Rox threw a stone as far into the sky as she could. “You have any idea what you’re doing?” Mai asked.
“Nope,” she said with a shrug. “Which is half the fun.”
The guard outside the facility heard the clattering of pebbles from overhead, grunted and looked up. A hailstorm of stones bounded off the rock face onto him- one with the force of a softball, sending him crumpling to the ground.
“You’re lucky you didn’t kill him,” Mai said. “Not that I’d have lost any sleep over it.”
Rox checked his pulse. “Strong and steady. Lucky he was wearing a helmet.” She ejected the magazine from his rifle and hurled it into the darkness. Then she clipped his radio to her belt.
“Whatever we find in here,” Mai said, “we keep going until we find the kid. That’s non-negotiable.”
“Fine,” Rox said. Mai opened the door, and flattened against the wall to the right. Anita was behind her by a fraction of a second, flattening to the left. Rox stood, flat-footed. Inside was a reception area. “This was not what I expected.”
“Don’t,” Anita said, pointing a gun at a receptionist who was holding the receiver of her desk phone to her ear. “Everything’s fine,” she mouthed.
“I have to go,” the woman said, hanging up the phone.
Rox held up her hand, and approached the reception desk. “We have an appointment.”
“No,” the woman said. “You don’t.”
“Ah,” Anita said, circling around the desk. She pulled a pistol out from a holster beneath the desk.
“So it’s that kind of ‘reception,’ then,” Rox said. “Cool. Then I don’t have to sugar coat this. My friends are former deep cover black operatives whose service broke the parts of the human mind that prevent them from tearing appendages off their fellow human beings. We’re looking for a young boy, brought through here, because they’re concerned what happened to them might happen to him, and I don’t have to tell you that the thought does not make my friends terribly happy- or sociable.”
“I think you’ve made a mistake,” the woman said. “We’re… well, from your accent you’re from the States, yes? We’re comparable to your NSA. This site is servers and data analysts. We don’t have a child kidnapping department onsite. Or offsite, for that matter.”
“I’d suggest you not lie to us. My Asian friend can hear your heartbeat quicken, smell the slight change in pheromones signaling fear; I even imagine she could alter her eyes to perceive the electrical impulses in your brain to tell when you’re engaging the parts of the brain that lie. She’s also really good at mutilating people, and paranoid. My other friend can see the drafts of reality. On a good day, that means she could probably get the information out of you without having to hurt you at all. But she’s having a hell of a bad day; I think in this case she might just use her ability to figure out how to hurt you the worst, for the same reason a sad, scared little kid will rip the wings off a fly.
“Now, our intel suggests you are indeed a government run operation. Which likely means there’s a binder with pictures of my friends, and a description of a handful of the awful things they’ve done in the name of country- but you’ll also know that list only includes the official record, and none of the off the books shit no one would dare commit to paper. If it was written by people with your best interests at heart, it would tell you to shoot them on sight, and failing that, yourself. Bottom line, we’re not leaving without the kid. Personally, I’d like to maim as few people along the way as possible, but-“
It happened too fast. Anita fired a round into a security camera overhead, as the receptionist went for a button on the desk. Mai and Anita bolted for the interior door, which was covered an instant later by a heavy blast door, locking Rox in the lobby. “Sonofabitchsonofabitchsonofabitch,” she muttered. “I don’t think it’s an accident they both ended up on the other side of the blast door. Can you get it open?”
The blast doors slid back up, and Rox walked silently towards them. A guard strode through. “Everything okay? Or you drop your bagel on the lockdown button again?” he asked.
“Watch,” the receptionist began, before her throat seized in a fit of coughing.
“You okay?” the guard asked, stepping towards her. Rox slammed her elbow into his throat, took his keycard and slid back through the blast door as it descended.
Alarms were blaring inside, and civilians were prepping for evacuation. “Shit,” Rox muttered. “Needle in a burning haystack.”