SolCorp LAHQ. Neptune Department.

When Penn burst through Sage’s office door, he knew something was horribly wrong. People didn’t walk into his office without knocking and being invited. (Well, except for Freddie, but he wasn’t about to try to tell her to do or not do anything.)

Penn was carrying an open laptop and he looked harried and tense, more so than usual. “This just landed on my desk but you’re going to want it on yours.”

Penn set the laptop on Sage’s desk and swung it around so it was facing him. On it was a photo of a group of police officers standing in a loose group near two bodies behind a dumpster in an alley, partially hidden by a pile of broken-down cardboard boxes. The bodies were wearing Neptune Blacks.

Sage’s heart began pumping a mile a minute, enough that he could hear it in his ears. “Is–is Cleanup–”

“My people are on the scene managing it now, but it’s worse than it looks.”

He swallowed. If he was honest, he didn’t want to know in what way it could possibly be worse. Even after years in his position, his first reaction was always a wish that someone else was in charge of handing this.

Freddie came through the door from across the hall. “What the hell is going on?” She looked annoyed until she saw whatever expression Sage had on his face, and then sobered.

Penn turned the laptop to her. She froze and anger etched itself onto every inch of her face. “Whose is that?”

“Retrieval. Will is my next stop. The entire team is dead.”

There was an oppressive pain taking over Sage’s chest. Losing any agent was tough, but losing several in one day? It was the kind of thing that would be felt across the department.

“The whole team?” she squawked. “Jesus Christ. Who is it?”

“My people found their ID’s, uh, Allie, Kyle–”

“Fuck,” she swore.

Sage stared at the picture and did his best to look beyond the black figure and dark stain on the concrete. Low palms and stone landscaping. “Where is this?”

“Las Vegas.”

Sage felt the breath leave him. He’d sent them there.

Penn must have felt it because he cocked his head at him. “What was the op? This is the one you mentioned the other night?”

“They removed an Icarus from a moon yesterday. I had no idea he had this in him. The offenses were serious, but nonviolent.”

“Was that an A designation?” Freddie asked. “I don’t have anyone new on my manifest.”

Sage held back a swallow. He knew it didn’t instill confidence. “After a telepathic scan, yes.”

Freddie nodded. “What about the second team?”

“The Cleanup team that took care of the cars from the crash reported in just fine,” Penn told them.

“No, the second Retrieval team.”

“What second team?” Penn asked. By the sound of it, he was as scared as Sage was of the possibility that there was another team of agents dead somewhere.

Sage really needed to get himself thinking faster than he was. Penn had never spent time in Retrieval, so there was no reason he’d know, but Sage’s mind should have gone straight there.

“When you erase one team member,” he explained, “a second Neptune team moves in to help the rest of the moon understand what has happened. I’ll pull up who that is and have them contacted immediately.”

Sage typed rapidly on his keyboard to open 37A’s file. He scanned the page twice before speaking. “There should be a report from them submitted last night. There's one from the first team, but there’s nothing else.” He looked a little deeper. “There’s a team named for the role but…”

“But what?” Freddie snapped, not one for patience.

“The orders were never sent to them. I don't think they were ever formally assigned. There was no second team.”

There was a brief silence in which they all looked at each other with a single name in their eyes.

“I’m gonna kill him,” Penn breathed, low and monotone.

Freddie gave a growl of frustration. “Jesus fucking Christ, Will!”

Solidly still in the fear-stage while the others fell partly apart in rage, Sage tried to focus. His eyes raced through the file, skimming the first team’s report, looking for any scrap of information that might help them. Sage’s breath caught and the thundering in his chest threatened to pound right out of him. There was a foster with them. The team had been worried and emphasized the need to triage for trauma. He rushed back through 37A’s file. No requests for shadowing approved–there couldn’t have been, given the short notice needed to execute a mission like this. He would have felt relieved that he hadn’t missed it, if he wasn’t so scared for the student.

Freddie’s voice broke through his spinning thoughts. “What is it?”

He looked up and saw that she and Penn had trailed off from their angry exclamations and were looking at him, worry lines forming across their faces.

He cleared his throat. “That moon has a foster.”

“So we send someone out to the home ASAP,” Penn said.

“No,” Sage said, eyes drifting back to the words on the screen in front of him. The stark black letters standing out like a threat. “The foster was with them. He wasn’t supposed to be–”

“Fuck,” Penn ground out. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Freddie’s face was a mask, and Sage recognized her way of containing lethal anger and pain.

“I want someone to put physical eyes on this Retrieval team and confirm they are still in the building,” Sage said. “Use a teleporter if you have to. And I want a second teleporter at the site of the 34 right now to give me a status on the rest of the Icarus’ team.” If the Icarus was in the wind, who knows what he might have done to his old team. The two of them looked at him and didn’t immediately move. Those were tasks that should be falling to the head of Retrieval and they knew it.

“I’ll handle Will,” Sage told them and tried to make it sound like he didn’t feel like crawling under his desk.

They moved like they were dodging lightning. Sage wanted to get his shaking hands under control, but he wasn’t going to wait. Will’s office was one hallway over, closer to the elevator. He closed the distance faster and somehow slower than he’d ever traveled through that hall.

At the door, Sage paused to take a few breaths (maybe more than a few) to steel himself. He needed to not come off like he was going in there to ask for a favor. He walked in the door. Will was at his desk, leaning back in his chair, typing slowly with one hand and holding his coffee with the other.

“What is–”

“Have you been in contact with the teams you sent out for the assignment I gave you?” Sage demanded.

Will looked up at him and squinted. “Yeah, I must have,” he replied, turning his gaze to his screen. “I saw a report come in last night.”

“But nothing since?”

“I don’t think so.”

Sage’s shoulders were inching up and he forced them down. “What about the report for the second team to help the other members of the moon recover? Do you have their report?”

His mouth stretched, thinking, and he shook his head with a casual shrug of one shoulder. “They must be putting off writing it until today.” The offhand way he’d said it only made Sage burn hotter.

Sage’s phone rang. It was Fredericka and he set it on speaker. “Yeah.”

“I’m standing in the apartment of the secondary team with two of the agents.” Her voice was hard and Sage was glad she could bring a little more force into that room with him. “The other two are somewhere in the building. They haven’t gotten an assignment in a week.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“Thank you.” He hung up.

Will’s forehead wrinkled as his face was gripped with a look of shock. He didn’t speak.

“You never sent them out,” Sage explained, making his voice hard. “You didn’t send the assignment. You left, we left a traumatized, possibly injured moon, with a foster by the way, on the scene of a fucking 34 with no one to help them cope. Are you–” His voice was getting too loud and got ahold of himself. He'd been on a 34 once and would be glad to never do one again. It had worked to neutralize the target, but everyone had walked away worse for wear.

Sage counted out one breath. Three beats in and five beats out. “You’re fired,” he said calmly. “Have someone on your staff write up your resignation. I don’t want you doing it because I need it by the end of the day.”

Will got up from his seat. “Sage–”

“And your other team is dead. The Icarus killed them all.”

Sage walked out and shut the door hard. His hands were shaking, so he gripped them into fists and went back to his office to try to manage the fallout. It had already gone so ugly and he could only imagine it was going to get uglier.

---

Beatty, NV.

Gareth tore down the dirt road leading to their ranch in Beatty at a speed that made the car jounce over deep ruts, but no one was complaining. As he swung around the bend, he saw that there was a dark grey van parked in front of the house.

Hannah checked for the third time that her pistol was fully loaded. "We shouldn't be here," she muttered. The blood still on her face was dry and cracked.

Gareth eased on the brakes as they pulled into their driveway. He didn’t disagree with her, but if he didn’t count the situation they were currently in, Gareth felt like Reeve had never let them down before. On the other hand, the current situation was a right bitch and a half.

"Try to wake Reeve up."

He saw Alex nod at him in the rearview, Reeve’s head in his lap. He turned back to where there was a figure standing beside the van.

"Stay in the car," Gareth said, getting out and slamming the door before they could argue. Gareth drew his sidearm and started toward him. He heard Hannah's door open and glanced over to see her leaning heavily on the door with her gun resting on top of the window. The man moved forward and Gareth caught the shape of a holstered weapon under his jacket.

"Don't fucking move!" he shouted, breaking into a jog. The man froze on the spot and, after a moment of hesitation, put up his hands over his head. Thinking of the three back in the car, the only way Gareth could stop himself from shooting on the spot was to keep moving forward until his gun was only inches away from his chest. The man had a thin nose and brown hair shorn short, greying at the temples. He was tall and long limbed, and had smallish eyes and big ears that stuck out just a bit more than most. Gareth wrenched the gun out of the man’s holster and stuck it in his belt. The man, looking stunned, lowered his hands to shoulder level, fingers spread wide. Gareth raised the gun to point it at his head.

"What are you doing here?"

Gareth watched him stare at the gun, eyes wide, then meet Gareth’s eyes again, swallowing his fear. "You called me."

From behind them, he heard a car door pop open and Alex’s voice urging, "Don't! You need to sit down!"

Gareth angled himself to be able to see them both, heart pounding. Reeve was levering himself out of the car and Alex was trying to pull him back with his good hand. If he could have shoved Reeve back into the car with his mind, he would have.

"Shvedov!" Reeve shouted before wavering and then staggered as if to fall. Gareth's head snapped back as the man beside him took a lunging step forward. Gareth moved to body block him, pressing the barrel of his gun hard against his forehead, between the eyes. He froze, stock still, glancing back and forth between Reeve and Gareth. There was something in the desperate, pained concern Gareth could see in his eyes that made him ease his tension on the trigger. He recognized that look and he could hear Alex struggling with Reeve behind them.

Gareth took one step back out of his way and angled his gun up a fraction. He looked at Gareth then for a long moment, confirming his permission, before taking off at a run toward Reeve and Alex. Gareth tracked the back of his head with his gun and saw that Hannah was doing the same. Alex had gotten out of the car to hold Reeve upright and Gareth could see from where he stood that he had that look about him that said he was ready to pounce with tooth and nail the second he needed to. The man reached Reeve and Alex, ducking to swing Reeve’s other arm over his shoulder and putting his hand around his waist to support him. Reeve sagged into his grip and gave his shoulder a weak pat.

That was going to have to be enough for Gareth. For now. There wasn’t time for anything else. He jogged over and moved to take the arm that Alex was bent under, but Alex gave him a look that could’ve melted steel.

Alex turned back to the man, "Who the hell are you?" He was yelling. Everyone seemed to be yelling except this strange guy with the pattern of a gun barrel still imprinted onto his forehead.

"Alyosha," he said. "I am a friend." He spoke with a Russian accent with small gaps in his sentences, like he was searching for the next word. Reeve’s eyes opened and closed too slowly to even be considered blinking. Alyosha shifted his hold on Reeve. "Help me get him into the van. We have to go.”

Together, they guided (mostly dragged) Reeve to the van, and Gareth opened up the door to the back seat. Alex scrambled up onto the van, bending down to haul Reeve up onto the bench seat as they settled him to lay down beside Alex.

Alyosha turned to Gareth. “You’ve been in a fight. Is Hannah well enough to drive that car?”

Gareth gave his head an involuntary jerk. “No! What? Yeah, yes we were and I think she is. Drive where? Wait, how the hell do you know her name?”

He pulled at his sleeves impatiently. “Reeve told me.” He looked over Gareth’s shoulder at her. Gareth turned to see she was walking toward them, slower than normal with how sore she was. Alyosha raised a hand to her. “Drive your car to the airstrip in Beatty! We will be right behind you!”

She didn’t respond and was looking at Gareth. They’d come this far. Gareth nodded to her. Hannah turned around and headed for the driver’s side.

“Gareth!” Alex’s voice from inside the van was almost plaintive. “What the fuck is going on?”

“We’re running,” he told him, “and Reeve seems to have booked us a goddamn ride.”

Alyosha opened the passenger side door for him. He was still noticeably keeping his free hand outspread where Gareth could see it and gave him a nervous smile. “Please get in. There isn’t time.”

“I’m keeping your gun.”

“That is fine. As long as someone in the van has a gun, I have no complaints.”

He got in and as he did, heard Hannah start up the engine to their car behind them. She had been right. They shouldn’t be here. Alyosha climbed into the other side and waited for the car to turn around and head back out toward the road before doing the same.

“So we’ve got a plane to catch?” Gareth asked him, turning in his seat to look back at Alex.

“Yes, we do.”

Reeve was on his back again. Alex was cross-legged on the seat with his back to the window. He had his good arm across Reeve’s chest, steadying him. The bruises on his face from the impact of the crash were enough to make him cringe. Reeve, Gareth thought purposely, doubting he could hear him in the state he was in. What the hell did you do?

They made their way through downtown Beatty. It was mostly empty, like it always was. It felt completely wrong that everything outside the van could look so normal. Alex was craning his head, watching to see if they would be followed. “Hey, Gareth,” he said, pitching his voice to carry, “your suitcase is back here.”

Gareth shifted in his seat to try to see over into the back of the van.

“And my bag…” Alex reached over the seat, rummaging around. “There’s like a shit ton of our stuff back here!”

“I packed it,” Alyosha called over his shoulder. “It’s a sloppy job, but there were three more people than planned. I got as much as I could.”

“Three more…?”

“How did you know it was three more?” Gareth demanded.

“The passphrase came from Hannah’s number so I guessed.”

Gareth drew a breath to yell but Alex was quicker.

“You have our numbers? And how’d you get into our house?” Alex asked, his voice dumbfounded. Gareth was rubbing at his forehead with both palms.

“I have key.”

“How?” Gareth nearly yelled. “We were only in Vegas. You got here, let yourself in, and packed in the what, two hours after we texted you.”

“I, um,” Alyosha hesitated and a guilty-looking smile split across his face. “I have a place just down the road in Beatty.”

Gareth felt his face drop. “You live here?”

“What the fuck is going on?” Alex yelled again from the backseat.

“Reeve will explain everything once he wakes up and we are coming up on the airstrip. One minute.”

As he watched Hannah pull in through the gates ahead of them, Gareth felt the van come to a sudden stop before entering the airport. A shrill terror moved through him like an explosion, the epicenter in his stomach. His decision to let Hannah drive separately stung him like a wound and he felt his self-control unraveling. Gareth pointed his gun at Alyosha. Before he could shout the violent threats he had roiling in him, Gareth felt a vague but insistent intrusion. It felt like Reeve, but it was too disorganized to even come across as words—just this sensation that he shouldn’t do what he was doing. Gareth turned around to see Reeve, jaw still slack and loose but his eyes were open and locked on Gareth.

Alyosha put a hand up. “Is okay,” he said softly. Gareth watched Hannah step out of the car with a look that could kill. Alyosha reached his other hand out the window and waved her toward them. Gareth glanced back at Reeve, but he had gone under again. Hannah came at a limping jog to Gareth’s window. She was more out of breath than she should be.

“Get in,” Alyosha called. She hesitated, looking at Gareth.

“I don’t know,” he told her, shaking his head, “just get in here.”

She climbed into the back and Alex helped her rearrange Reeve so she could sit with his legs resting over her lap.

“Your phones,” Alyosha urged. “Turn them all off. Then break them.”

“What?” Hannah squawked.

“Please.” Alyosha flicked his eyes to the backseat. “I’m only following his instructions. Neptune will trace your phones. I have burners.”

They did as he said in silence, and as soon as he had confirmed all their phones were dead, Alyosha sped off. Hannah was holding Alex’s hand, resting it on Reeve’s chest.

“Seriously though,” Alex shouted, “Hey! Random guy driving the van–what in the hell is going on?”

“Where are we going?” Gareth translated, shooting Alex a look.

“We’re driving south to my other place, but we want it to look like we took a plane,” he looked up at Alex in the rearview. “You aren’t the only psychometrist in the Corp.” That made something in Gareth twinge, wondering just how much this guy knew about them.

“And this is all Reeve’s plan?” Hannah asked.

“Yes. He said that this close to LAHQ, he could never outrun Sol so instead he wants them to think we are moving faster than we are. They’ll assume we’re flying south. Large cities in Latin America are the closest good places for Icarus to hide. Hopefully, by the time we get there, they will have finished searching the area and have moved on to the next place, thinking we’ve already left. That’s the plan at least.”

“Where’s your place?”

“Guadalajara.”

“Christ.” Gareth sat back in his seat. “That’s like a twenty hour drive?”

“Twenty-nine,” Alyosha said flatly. He shrugged and laughed dryly. “I did not get to make the plan. So anytime you feel like volunteering to take a shift driving, please do.” He grinned at Gareth and he unintentionally smiled back.

“He wasn’t gonna take us with him?” Alex called up to the front. Gareth saw Alyosha’s eyes shift from the mirror, focusing on the road. “You said there were three more people than planned. He wasn’t gonna take us with him,” Alex repeated, eyes a little glassy.

***