* * *

All eyes turned to Pegasus as he stepped into the conference room. Met only with silence, he swallowed back his apology for being late.

A quick look around as he took a seat showed he wasn’t the last one. They were still missing Cypher.

Because of the bombings, this was the first real meeting they were having since discovering Robyn’s impostor. The aftermath of the attacks were still occupying most of everyone’s time.

Unicorn leaned towards him. “Were you with Sarah?”

He shook his head. Sarah was in no immediate danger and there was little he could do to help. She was lucky that the bullet didn’t hit anything vital so the surgery hadn’t been too complicated.

As for where he’d been, this meeting hadn’t been the only thing delayed due to the attacks. “Autopsy.”

Unicorn went back to staring at her tablet as if to occupy herself with something.

Pegasus let his gaze wander over to the others. Scorpion was reading something. Griffon touched her shoulder to get her attention and she flinched when she turned towards him, a hand going automatically to her side. At the head of it all, Zeus was staring forward much like a statue.

The table was a mess, but Pegasus didn’t feel like doing anything about it even though it was his fault. He’d been working out of the conference room since Robyn’s death, figuring it would reduce the temptation to rest.

Photographs and files were spread out across the table, marked and highlighted at certain points. Nearby screens showed paused videos of the inside of the compound.

He’d checked and rechecked everything he could.

There was a knock on the door.

Cypher edged into the room looking like a scared rabbit worried about the time. He muttered an apology when Griffon looked down at his watch and took an empty seat next to Scorpion.

Zeus acknowledged him with a glance, a statue coming to life.

“Did we miss anything?” Pegasus asked, including Cypher in his question.

“No,” Griffon said, looking over at Zeus. “Where would you like us to start, sir?”

“Start with how we let an impostor get inside the compound in the first place.”

“They exploited a flaw in our security procedures,” Unicorn said.

Scorpion tossed her tablet onto the table. “She was bleeding out, who the hell was gonna stop to do security checks?”

“That’s precisely the point,” Griffon said. “We brought her in. And we didn’t test her later either.”

“Of course not.” Scorpion scoffed. “She was bleeding out when we found her!”

Pegasus expected Zeus to say something about her tone, but he let it slide. Everyone probably felt just as angry.

He couldn’t help a dry laugh. “That was probably the plan all along.”

“To kill her?” Scorpion asked.

“To almost kill her.” Pegasus shrugged. “We were so desperate to keep her alive, we weren’t thinking about who it was we were trying to save.”

Unicorn slid a pile of papers away from her, catching a pen that almost rolled off the table. “A couple of inches this way or that and she would’ve died. We estimated Robyn had been bleeding for minutes before we got there.”

Pegasus picked up the pen she discarded, flipping it quickly over his thumb. “It could’ve been staged. She was bleeding to death, true, but we were meant to find her in time.”

“It would be one hell of a gamble,” Griffon said. But he seemed to be considering it.

Pegasus watched the pen as he balanced it over his index finger. “She couldn’t be well enough for a check.”

“Well, there’s a consistent flaw in our entry protocols,” Scorpion said. “We did the same with Mermaid.”

“How is she doing?” Zeus asked.

“She’s awake now, but still suffering some confusion. Doctor Blue is hopeful for her recovery,” Griffon said.

At least one good news to balance out the rest.

“There’s not much we can do when we come in with wounded, but we could start implementing a security check once they’re awake and considered well enough,” Pegasus suggested. “We’d have to keep them under security until then.”

Unicorn took away his pen when he spun it again and placed it out of his reach. “It would be easy enough to ask them for their re-entry codes, assuming they can still remember them.”

Zeus nodded, turning to Cypher. “Let’s try it with Mermaid and see what happens. We can go from there.”

Cypher typed the orders into his computer.

“I also want anyone who recently came in under similar circumstances to be rechecked,” Zeus ordered.

Cypher nodded again, typing away. “There haven’t been that many, thankfully.”

“If the impostor is to be believed, she claimed she was to help them get other operatives inside,” Pegasus said. “It didn’t sound like they had any immediate plans.”

Unicorn stood up, coming to attention. “Sir, there was another grave mistake. That one’s on me.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“The telephone?” Pegasus asked.

Under the pretext of fetching some photo albums for Sarah, the impostor contacted her people from Robyn’s home when Unicorn drove her over. Call logs for the landline showed a call that day to an unregistered phone that was no longer in use.

Unicorn winced. “Okay, two mistakes on me then.”

“What was the other one?”

“I questioned Gellman several times after our first interview. Each time, I took for granted what we thought we knew. I asked him about the plans, about how they had gotten to the house, when they had left…” She glanced at Pegasus. “I never thought to ask him how many people they’d shot.”

“That didn’t occur to anyone,” Scorpion said. “We got there and found three people shot. It was only natural to think all three had been shot by the same group.”

Unicorn shifted her feet. “I spoke with Gellman again. He swears they’d only killed the parents. He claims the daughters were gone by the time they got into the house and they left when they heard cars arriving. Contrary to our initial belief, I don’t think they heard us approaching.”

“Adding in the scheme to have the impostor wounded, it would make sense that there was someone else there between Gellman’s team and ours. The second team would’ve been the one to shoot the impostor.”

“We went back to the weapons and checked them against the bullets we got out of Robyn,” Unicorn continued. “There’s no match to the weapons we got from Gellman’s cell.”

Griffon nodded. “And Gellman didn’t think anything of seeing her here alive because he hadn’t seen her at the house.”

“When we got Gellman talking about who the target was, that only distracted us further,” Pegasus said. “I wonder if that was a contingency in case we found the cell responsible for the attack.”

Scorpion pulled up the recording of Robyn’s first interrogation of Gellman. “We went over the entire thing again, there’s no way to tell it wasn’t her. She was damn near perfect.”

Unicorn sat back down. “She could’ve killed us all and we never would’ve seen it coming.”

“Do we know when they made the switch?” Zeus asked.

Griffon nodded.

“Robyn told Sarah she skipped class to go to the library the day their parents died,” Pegasus explained. “They were supposed to meet up and Robyn claimed she forgot.”

“Footage from the library showed no sign of Robyn,” Unicorn said. “At first we couldn’t account for her whereabouts until she showed up home for dinner later that evening.”

Scorpion brought up a surveillance video on the main screen. “It took us a while, but we found her.”

Students went in and out of a bathroom at the university.

“It’s not the one closest to her classroom, that’s why we were having trouble,” Scorpion explained. “Pay attention to the cleaning staff.”

They watched as two women in uniforms went into the bathroom. A couple of seconds later, they saw Robyn going in. One of the women returned and placed a sign on the door, closing off the bathroom.

Deathly silence fell as the seconds went by, then minutes. Finally, Robyn emerged and walked away.

It wasn’t his friend anymore, Pegasus was sure of it.

The cleaning staff came out, took the sign and left the other way, pushing a cart with cleaning supplies and a rather large garbage container.

“We checked, those two aren’t employed at the university,” Scorpion continued, trying to disguise the sadness in her voice. “We’re running facial recognition, but they don’t match anyone in Gellman’s cell.”

“And we’re sure our Robyn’s dead?” Zeus asked.

Scorpion nodded, eyes teary. “We combed over every inch of that place this morning. Someone cleaned it up on the surface, but they found blood… and traces of brain matter in the drain.”

When they first discovered the switch, Pegasus had been hoping against hope that Robyn would be alive, maybe being held for information or as leverage. Anything would be better than the alternative. But there was no more pretending.

His eyes stung. Unicorn reached out and held his hand.

Scorpion stopped the recording and placed her hands on the table, clenching them into fists.

“There was a double purpose to switching her before the attack,” Pegasus said beneath a breath. “The phone call. She was the one who told Sarah to answer it. I think she was supposed to ensure that Sarah would be killed.”

“What went wrong?” Zeus asked.

“Remember the bullet holes? There were a number of them aimed exactly at where Sarah would’ve been had she answered the phone where it was. But when she answered it, she pulled it along with her towards the couch, putting a wall between her and the front door. Saved her life.”

Griffon nodded along. “Sarah ran off, so they couldn’t find her. With her gone, this Robyn decided to go ahead with the plan to infiltrate us. She would have figured they could always get to Sarah later.”

Zeus scoffed. “Then it’s an accident that the girl survived.”

Griffon nodded. “Pretty much. And then we almost killed her.”

“I said tranq gun,” Scorpion grumbled.

Cypher shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“Did we get anything from the autopsy?” Zeus asked towards Pegasus. “Any clues as to where she might’ve been before coming here?”

Pegasus shook his head, bringing up the coroner’s report. He didn’t need to read it, didn’t need to see any pictures. He’d watched enough of the actual autopsy to know he’d have trouble getting the images out of his head at night.

Zeus turned away from the screen.

“That was about as unhelpful as we expected it to be,” Scorpion said into the silence.

“We’re still waiting on some toxicology and immunology results,” Pegasus said. “But they’re not holding out hope that we’ll get anything useful.”

Zeus acknowledged him with a glance. “A dead body can only give us so much information.”

Pegasus and Scorpion exchanged a look. For all intents and purposes, they’d been the ones who failed in capturing the impostor alive. It was only slightly better than if they’d shot and killed her themselves.

“Did they get anything from comparing it to our Robyn’s medical records?” Griffon asked.

“The only discrepancies were a scar in her inner thigh we had no record of and no sign of a previous shoulder injury,” Pegasus replied. “There was also a titer for toxoplasmosis.”

Unicorn gave him a questioning look. “She had contact with cats at some point in her life?”

Pegasus shrugged. “Or raw contaminated food. Sometime during her childhood is the estimate.”

Scorpion made a face. “Really not helpful.”

“No, but every discrepancy counts as proof,” Griffon said.

“Or cautionary tale,” Cypher said.

True that the impostor had been very similar, but there’d been several things that they all shrugged off as Robyn’s normally odd behavior. He’d chalked up her avoiding Sarah as her reluctance to explain that they had to be separated, and even Unicorn had said Robyn was not herself with worry.

“Could she have studied our Robyn for a while before the switch?” Griffon asked.

“Or they were alike enough in personality that it worked,” Pegasus suggested. “But there were some serious discrepancies. She told Sarah I pulled a gun on her when we first met.” Later, she’d had to watch the surveillance footage from their first meeting to correct herself.

Scorpion frowned. “Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about Sarah?” Griffon asked.

“I was there when she woke up from surgery. She was very agitated, talking about a park they hadn’t gone to, and something about Robyn not being my friend, but Scorpion’s.”

“Add that to the list of gaping discrepancies then,” Cypher muttered.

“Our recent distance wasn’t exactly my fault,” Scorpion objected with a look towards Pegasus.

“Stop it, both of you,” Griffon said, pointing at both her and Pegasus.

Pegasus turned to him in silence.

Griffon sighed. “Never mind, force of habit.”

“Did Sarah give us anything else?” Zeus asked, expression clearly indicating he was losing his patience.

“No, she was pretty out of it. Doc Green decided to be slow about removing her sedation.”

Zeus frowned at him. “Why?”

“He prefers comatose patients ever since he started helping out the coroner,” Scorpion said. “And Sarah kicked him, I think.”

“I spoke with him on my way here,” Pegasus said. “She’ll be well enough to talk soon.”

Which meant she’d also be well enough to learn about what happened to her real sister.

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat when the memory of Sarah, wounded and covered in blood while still gripping onto the gun, flashed through his mind. Her pain resonated with his own, clawing at his heart. He wished he could take her suffering unto himself. Unfortunately, the most he could do was share in it.

His eyes stung, and he lowered his gaze. Did he have the right to help anyone when he hadn’t even dealt with his own pain?

Running around the compound nonstop, looking at every single clue he could think of while pretending it was someone else…

He covered his eyes as unfallen tears gathered on his lids. Loss was not unfamiliar to him. Didn’t mean it was easy to accept.

His best friend was gone forever.