Roxy stirred against the wall with an embarrassed look. I raised a curious eyebrow at her.
“Look,” she said. “You should know I radioed them with some info about the Canyonlands area. I had to report in. The Bureau planned to follow up the lead and raid this place in six hours.”
It didn’t leave a lot of time, but it would be enough to make an escape.
“What’s up?” I asked Sike, noticing he and Bravi were watching Roxy carefully.
“She’s got good vibes still,” he said definitively. “She’s genuinely trying to help us.”
Dorian stepped beside him and nodded in agreement. Bravi did the same.
“She's honest,” Dorian said solemnly.
Roxy accidentally met Bravi’s gaze. For a moment, they stayed like that, as if wondering how they’d gotten to this point after their alliance at the trial facility. Roxy abruptly jerked her head down with a scowl. Bravi’s expression wasn’t much better. Their comradery seemed dead and buried. I’d seen that friendship forged during those several weeks. They stayed turned away from each other.
“We have to leave as soon as possible,” I suggested. Dorian nodded bleakly, then moved closer to me.
“What do you want to do with them?” he asked, leaning his head discreetly toward mine.
“I can only show them the evidence again.” I glanced over the four faces. Faces I had worked alongside for years. “If that doesn’t sway them, then we’ll need to think of something else. We can try to figure out what exactly that is while we wait for the scouts to return.”
“Well, since we’ve been made,” Bryce announced as he removed something from his pocket. “I’ve got a call I need to make.”
We stared at the older man as he placed his battery back into his cellphone. I gaped in confusion as he opened it up and tapped out a number. He put the phone to his ear, giving us all a saucy look.
“Aye, what did you do now?” said a loud female voice with a Scottish brogue even thicker than Bryce’s. The volume was so loud that we could all hear them.
The person on the other end sounded wild, like she was ready to fight at any moment over anything. Loud music could be heard coming through the phone. A glass broke somewhere. Someone cheered.
“Calm down, calm down. I’m fine. Just found myself with a slight complication.” Bryce’s accent thickened, and his voice deepened as he spoke.
A burst of words tumbled from the speaker, but between the accent and the frantic background noise, I couldn’t quite make out what was being said. Something about a rescue? Gathering the boys?
“No, no, don’t trouble yourself,” Bryce said brusquely. “I can handle it.”
Well, that was news to me.
“Just calling to say that I may not be in contact for a while. I’ve got some things to take care of.”
A pause came over the line, allowing the wail of what sounded like a fiddle and a set of bagpipes to slip through. Suddenly it was quieter, as it seemed the person had left the room.
“Well, at least it isn’t as bad as the last time,” the voice said, but she sounded almost disappointed.
I exchanged a look with Zach. What was the last time, Captain? And how on earth was it worse than this?
“You’re right. I’ve got to go now. Give my love to the little ones. I’ll call when I can.” He ended the call and removed the battery again. When he looked up at us, a teasing glint lit his eye in response to our mouths hanging wide open. “What?”
“You—” I couldn’t manage to find any words.
He grinned, quite proud to have stunned us all so thoroughly. “You think a captain stops existing when he’s off the clock? I’ve got family too,” he said smirking. Then his humor faded. “Family I’d like to see again.”
A chill ran through me as I nodded. The discovery of Bryce’s family connections made me want to fight even harder. My friends and I all had family we wanted to get back to as well.
Light footsteps echoed down the entryway. We turned to see two vampires, older men. They must’ve been the first scouts. Their clothes looked tattered, the fabric the same thick linen-like material I was used to seeing on the vampires. Each cloak was a different shade of faded green and brown, gray dust skirting the bottom hem.
“They’re nowhere to be found on this plane,” said the taller one to the vampires that were gathered. “They’ve flown through the tear, it seems.” He dropped his disappointed gaze to the ground.
“Are you sure, Lex?” Rhome asked the other vampire in a rising voice.
Lex, whose skin was almost as gray as the dust on his cloak, scratched at his red stubble and nodded slowly.
“Then we’re ready to go,” Oleah said in a loud voice.
“Let’s begin,” Dorian said and turned toward me. Even in the tensest of moments, his presence sent a warm sensation through me.
“Is everyone ready?” he asked. From his expression, I knew he wanted me to make a decision about our captives. I sighed and rubbed my temples as I turned back to my former teammates. Zach came to join me. Part of me screamed to simply haul them along with us, insisting that I could find a way to convince them. But we didn’t have the time or energy for that. There was no right decision. In the end, it would have to be their own.
“You can either come with us now that you know the truth or get left behind here,” I informed them. “That’s all I can offer you.”
Roxy bit her lip with a worried glance. Fear tempered her anger.
“We can’t just leave,” Louise muttered weakly. Roxy nodded in agreement, along with Grayson and Colin.
I swallowed my pain at hearing their unbroken doubt. The truth hadn’t convinced them, after all. Perhaps I’d been foolish to still be hopeful.
“The Bureau has been our whole lives,” Roxy said, avoiding my gaze for the first time. “For some of us, it’s everything. They trained us, cared for us, gave us a career and a purpose. And I get that what is written in that report looks bad and that the blueprints are awful. But… there has to be a good explanation for this.”
Louise spoke up. “There has to be a reason. They must know something we don’t.” Her tone was colored with blind optimism, and I saw shame in her eyes as she flickered a look at Sike.
I recognized the same feelings on the other three faces. I ignored the sting of their decision and looked at Bryce, who had taken a step forward.
“If you all want to stay here,” he announced, “we’ll leave the four of you tied up in the canyon outside. We’ll leave you a bit of water. I assume you were each given a distress beacon?”
Roxy nodded. “They couldn’t guarantee they could track our comms out in the desert.”
The distress beacons were an electronic device no larger than the palm of my hand but sent out a powerful and incredibly accurate signal. The Bureau gave one to each of its soldiers when they were going out on missions into dangerous landscape. The beacons made sure that if any of us got into a tight spot, such as falling down a crevasse like Zach did one time in Alaska on a training exercise, there was a strong signal for search parties to lock on to. While there was a tracking device in all of our comms units, they became notoriously inaccurate outside a certain radius and were mainly to ensure teammates could keep track of one another out on missions. It didn’t surprise me at all that they had been given one for this mission, and I was annoyed with myself that I hadn’t been able to find any when I searched my teammates.