Leo makes a face, nose crinkling like he's trying to emulate a pug. "Great," he drawls sarcastically, darting an uneasy look at me.
"Will we be able to take our comm units?" I ask, already assuming the answer will be in the negative. Bullet wouldn't bother telling FISA we had to go in by ourselves if he was just going to allow us a direct line to our agency in case of emergency. Bullet will want us isolated and on edge, cut off from any potential help to make it easier to manipulate and lie to us.
"No comms," North says regrettably. "You go in clean on this one."
Clean? That's hilarious, considering we're about to plunge into the depths of human sewage. People like Bullet thrive down in the dirt. He excels at creating sinkholes to trap other people and drag them into it with him, drowning them in mud until their lungs fill with thick sludge, and they choke on all the filth they’ve swallowed.
Those dark spaces. Thosebloodydark spaces.
"How about our weapons?" Leo pushes, looking mildly disturbed by the idea we might not be able to bring any form of defence at all.
When North hesitates to answer, I'm more than disturbed, I'm apoplectic.
"No, fuck you," I growl out at North obstinately, "we're taking our weapons, or this shit is not happening."
"You'll have your superpowers," Leo reminds me, like I could ever forget the existence of my stupid fucking freak powers. As if they haven't ruined my life every day since I was shot up with a black chemical that Obsidian Inc. knew had a 70% chance of outright killing me.
I still can't decide if the children who died writhing in agony were the lucky ones, when all is said and done.
"You can take weapons," North says although he doesn't look any happier about it than he did anything else. "But that place is going to be packed with Bullet's personal soldiers, who will no doubt be outfitted with the best weapons on the black market. I'd heavily suggest not letting it come down to a gunfight if at all avoidable."
Yeah, he's right about that. If shit goes sideways, which is almost guaranteed, and Bullet doesn't get what he wants from us, we'll probably go down in a hail of ammunition before we can even blink twice.
But I don't think that will happen, not if we do what Bullet asks. That's what I'm worried about. Not the guns or his soldiers or even Bullet himself, particularly. I just know he's going to ask for something Leo won't want to agree to, something morally despicable, and I'll have to do it anyway to complete the mission and keep us alive. The fallout from that is what I'm really dreading.
I know Leo has seen what I'm capable of; FISA showed him, and he didn't turn away when he found out about Rohan's mum. He might be alright with my past in theory, with what I did for OI to survive, for the sake of keeping my brother by my side. But it's going to be different in real-time. When he realises I'm still the creature, the walking-talking weapon that OI reforged and sharpened me into. I imagine his reaction, and all I can see is brutal judgement, or worse, mindless absolution.
Ultimately, I'm afraid Leo will refuse to see the truth of me. I'm more afraid of that than of him thinking I'm a monster and retracting his easily offered friendship, the thing I've come to depend on most, out of disgust.
If Leo can't everseeme, he can't ever. He can't. He can't evercareabout me.Knowme.Wantme. Not the real me. Not properly. Not like I've become increasingly aware I need him to.
I've spent too much of my life living with lies, surrounded by people with well-constructed masks where their faces are meant to be. I can't do that again, especially not with Leo.
"Alright then," Leo says before I can make some kind of sarcastic remark about doing our best not to get greedy and ending up with an extravagant number of extra holes. "If those are the parameters, we'll just have to make the best of it. Do we at least have an idea of how many soldiers Bullet has, or the layout of his compound?"
North is quick to nod, seeming glad to have information he can give us that will actually be useful. He taps away at his laptop, then turns it around to show us the basic floor plan of Bullet's base in the jungle. From the design outlines, it seems to be a large two-storey building with an open-plan bottom floor and five rooms in total upstairs. There are two main exits, a front and back door. There are no windows on the top floor and only one on the bottom floor, which is likely fitted with bulletproof glass.
"Where did you get this?" I ask, instantly suspicious. Bullet isn't the type to have secrets about his evil lair floating around for agencies like FISA to just snatch out of the air and use.
"Agent Nash. She dug through Bullet's lawyer's files and found the plans," North explains, sounding rather proud of the fact. "Bullet had it built years ago as a retreat, but he was never directly involved. His lawyer was the one who organised it all, including the payments to the construction team and the local authorities to keep them quiet about it."
"That fits." I dip my head in acceptance, a sneer dragging one side of my mouth into a jagged slash. "Bullet keeps his hands crossed behind his back and lets other people get theirs bloody on his behalf. He's meticulous about paper trails."
"Yes," North murmurs in agreement. "It's part of what has made him so difficult to pin down despite the infamy of his name in the criminal underworld. There's nothing physical tying him to his criminal activity."
"That's the payment he's asked for, yeah?" Leo asks, jerking his head at the metal suitcase I noticed earlier.
"It is," North confirms. He gets up from his stool at the kitchen island and walks over to the suitcase. He picks it up and brings it over, laying the suitcase down flat on the island and spinning it around so Leo and I can see the lock. There's a keypad set above it. "The combination is 5624578."
"You know this isn't going to be all he wants from us," I repeat uselessly, frowning at the suitcase with open contempt.
North's dark eyes seem to harden as he meets my gaze head-on. "I know," he says in a low, sober rumble. "I've spoken with Director Snow about your concerns, and she’s told me to give you full authorisation to do whatever is required to get the intel from Bullet."
I press my lips together so I won't start laughing hysterically. Of course. I expected nothing less from Snow. She knows exactly the sort of person we're dealing with here. And the kind of things a man like Bullet would ask something like me to do for him in exchange for information he knows we desperately need. He wouldn't have offered to tell us if he didn't know we were desperate. Bullet prefers to deal from higher ground, always.
Leo looks from me to North, then back again with a worried expression on his face. His voice carries a wary undertone when he says, "Did she designate any limits at all? I mean, will we get burned later if we need to cross legal lines?"
We. Leo thinks this is going to be something we do together. That almost breaks me, from either shame or grief, I don't know.
