Page 79 of Gunpowder

“Did you just call me baby?” Wren asked without opening his eyes, his voice scratchy from sleep.

Of course he woke up for that.

“I might have,” Blair grumbled.

Wren snorted against his chest. “Baby.”

“Shut up.”

“I like it.”

Blair’s heart stopped for a second. “Oh.”

“Go commit war crimes.” Wren yawned and moved from his chest, stretching out on the other side of the bed. “I’ll be here.”

Blair got up and got dressed before he lost the will to leave, a surprising struggle to have since usually when Felix or Spencer said jump, Blair asked how high. He looked at Wren, seemingly asleep again, the sheet pooled around his waist and the blanket long forgotten at the foot of the bed. “I’m headed out. I—”

Wren turned over to look at him when Blair cut himself off. He squinted, and for a terrifying moment Blair thought Wren had an inkling of what he’d been about to say and was scrutinizing him for evidence, before he remembered Wren just couldn’t see shit without his glasses. Blair cleared his throat and smiled. “See you later.”

I love you.

Blair flipped through his keys until he found the one that went to the bar. He had tried to push it open but it was locked. As he walked inside, hope stirred to life in his chest at the prospect of finally having something they could use.

He came to an abrupt stop. “Spencer?”

For the first time since the war had started, Spencer looked grave. He had kept his composure at every turn but when he opened the door he set his eyes on Blair with an intensity that raised the hair on his arms. “Get in here,” he said.

Clouds had gathered, leaving bland and tepid air behind that smelled like a storm, but Blair felt cold as he walked further into the bar. Why was that, he wondered, when this was like a second home? He forced a smile onto his face to walk past Spencer. If whatever was going on was enough to affect their unshakable strategist, he couldn’t bring himself to smile for real but he would be damned if he wasn’t going to bring his fighting spirit when they had something on Phantom. Maybe their second man was just tired from working on the heap of computer bits Felix had given him. That would make sense and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling of foreboding.

“Guess I’m early, huh?” he tried to joke.

Spencer locked the door. “I didn’t call anyone else.”

He looked around. He noticed Julian for the first time, his usually sunny presence condensed into something much smaller and quieter where he perched on a barstool. Felix sat in the middle of the couch, hands clasped loosely between his knees, eyes on the floor. The chill that had gripped Blair before turned into a cold sweat. He could feel it bead at the back of his neck and roll down his spine. Spencer went to stand next to Julian, and the center of the room suddenly seemed like a bad place to be.

He walked over to the couch. The only thing that separated him from Felix was the table, and the lone black cord next to the ashtray that didn’t seem to be attached to anything.

“Boss?”

Felix dragged his eyes up from the ground and Blair’s breath hitched. His stare burned through Blair like thermite. There was no mere frustration there; he was livid. Felix snatched the cord off the table. “You know what this is?”

Blair eyed the round, quarter-sized piece at the end. “A mic,” he said thickly, his mouth dry when he tried to speak.

For a moment Felix just blazed into him with those furious eyes, and either Blair’s heart was pounding too loudly in his ears to hear anything else or even the city outside had fallen eerily silent. He was watching Felix so intently waiting for him to continue that he jumped at Spencer’s voice behind him.

“What I got off the hard drive Felix took out of the warehouse was a series of recordings. They date back to when the bar reopened. We searched the place, and I found that,” Spencer said, nodding to the wire.

Blair had forced his heavy limbs to turn and look at them, so he saw Julian shift before saying, almost guiltily, “It was ran along the inner lip of the bartop. I could barely get my fingers under there to pull it out. It was connected to a small transmitter that we can assume was sending the recordings to Isaac, and Spencer is going to try to run a trace to get Isaac’s location from it.”

“How did we miss an outsider being in here the night of the reopening?” He wracked his brain but the bar had been full of familiar faces, and the bar itself where the wire had been installed only held about eight people at a time.

Felix’s voice spun Blair’s head back toward him. “We didn’t.”

He could feel their eyes on him like he was supposed to understand. Felix still looked like he wanted to make him a pile of scorched bones, and when he looked back at the other two, they wore matching expressions of disappointment and was that pity? He looked back and forth to each side of the room waiting for something, anything to start making sense. Was he being accused of this? He was far from an outsider, he wore his colors as proudly as any member of Incindious, the only person who didn’t have colors at the reopening was—

“No,” he said. None of their faces changed. His fists clenched at his sides. “No.”

He remembered the distrusting eyes that turned toward the door when Wren came to the bar the night of the reopening. Toward the outsider, the only one that had been there that night, but no.

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