Page 60 of The Program

‘What do you want?’ one of their team’s newest – idiotic – additions asked. I’d never been able to decide which of the two were more ridiculously incompetent, and I’d started to think it was a draw.

‘Who’s there?’ came Bromm’s voice right before his face appeared above Idiot Number One’s shoulder. His beard wriggled around his face even more frantically than usual, which meant he was feeling too much anxiety to contain.

Because of his conversations with Artemis, perhaps? If there was trouble in paradise, I was going to enjoy being her shoulder to cry on.

‘Foryk!’ he called into the room, and the lumbering mass of muscle immediately surged forward, needles already in hand. He took one look at us, his gaze moving directly between the gaps in our bodies to the woman hiding in the middle. He immediately jabbed both idiots in the neck then swung around to do the same with the nurse that was currently stationed nearby, preventing her from sounding the alarm. Their mouths gaped open as if to scream, or shout for help, probably both, but they dropped to the floor unconscious before they could release anything more than a breathy squawk.

ThenIsquawked when the woman I was surreptitiously rubbing against began toglow,and I leaped away in shock.

‘Sorry,’ she said after she dimmed back to normal. ‘I was just looping the cameras in here, too. There’s quite a lot of them.’

‘Looping the cameras how?’ Dorian asked, his confusion evident in the way his head tilted to the side and his thick black brows lowered over his red eyes. I’d always found them a little eery, the colour reminding me of old Tornu horror stories about the monsters of the Forbidden Planet.

‘I just connected to the databases and looped the feed from before. We won’t have much time if someone’s actively watching, so we’re going to need to get a move on.’

‘Artemis, what are you doing here? What’s going on?’ Bromm asked as he approached her, reaching between us to tangle his fingers with hers and looking much better than the last time we’d seen him. She let him, even going so far as to pull him closer to place a kiss on his cheek above his highly active beard.

So no trouble in paradise, then. But damn, did I enjoy a challenge.

Especially if that challenge lit up like she was her own blue little sun. That was a heat I wouldvery muchlike to explore.

‘I don’t have much time to explain, but our rendezvous point is a no-go, I’m assuming there’s no other plan in place, so if you want out then you’ll have to stick close and help me free those in the facility first,’ she spoke quickly, getting straight to the point.

‘Shit. Okay. We’re leaving now?’

‘Our go-bags are in our dorm room,’ announced Foryk.

‘Leave them,’ said Dorian. ‘We don’t have time to double back.’

‘What about the others? Xander, Markus, T-‘

‘T? He’sthe guard you were talking about?’ Artemis all but shrieked in alarm.

‘Uh, yeah…?’

‘Well, I’m not going out of my way to savehissorry ass,’ she snapped.

‘While I want to know the story behind that, we should probably focus on retrieving the others,’ Dorian piped in to bring us back on track.

‘Right, sorry,’ murmured Artemis, looking slightly cowed.

‘Where to now?’ I asked, wanting to wipe that look from her face.

‘Where’s the captain usually at during this time of the evening?’ she asked.

‘Probably at home,’ came a new voice I’d become vaguely familiar with over the past solar. ‘But since his woman was taken he could be avoiding going back there.’

Artemis looked like she’d swallowed a rotten egg when she turned to look at the Tornu guard as he approached. Oddly enough, Foryk mirrored her reaction.

‘I was hoping we’d get to leave you behind,’ the latter mumbled unkindly. In fact, it was as if his intent was to cut as deep as possible, the venom lacing his words deadly.

‘I second that,’ Artemis agreed.

T had always been a stoic, steady presence, almost like a statue in the back of our meetings. Now, however, despite the gas mask still covering his nose and below, there was a flash of hurt when Artemis expressed her distaste of him. There was definitely some history between these two, and it wasn’t the best if this scene was any indication.

‘What are you doing here, T?’ Dorian asked.

His answer didn’t exactly fill me with hope for our successful escape. ‘You’re not being as discrete as you think you are if I was sent to investigate.’ He levelled us with an expression brimming with disapproval, but there was an undercurrent of anxiety there, too.

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