The Pyramid Chronicles: Fortuna Guard (#2)

Chapter Nineteen: Ice and Fire

It was a twenty-minute walk from the bus stop to the SCI facility. The building itself was set back on a property surrounded by trees. It kept SCI hidden from the street, but it also let Willow get close without being seen.

As she neared the fence around the facility property, she slid a simple white mask over her face. She'd managed to make it at Scorpion without the Director noticing. If he had noticed, she'd been ready to pass it off as a new idea for the front plate of the soldiers' helmets. Part of her hated it—it felt tacky. But she couldn't risk SCI's cameras identifying her.

Willow ventured as close to the building as she dared and lowered herself to the ground behind some bushes. She opened her bag, reached past the drone she'd brought, and pulled out her laptop. While the camera feed loaded, she searched for incoming and outgoing signals.

Once she pinpointed the signals, tracking down the messages that were still being stored on the server was easy. It wasn't anything close to classified, but it was worth a quick look. She ran her search back for a few days, and—

"What's this?" Willow murmured, frowning. There was a spike in outgoing messages dated earlier that week.

The messages were encrypted. Willow threw them at her decryption program. Ordinarily, it would need a few hours to decode the messages, but data she had from already cracking other SCI encryptions would speed things up.

While that ran in the background, she switched back to the security cameras and smirked. "How nice. You labeled them for me." She flipped through the feed names. Lab 1, Lab 2, various offices, storage, server rooms, cellblock—

The cellblock had guests.

Eric, Raveena, Summer, Veronica, Sam...no Adam?

"Dumbasses," Willow muttered. Always snooping around in the wrong places. No surprise they got caught. Still, she felt a twinge of concern. What did SCI have planned for the altered they caught?

Willow already had a vendetta against SCI, given that they were buying tech from her father's company. She didn't care if they were on the government's payroll. One way or another, she was going to deal with them. It was just a matter of time. And figuring out how to do it without getting arrested.

She tried the lab cameras, hoping for a peek at whatever projects they were working on. After flipping through a few rooms that only held scientists—and a surprising number of security guards, even for a SCI facility—she found Adam. Her hands froze on the keyboard.

Adam sat at a table in the middle of the room. A researcher stood in front of him, jotting down notes on a tablet. Willow zoomed in. The quality wasn't good enough to closely read Adam's face, but he at least didn't seem to be in much pain.

A new window popped up onscreen, alerting Willow that the process of decrypting and downloading surface-level server data had finished. She could leave now and walk away with their messages, along with security footage, lab reports, and whatever else they'd left sitting on the local servers. That all might need some extra decryption work, but she'd be able to do it from the safety of her room at Scorpion. Willow closed the laptop and slid it into her bag.

She rose to her feet. What else was she supposed to do? Rescue the captured altered? They'd probably just get caught again by SCI later. Or Scorpion. Or get killed doing something else stupid.

As Willow walked away from the fence, she found herself recalling what she'd overheard between the Director and Claudia. Something was up with Eric. He had electrokinesis in addition to pyrokinesis. He'd been kidnapped as a child by Scorpion, probably experimented on. There were things about Scorpion's lab, their other projects, that the Director wasn't telling her.