She closed her eyes for a moment, pushed all the pain and fear down until she’d buried it under years of uncertainty, then nodded. “Play the first video.”
“Are you sure? No one would judge you if you wanted to sit this part out. I can give you a rundown after.”
Guilt clawed at her throat, but she talked around it. “It took me two years to get this far. Whatever’s on there is because of that, and I need to know. To see what I left him to, so play it.”
“This isn’t your…” Bodie’s voice trailed off before he sighed, hit play.
The video began like the others with a blast of static, black lines cutting across the screen until an image took shape.
Hospital room.
An IV bag hung in the background, a single window brightening the right side of the feed. Alister restrained on a bed as someone pushed some of that eerie red liquid from the freezer into the port. Monitors provided a steady backdrop, his occasional cries cutting through.
She wrapped her arms around her waist as the view changed to a camera positioned above the bed, highlighting his face twisted in anger and rage before slowly fading until he stared blankly into space. No response when some bastard in scrubs snapped his fingers an inch from her father’s face.
Questions followed.
What sounded like the immediate past. How he’d found their trail. Who he’d told. If she knew about them.
His eyes focused at the mention of her name, that slight shift the only indication he recognized anything before he faded again, gaze fixed.
The image blacked out, cutting back in with him sitting in a wheelchair, silhouette outlined by the setting sun. She couldn’t tell if it was the same room, but she’d bet her ass it was the same hospital.
The same background, the same frame. Maybe a new ward but definitely the same location.
One of the doctors started talking — running through her dad’s vitals, how he hadn’t spoken since the last round of treatments. That, by all accounts, the erasure had been a success. The camera panned over to the man talking, caught a glimpse of him in profile, then shifted back, her father still staring out the window.
She tuned out after that, fixated on the way he sat there, frozen. No hint of the man who’d stormed enemy compounds, held off mercenaries in order to save a village clinic.
“Rowan.”
She blinked when Bodie’s voice sounded beside her, his hand gently squeezing her shoulder. She turned, swallowed, aware the room had fallen silent. “Guess we know which one’s the toxin.”
“What matters is that the time stamp is only a couple months old.”
“Great. I finally catch a break, and it’s too little, too late.”
“We don’t know?—”
“Look at him.” She surged to her feet, pointed to the screen, his image still frozen in that chair. “There’s nothing left to save.”
Dalton stood, crossed the floor. “You don’t know that.” He stopped her from interrupting. “If that toxin severed his memories or his neural connections, that other drug might restore them. Either way, we’ll bring him home. Worry about the future after he’s safe.”
Crossing the room, Rowan swiped at a few errant tears. “We have to go back. I’ll get a warrant, an assault team. Whatever it takes…”
Bodie gripped her wrist. “He’s not there.”
“But they know where he is, and I can’t?—”
“It’s too late.” Nick pushed to his feet, braced most of his weight against Dalton when he stood, caught Nick before he tumbled back on his ass. “We’re too late.”
Rowan frowned. “What do you mean? We were just there?—”
“They’re gone.” Nick pulled out his phone, tapped the screen a few times before a photo sprang up on the monitor. “When I heard about the raid — thought you jackasses had gone off and gotten yourselves killed — I had Sloane pull a few strings, get some images of the facility this morning, and that…” He pointed to the image. “Is what she sent me as soon as I landed. They bugged out.”
Rowan stared at the satellite photo, several black SUVs heading away. “Oh, god. Did I…” She inhaled but nothing made it past the lump in her throat. “Did I blow our one chance? Did I just kill my dad?”
“Whoa, easy, sweetheart.” Bodie moved in close, rubbed a hand up and down her back. “Just breathe. He wasn’t there. That video’s from a fully functioning hospital. The cannery was nothing more than a storage depot. Somewhere for them to harvest the fungus — keep everything together for this kind of scenario. No reason to believe anything’s changed.”
