Page 2 of Critical Strike

“He will. Someday. When he’s ready. Now put that stuff away and let’s go to bed.”

Luke climbed the rest of the way down the stairs and hid in the dining room until Clinton and Sheila left the kitchen and went up the stairs to their bedroom. Then he slowly walked into the kitchen.

He opened the fridge and grabbed the plate with the sandwich and veggie sticks.

And it was the most delicious food he’d ever eaten.

Chapter One

Claire Wallace wasn’t a hero. No one, by any stretch of the imagination, would ever call her one.

Heroes were outgoing and good-looking and quick to take action.

She, on the other hand, was a relatively slow-moving, rather plain, introverted loner who rarely talked to others unless that “person” happened to be her cat, Khan. Khan didn’t tend to answer back, but that didn’t bother Claire much. She still preferred his company over almost anyone else’s.

Right now, she was sitting where she had sat almost every weekday for the past five years since she graduated from college—at her desk at Passage Digital, a software and phone app development company. Most of the people hired five years ago had moved up the corporate ladder at least a little bit. Claire still worked on the third floor with mostly newbs, fresh out of school with their first career-oriented job.

Not being promoted didn’t bother her much, either. Getting promoted generally required regularly interacting with other people and getting noticed.

Did she have crippling social anxiety? Yep.

Did she plan to tackle that any time soon? Nope.

A hero she was not. So when her coworker/partial boss, Julia Lindsey, emailed her an hour ago to be at her terminal at 10:00 a.m. and that it would make Claire a hero, Claire had been less than enthused. But here she was.

Maybe she wanted to offer Claire a promotion?

But promotions came with more responsibility, and more responsibility came with increased human interaction, and increased human interaction came with...

Claire pressed a hand to her suddenly tight chest.Had someone turned up the office’s heat?

Taking a deep breath, she did her best to shake off the bad feelings.

The clock kept ticking. It was only 10:02, but Julia had always been early to meetings; her punctuality was one of the things Claire had appreciated the most while they were working on the camera phone filter app Julia had conceived.

“Hey.” Claire reached a hand out toward the guy walking by her cubicle, not quite touching him.

Tom? Trent? Terrance?

Who knew? He’d been working there a couple of years, but the two of them had never spoken.

His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Uh...yeah?”

Claire cleared her throat, swallowing past the lump. “Have you seen Julia?”

Tom-Trent-Terrance shook his head. “No. Sorry.”

Claire nodded and slumped back into her chair. That had been hard enough. She wasn’t asking anybody else.

Julia probably wanted to talk about their cell phone filter app, Gouda. The first version of the app had been hugely popular. The new version they’d been working on—with a much more complex facial recognition matrix—would be able to do so much more.

Teenagers all over the country would be beside themselves with excitement as they were able to morph their faces into all sorts of animals, celebrities and objects.

Or would’ve, until Julia halted all work on Gouda last week. There’d been no explanation given for the project’s sudden stop, which was probably weird.

But, of course, Claire hadn’t asked for reasons. She never did.

Today’s meeting probably wasn’t about the app, anyway. That was over. It was probably related to doughnuts or something. Passing treats out would make anyone an office hero.

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