Page 128 of Red Rooster

And then there was the way she’d touched him. Healed him.

He listened to the cellphone video’s familiar sounds, watching the team go from bored, to intrigued, to a blend of doubtful and put-out.

Esposito spoke first, covering his reaction with anger. “Why haven’t we seen this?”

“I thought you had. It was a part of my briefing packet.”

Spence gulped audibly, eyes still glued to the laptop screen. “That’s fake, right? I mean…it’s fake. It has to be.”

“How is she doing that?” Jones demanded.

Ramirez snorted. “The only reason any of us is even upright right now is because we pop weird experimental drugs every day. But you all draw the line at the fire girl?”

“Could we, like…hit her with a fire extinguisher?” Spence asked.

“Ruby Russell,” Jake said, raising his voice to silence them all, “is what we’re referring to, loosely, as an individual with heightened abilities.”

“Understatement,” Flannagan said.

“It’s a working title.” He cleared his throat. “The point is: this isn’t a simple arrest.”

“Then what is it?” Jones said.

Jake turned the laptop back around and pulled up an image: a diagram of the VA center. “We’ll make our move tomorrow,” he said, and detailed the maneuver he’d spent three hours meticulously planning.

Everyone left the meeting muttering under their breath, shaking their heads. They’d been unhappy at the outset, and they still were – but now it was fear, rather than boredom, driving their attitudes.

Ramirez stayed behind, statue-still in her chair. When the others were gone, and their voices had faded, her gaze snapped from the computer screen to Jake’s face. “I know what you’re doing.”

“Of course you do.” He took an ounce of childish satisfaction in biting back, short-lived and pathetic though it was.

She smiled, slow and sharp, and there was something feline in the expression. “Your recon. You’ve been looking for a reason to apprehend them.”

He scowled at her. “I have my orders. That’s reason enough.”

“Yeah, but you don’tlikethe orders. You’ve been trying to convince yourself the kid’s a monster, and the guy’s a whackjob. That they’re a danger to society.” She shrugged. “You want to believe that it’s right. But you don’t, do you?”

He stared at her a moment, the infuriating curve of her smile, the way she was amused by all of this. “Were you this smug in the Army?” he asked, and the smile dropped off her face. “Did you drive your CO up the wall?”

“No,” she said, getting to her feet. “I was a model soldier,” she said over her shoulder as she went to the fridge, and pulled out the box of injections. Her fingers shook a little as she worked the clasp.

Jake knew that everyone on the team had received a medical discharge from the Army, but he had no idea what sorts of injuries any of them had suffered. He wanted to ask her, suddenly:what was it for you? Which part of you starts to fail when you wait too long between shots?

But he wasn’t that much of an asshole.

He took a deep breath and said, “Okay, I’ll bite. Yeah, I have my concerns. What’s your take on it?”

She rolled up her sleeve, applied the tourniquet with her right hand and her teeth, and gave herself her nightly injection. Only once she’d snapped off the band and put the box away did she turn to face him, rubbing her upper arm with her opposite hand.

Jake felt a sympathetic burn in his own veins.

“I think,” she started, voice careful in a way he hadn’t heard before, “that I’m not the team leader. So it doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Bullshit. I’m not asking as your team leader.”

She tipped her head from side-to-side, fingers tightening on her biceps. “I haven’t spoken to either one of them, you understand.”

“Yeah. But you can’t tell me you don’t have an opinion.”

She hesitated, scrutinizing him. He hadn’t known before that she was so cautious; he wondered if she knew how much of herself she revealed by holding back.

“I think,” she said at last, “that a person isn’t a weapon. And there’s no reason they want her other than that: to use her. I think she deserves better than that.”

“Yeah,” Jake said grimly.

“But that’s not my place to think or say. So.” She shrugged and turned to the counter, the going-cold coffee sitting in the pot there. “We have our orders.”

And they did.

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