Page 92 of Explosive Vengeance

“No, just tell me the highlights.” Reading would just strain her eyes and make her head hurt worse.

Amber half-smiled. “All right. Let me go grab Lady Ada.”

“Who’s Lady Ada?” she asked the others in confusion as Amber left.

“Her laptop,” Megan answered. “She’s extremely protective and possessive of it, so never ever touch it unless she gives you permission.”

Huh. “Okay.”

Amber walked in with her laptop open, and shut the door. “All right, the highlights on Chloe Wilson. Your real name was Elizabeth Marie Connors.”

It was? How in hell had she forgotten her own damn name? The cadre had done a good job of wiping her memories clean.

“And you were born in Nebraska.”

“Nebraska…” A sudden barrage of images flashed through her mind. Fields of tall, green cornstalks, and others of golden wheat shimmering in the summer sunshine. Of passing by acres of them in the front passenger seat next to her mom, windows down and the wind blowing in their hair as they sang to something on the radio.

She hadn’t remembered the memory until just now. It made her smile even as a sharp pain pierced her.

“Your birthday’s July twenty-eighth,” Amber continued. “Your parents never married. Your mom got pregnant in junior year of high school. That same fall your father left town to go on a college football scholarship and never came back.”

Her dad had been a football star? “She never talked about him, even when I asked,” Chloe murmured, fascinated and a little sad. “All she ever said was that she’d loved him and hadn’t wanted to hold him back.” It made so much sense now. Her mom had set him free and taken on all the responsibility of being a single parent to keep her.

It put a lump in Chloe’s throat. Her mom had struggled so much to take care of her on her own, keep enough money coming in to feed and clothe her and keep a roof over their heads. She’d deserved so much better than dying a slow, painful death from cancer.

Amber continued scanning the file for a moment, then looked up with a smirk. “Says here you showed a remarkable penchant for disobedience and destruction when you were first put into the program.”

Megan chuckled. “Yup. You’re looking at the class rebel right there.”

Amber kept reading. “That’s it, really. Specialized in explosives and demolitions, tested for ADHD and found to be on the spectrum…”

“I remember when they diagnosed me,” Chloe said. “I was relieved that there was a reason why I couldn’t sit still or focus for long when I was younger.”

“It explains alot,” Megan remarked.

“You must have figured out how to manage it, or they wouldn’t have graduated you,” Kiyomi pointed out.

“Oh, it’s still there,” Megan said with a twinkle in her eyes. “She wouldn’t be Twitch without it.”

Amber closed the laptop. “So yeah. That’s you.”

“Thanks for telling me,” Chloe said. “And I gotta say, it’s so cool to be here with you guys. To be part of this. It’s been…hard to be so isolated for so long.”

The others nodded, expressions suddenly serious, a little sad. “I know,” Amber said. “But you’re not alone anymore.”

“That’s right, because we’re family,” Megan added, looping one arm around her sister’s shoulders and the other around Kiyomi. “Skeletons and all.”

It was more than Chloe had ever imagined having. Enough to make her throat tighten. “Cool. But we’re gonna need a code name to call ourselves.”

The others all stared at her. “What?” Megan asked.

Chloe waved a hand, frowning. “You know, a moniker. Something awesome.” Valkyries was obviously no good, though she was damn proud of having earned the title. And her mark, now ruined. Bastards.

“Uh, okay…” Amber looked at Megan and Kiyomi. “Any ideas?”

“Renegades,” Megan suggested.

“It’s been done to death,” Kiyomi said. “Needs to be something more original.”

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