The Pyramid Chronicles: Fortuna Guard (#2)

Chapter Twenty-One: Breach

Willow was restless the entire trip back to her hotel. She opened and closed her laptop, watched strangers get on and off the bus, tried to read, failed, checked the status of applications to colleges she hadn't heard from, checked the status of the data decryption, tried to eat a granola bar, felt nauseous—

The bus came to a screeching halt at her stop. She jumped up and rushed to the exit, ignoring annoyed looks from other passengers as she shoved past them.

Willow fumbled to get her laptop out of her bag as she entered her hotel room. The door clicked shut behind her. She let the bag drop to the floor, opened the laptop, and set it on the bed. The decryption process was ninety-six percent complete.

She collapsed onto the bed next to her laptop and stared blankly up at the ceiling.

The morning before Tyche Point had been destroyed, when she'd sat outside the school with Adam...he'd called it the last good day. Maybe it was.

The Scorpion building was always so cold. Not in temperature, Willow could handle that. But it was quiet and tense and unwelcoming. She couldn't deny that she often found herself wishing she was sitting in the sun. Sitting with someone who didn't hate her.

And that morning had been perfect. They'd made it past the early chill of spring, but it wasn't yet scorching the moment the sun touched the sky. And the coffee from that shop in town was so much better than what they made at Scorpion's base. Considering how much other equipment Scorpion stole, Willow figured they could at least get their hands on some decent coffee makers.

Maybe Scorpion was lonelier, too. No one there liked each other. At least people at Tyche Point had been friendly. Polite, at the very least.

Willow's laptop beeped, announcing that the decryption program was done running. She sat up and pulled it onto her lap. SCI's outgoing messages took a few moments to load, and it took Willow another few to locate the date they'd spiked in volume.

The surge of outgoing messages was frantic. One after the other had been sent in rapid succession, all short, all spelling out a warning. Willow's eyes widened.

Error with the containment chamber.

Possible sabotage.

Sample storage broken into.

It's tracking something.

Something had escaped SCI. Willow's eyes darted back and forth, picking out bits and pieces of text and barely processing any of it.

Apex-3.

She pulled up the other files she'd grabbed from the local server and opened a search bar. "Apex," she muttered as she typed the word.

The images that popped up in the results were...terrifying. Photos, x-rays, MRIs. It took Willow longer than it should have to go through the reports they were connected to. She kept reading the same sentence over and over, struggling to take in the information.

Crash in Canada.

Three bodies.

Still alive, critical condition. Tranquilized.

Brought back to the lab.

SCI couldn't be sure where the...creatures came from. The vessel they'd arrived in was too damaged to learn anything of interest. And the physiological descriptions, the genetic information, the photos, none of it matched with anything in any databases. Nothing from Earth. Nothing in the sparse amount of information they had on other planets.

Recorded history had no shortage of heroes and villains claiming to be from other worlds. There were even stories of attempted attacks on Earth, though none had ever been confirmed to be true. It seemed that the Star System Alliance, which Earth's most prominent governments had supposedly been brought into decades ago, eventually felt forced to admit their existence.