about this, but you should. At least tell the team, maybe Clark. You can't keep this kind of thing a secret for long, so I think it would be better if they found out from you and not someone they're fighting." She sighed and nodded, thinking. "Oh, look at this. Decryption's done already," he announced.
She and Roy read the files over his shoulder, but in the back of Mallory's mind she was thinking that it was time to come clean. There was just one thing she would need to do first.