She looked harmless. That was her secret weapon.
Maya didn’t give him a chance to collect his thoughts. She lunged, aiming the stun gun at the largest expanse of bare skin she could find. He moved at the last second, swatting her hand away from his neck with enough force to leave her fingers numb.
Ignoring the discomfort, Maya used the momentum of her lunge to drive her booted foot down on his toes. She had a fraction of a second to worry they’d be steel-toed, but her heel crushed down on leather, and he howled and flailed. Dancing back would save her face, but driving forward—
Instinct made the decision for her. She took the hit to the face, hissing with pain. But she was inside his guard now, too close for him to stop her.
Her stun gun hit his neck with a crackle, and it was all over. His body convulsed, and she stumbled back out of the path of destruction as he went down with all the grace of a felled tree.
“Fuck.” With the guard down, Maya took a second to wipe tears from her stinging eye. She’d have a shiner tomorrow, which would only make everyone more annoying and protective. As if they didn’t frequently come back riddled with bullets or bruised to hell and back.
Supersoldiers were exhausting hypocrites.
“Maya?” The concern in Conall’s tone was palpable.
She tapped her ear. “I’m fine. Guard’s down. Just gotta stash him somewhere.”
“Good job.” Knox’s voice always managed to sound deadly serious, even at a low whisper. “We’re about to secure the package. Be ready.”
Shit. The fight must have taken longer than she’d realized. Maya reached down, hooked her hands under the man’s armpits, and grunted with the effort it took to drag him a mere foot from the van.
“Of course no one’s running out to help me now,” she muttered, bracing herself to pull him again. The nearest cars were a good twenty feet away, which had seemed like nothing before she started trying to drag dead weight.
And it’s your own damn fault, taunted an inner voice. If you hadn’t overruled Knox, Gray could have dropped him before he ever even knew you were here.
During mission prep, Knox had raised the possibility of Gray finding a vantage point where he could guard the van. Maya had been the one to protest—they wouldn’t have held Gray back from the main assault just to watch over Conall, and she’d be damned if she let Knox and his squad get into the habit of acting like she needed special protection.
All perfectly logical. And she hadn’t needed protection. The unconscious security guard at her feet was proof. She didn’t need a babysitter watching her through a sniper scope, ready to leap in and save her lest she break a nail—or take a stray elbow to the face. Honestly, who the hell felt better knowing a broody sniper was tracking their every move?
You would, whispered that traitorous inner voice.
Maya stomped on that thought with a vicious mental boot and turned her attention back to getting her assailant’s limp body to cover.
The parking lot suddenly seemed a lot bigger than it had before, and it was riddled with cracks that were just begging to trip her up. She supposed even rich, evil scientist outposts didn’t have the resources to keep asphalt in top repair.
Roads seemed like the last priority for most people these days, though the old-timers around Five Points insisted that the roads had been crap even before the Flares. Some swore they’d grown up watching sinkholes open up and swallow entire highways full of cars. The city had tried to keep up with maintenance, but road infrastructure had fallen by the wayside after solar flares had caused the whole damn country to collapse right in the middle of an unprecedented famine.
People who’d survived the dark days always had a certain look in their eyes. It had been almost fifty years since the lights had gone off and the world had changed, but some of them would still look at you like it had all happened yesterday, like time didn’t mean anything when the pain cut that deep. They remembered the panic, the fear. The brutal winters without access to heat. The sweltering summers when neighbors dropped dead of heatstroke.
They remembered the hunger. The Energy Wars had shaken the country, and the second Dust Bowl had brought it to its knees. The solar flares that swept the globe in ’42 might have struck the death blow to the faltering federal government, but they weren’t what killed people.
The famine had done that. It lasted for a decade, right up until the TechCorps and its corporate partners had established the Heartlands irrigation program. Food started to trickle back into Atlanta after that—but only through the TechCorps. Soon, they were the only reliable source of clean water. Electricity. Communication.
The TechCorps had demonstrated how easy it was to take over a region without fighting. All you had to do was own everything people needed to survive.
Well. That, and be heartless enough to withhold it until they fell in line.
“Fuckers,” Maya muttered, stepping over another fault in the asphalt before dragging the limp body after her.
“Almost there.” Nina’s quiet words drifted over the comms. “Couple of close calls, but we’re still undetected.”
Maya heaved again and imagined what was going down inside the building. The team would be slipping through the halls right now, expertly exploiting the razor-thin gaps between patrols, relying on Conall to shield their passage from the cameras and the algorithms that ran the security system. That was how Nina preferred to operate. In and out, like a ghost. Less attention meant less danger. Get the mission done and get home in one piece.
Knox would be in the lead. He would assess each tiny shift in their master plan and adjust their strategy accordingly, with Nina at his side, ready to crack any safe or lock. Rafe was the muscle, capable of ripping a door off its hinges—or a head off a body, if it came to that—while Dani ranged ahead of them like a ghost, her speed making her the perfect scout.
And, of course, Gray would be guarding their backs. He might be most comfortable with his sniper rifle, but give him a handgun and he became a protective wall. Chaos could be erupting all around him, and he’d quietly assess the situation, decide who needed to be shot, and swiftly and efficiently get it done.
Maya worried a lot less about everyone when Gray was around.
This is the one,” Knox said. “427-D.”
“Retinal scan paired with voice recognition. You’ll have to pop it.” Maya could hear the grin in Dani’s voice. “Seventeen seconds.”
“My record is nineteen,” Nina protested.
“Don’t care. I’ve got fifty on it. You in, Morales?”
“Any time, sugar pie. My money’s on twenty-three.”
“Sure,” Maya muttered into her comm. “You two just keep foreplaying while I’m dragging around a body twice my size.”
“Focus,” came Knox’s firm command. “We’re almost out.”
Sweat dripped down Maya’s spine. Her arms were starting to ache, and her face wasn’t feeling much better. The perimeter guard was actually getting heavier. She winced as his boots scraped across the gravel, even though she knew no one was close enough to hear.
Well, no one except Conall. But since he wasn’t leaping out of the van to help her now, she got a better hold on the guard and continued dragging. If she made it through this, she’d start lifting weights. That would probably make Nina happy. Rafe, too. Maya wouldn’t even bitch about the additional training time.