Rohan was absent from the meeting, apparently down in his lab, pissing around with his microscope and unethically obtained samples of blood. Snow told us that he’s trying to figure out how to combat the mind-control drugs, how to reverse their effects or prevent them from taking hold in the first place. Our second-best bet to stopping OI from literal world domination is a blocker or inoculation of some kind against the drugs they created.
It's unlikely Rohan will be able to do anything meaningful in the time we probably have left before OI pulls the trigger of theirmwah ha haevil plan, but he’s got a better chance than most of succeeding. Possibly a better chance than anybody else in the world, given how he had access to OI’s lab during his incarceration.
Stone Senior didn’t give him full access, because he’s not a complete idiot, but Rohan had enough to understand how these drugs work as well as how they’re made.
As predicted, we find Rohan squinting at something through his microscope. He has a worryingly distressed expression on his face, a brand of emotion I didn’t think him capable of feeling, let alone expressing so blatantly. It’s awful, I hate it, I want it to stop immediately. An unsure-of-himself, frantic Rohan is like blunt teeth scraping over my scalp: disturbing, and it makes me twitchy.
Rohan looks up at us after a moment, scribbling down notes in a pad next to him. He doesn’t use a laptop or tablet to take notes, like most of the scientists I’ve seen; he’s probably too aware of how easily anything tech can be hacked and the information on them stolen by an enemy with enough skill and imagination. Rohan raises his eyebrows at us expectantly, and that’s all the opening I need.
“We need to go after Stone,” I say, planting my hands down on the worktable and leaning toward him. “You in?”
It probably means something that I’ve stopped thinking of Rohan as a Stone, that he’s a Sathe now, his mother’s son, not his father’s. I don’t know when that happened, or if it matters, but it’s flipped a switch inside my head somewhere along the way.
Rohan doesn’t pretend not to understand what I’m talking about. He grips the edge of the table and pushes his shoulders back, leaning toward me as well. “Are we taking him out clean,” he asks, voice low and ridged with malice, “or are we getting messy with it?”
“All I care about is what he’s done to my brother,” I tell him, feeling the grim twist at the corners of my mouth, that hungry, thrashing creature in my chest uncurling itself at the scent of blood in the air, “and how to undo it. After that’s sorted, we can put as many holes in him as we’ve got left in the chamber.”
Rohan is already nodding along in agreement. “Sounds like a good time to me.” There’s that same gleam to his black eyes that I remember from the day we met properly for the first time, when I woke up in medical, something purely animal, primal, instinctual to things like us, the need to hunt down a threat and kill it, the solution a mangled, bloody,finalthing.
I can feel Leo’s agitation practically vibrating from him in steady waves, and I understand it even if I don’t share the feeling. No matter what he might believe about his nerve, he hasn’t got the same impulses as Rohan or me, wasn’t raised to murder his problems at birth before they could grow up to become bigger problems, to rip the heart out of anything with larger claws and sharper teeth that draws in too close.
“But how do we find him?” Leo asks, visibly pushing aside his discomfort for my sake. It fills me with affection for him, the fact he’s willing to do and be part of things he’d be against in anyother circumstance just because it’s for something that matters tome.
Leo looks from Rohan to me, brows pinching together. “I mean, he’s a jet-setting billionaire with a thousand places to hide all over the world.”
It’s definitely a point. If we’d known where Ian Stone was all this time, he’s the first person we’d have gone to about tracking down where OI had stashed Rohan.
Rohan’s mouth tugs up into a blithe smile, eyes brightening from simple black to glimmering onyx. It’s a mix of smug and excited and has me feeling a reactive mashup of giddy and hostile. I want to smack the look off the haughty bastard’s face and demand to know what’s got him so hyped up so I can share in it because I’m certain it’s good news for us.
“What did you do, you sneaky little shit?” I ask, a vague buzz of anticipation humming under my skin, like a flurry of bees are looking to make a nest somewhere between my muscles and bones.
“Planted a bug on the fucker, didn’t I?” Rohan crows, arrogantly triumphant. At Leo’s shocked “seriously?” he rolls his eyes and tuts. “What, you thought I spentall that timeI was caught by OI rocking in the corner of a cell? Knitting? Alphabetising my dust-bunny collection?
“Chill with the ‘all that time’ bullshit,” I say, wrinkling my nose at him. “It was, like, a month. Barely. And I almost got shot two dozen times, storming random fucking OI bases searching for your ungrateful arse.” I jerk my chin at Leo. “This one was practically your knight in shining Kevlar.” I shake my head, vaguely disgusted by the memory of Leo displaying his bone-deep hero tendencies.
Rohan pointedly ignores me and turns his attention to Leo when my partner asks him, “Where’d you plant the bug?”
“Dear old dad let me out of my cell and into the lab,” Rohan explains. “Big mistake, giving me access like that. He kept swerving too close, and I stole his phone, planted the tracker, and put it back in his pocket before he noticed it was gone.”
Leo looks annoyingly impressed at the basic slight-of-hand trick Rohan apparently performed. “Brilliant, mate,” he says, grinning brightly at Rohan, who seems to revel in the approval, shooting me a furtive glance just so I know his preening is at least partially to irritate me, the prick, which in turn has my hand twitching to smack both of them.
“Hmm, at least one of us was trained right,” Rohan says to me in a clear retaliation for what I said when we rescued him.
I’m about to come back at him with a suitably scathing retort when the entire base is wracked by an explosion, everything from the walls to the ceiling to the floor shuddering violently, like we’ve just been hit by an earthquake. But it isn’t an earthquake. Alarms start blaring a second later, almost deafeningly loud.
Leo flinches, agony splintering across his face as he bends over at the waist, hands going to his ears. His new senses are still overly sensitive, the alarm too much for him to take this soon. I reach for him, steadying him so he doesn’t crumple to the floor from the overwhelming pain.
“We’re under attack!” Rohan shouts, gaze moving frantically to the exit.
“It’s OI,” I yell back, arms holding Leo up and already shuffling him toward the same door Rohan’s eyes went to first.
It has to be Obsidian Inc.; it’s too much of a coincidence otherwise that Dan was brought in, and the base gets invaded barely a day later. My brother must have a tracker chip inside him that FISA missed when they scanned his body for them as part of the medical checkup. We should never have come here, and if Leo hadn’t needed medical attention to keep him alive,I’d have voiced that at the time. But when I woke up in medical from the drugs Dan shot me up with, all I could think about was Leo and staying by Leo’s side while his body fought the lethal chemical mutating his cells, the black poison trying to kill the man I’d, against all odds, fallen in love with.
Rohan follows after us, taking hold of Leo’s other side and helping me get him out of the lab and down the corridor. We lock eyes over Leo’s bent head.
“You need to get Leo out of here,” I tell him. Leo tries to protest, tugging at my T-shirt, attempting to shove away his obvious suffering, choking out bullshit about coming with me. He already knows exactly where I’m going.
Rohan must as well because he nods in quick agreement, not seeming at all surprised and taking more of Leo’s weight when I move away. “We’ll go the garage and nick a van,” he says. “You going after Dan?”
