Page 74 of Beta Lies and Cursed Lives
Against every protective fiber of my being, Miranda takes the lead. She’d practiced again and again at the bunker, not in her element, and succeeded. Now, it’s with an awe-inspiring level of ease that she turns her body sideways and extends both arms, the one in front forming a giant shield of ice with a crackling sound, the curved formation growing out from her palm.
We gather close together and push forward, the shield serving to obscure us from view as much as possible, her other hand hovering and mending the icy snow our shoes disturb to cover our tracks. But the sound is louder than I imagined, and I wince the closer we get to the facility.
We have to rush them,I think hard at Colt, and nearly miss my footing when Rai’s voice responds in my head.
“We should. They haven’t detected us yet. I’m tapped into the security system.”
“Good work, Rai,”Colt says, steady and calm.
“Have you linked our minds, Colt?”This from Miranda.
“Just a little something I’m still working on. Glad it's helping now.”
I take a breath and mentally steel myself for what’s to come.We all know the plan,I remind them.
There’s this strange sensation of nodding inside my head that makes my brain itch. I shake my head and power through.On three, we rush the gate.
One.
Two.
Three!
Miranda’s shield disappears, and I run through my pack straight for the gate, screaming obscenities at the top of my lungs, adding the power of my bark to the sonic boom that smashes through the gates, sending the giant metal doors spinning through the air where they crash into the building ahead of us.
The gunfire starts just as the alarms wail.
“Incoming friendlies!”Colt shouts in our minds.
Three soldiers surround us, facing outward. One shouts, “Hold fire!” as Colt says in our heads, “Don’t shoot!”
A glistening dome of rainbow colors surrounds us, bullets ricocheting off of it like an impervious shell.
Not only are these soldiers a part of the rebellion, but they are Cursed. Yet, I don’t scent them as Alphas.
How were they able to pose as Betas?
“This way,” the shielding soldier tells us and we follow him to the side door where Rai gets to work immediately, attacking the electronic defenses and lock with his power. When the door swings open, the alarm stops wailing, and Shield Guy shouts, “Go!”
As his shell falls away, one of the other soldiers steps up, arms wide at his sides, then quickly swoops them in like he’s hugging himself. A giant arc of golden light flies from his arms, taking out guard tower after guard tower like a boomerang-shaped heat-seeking missile.
The force of the explosions leaves me little doubt that any guards in those towers are dead.
The third soldier takes point, leading us through a bright white hallway with another door at the end, the electronic lock on the wall beside it has a biometric panel with the outline of a hand on it.
“I’ve got this,” the lead soldier says before placing his hand on the panel. The door opens inward and he resumes his lead, readying the rifle on his back just as a handful of guards rush toward us from around a corner, their boots stomping and screeching on the shiny floor.
The soldier opens fire, sweeping his gun from side to side across the width of the hall, making the soldiers drop, red streaking the floor and walls. He strategically hit them below their vests to bring them down, but when one points his gun at us from the ground, his breath coming in loud wheezes, the soldier fires a single round through his forehead. His body collapses.
“Keep moving,” the rebellion soldier tells us, and we turn down the corner from which the enemy soldiers had come.
The walls are glass, laboratories on either side, people in lab coats and hazmat suits with heavy gloves inside, red lights flashing on the ceilings.
“We’ll come back to these later,” the Boomerang Guy tells us as he jogs up beside me. He’s older, with salt-and-pepper hair, clean-shaven, and has a seriously angular jaw. His dark eyes are as hard as his expression. “We go to Vera first, then split up for your target.”
Miranda’s dad.
I nod at him, and he moves to point ahead of the shooter, leading us around a few more corners, just as we expected from the blueprints. When we reach a solid metal door, Boomerang Guy pounds on it twice, pauses, then raps on it four times, fast. The door slides open to reveal a woman, tall and slender, with straight black hair, dark almond-shaped eyes behind red-framed glasses, and smooth skin, not a lick of makeup. The patch on her coat says “Song.”
