“I was really looking forward to taking the evening off,” Mikaela said, “soaking in the tub and eating precisely the amount of donut holes that would be decadent but still ladylike.”
“I’ve seen you eat donut holes,” Tucker said with a grin, “it’s all the former with absolutely none of the latter.”
“To be fair, I was eating them off of you, at the time; hard to be dignified when snuffling a donut hole out of your lover’s belly button like an amorous truffle pig.”
“I’m just going to remind everyone that I’m here, a blood relative, then do my best to go into catatonic shock,” Iago said.
“Sorry, little brother,” Tucker said. “I thought she’d take the L, without the tour down Lesbian Lane.”
“That’s what we used to call your-“
Iago jammed his hands over his ears and started loudly practicing his scales.
“That was a little mean,” Demi said.
“But also a little funny,” Drake said. “To me, a good ratio of mean to funny.”
“Can we focus?” Izel asked.
“With this group?” Tucker asked, and shrugged. “But tell them your idea, anyway.”
“Okay. ICE are a bunch of bigoted assholes, right?”
“Are we sure there aren’t good people on both sides?” Drake asked sardonically. “The President did insist that was the case.”
“He also insisted that if his daughter weren’t a blood relative they would definitely be dating,” Demi said. “Which is fucked on every level- all the levels.”
“My point,” Izel asserted, “is that they’re itching for a war. What they want, more than anything, is for an excuse to start shooting- and I don’t think they stop once they startr. They want us to step a toe out of line, so they can kill us indiscriminately, and hide behind either ‘National Security’ or ‘Self Defense.’ So we can’t give them an excuse. Which means we can’t have a direct confrontation. It probably means we need to take a step even further than that, and say that our offensive cannot seem like an offensive.”
“An inoffensive offensive sounds good on paper,” Drake said, “but it’s also linguistic gibberish. What are you actually saying?”
“Deniable operations,” she said, knowingly. “Not just in the sense that we can deny a Breed was involved… but in the sense that we can deny there was an operation at all. So we subtly fuck with their equipment, their logistics- everything.”
“We’ve got some thoughts,” Tucker said. “Ryan and several of the technopaths are already working hard to fuck up their intel streams and communications. The day of, they plan to take down the entire phone grid, to make sure they can’t coordinate or call for back-up.”
“Though the impressive part there is it will be filtered chaos; he thinks they can leave emergency calls intact, and filter out routine conversations.”
“That’s a good start,” Drake said. “Now how can we help.”
“I have some thoughts about that…” Izel said, smiling mischievously.