Sami paused. “Fine. You?”
“Just fine and dandy.”
Ah. Sami tried to get rid of what must be a contented glow. Raze didn’t like being away from Vinnie for any amount of time, and now that Sami had found amazing sex and romance, she actually understood why he was so cranky at the moment. “You’ll be heading back to Vanguard soon.”
“I’m not leaving until we fix Tace,” the Vanguard soldier returned.
Sami paused, her chest filling. The Vanguard soldiers were family, and she belonged. They cared about Tace, too. “Raze.” Tears filled her eyes.
Horror filled Raze’s. “Stop that. Geez.” He reached over and awkwardly patted her shoulder, nearly sending her into the wall. “It’s okay. We’ll cure him.”
She sniffed and headed over to her rolling chair. “I’ll go back to the medical files as soon as I decrypt the rest of these.”
“Jax and I were up all night going through the medical files. We need to get them to Lynne or the doctors of Vanguard,” Raze said.
Sami turned, her heart warming all over again. “All night?”
“Yeah, but we couldn’t figure out some of the scientific formulas.” His lip twisted. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. We’ll get it.” They were fighting for Tace as hard as she was. That meant something. Heck, it meant everything. She turned on the computer and waited for it to boot up. “What about Penelope? How is she?”
Raze shook his head. “Not good. Still incoherent even though we plugged her full of B and morphine all night.” He winced. “I guess it’s fair to say that Marcus plugged her full of them. He wouldn’t let us get close.”
“Did he talk to Jax at all?”
“No. The only person he seems even remotely interested in is Penelope. I have guards on him in case he tries to take her and run.” Raze leaned back against the wall. “He’s half-baked, Sami.”
Sami nodded. “Yeah, but we’ve all been there at one time or another. Maybe he’ll relax and come out of it at some point. Who knows what those doctors did to him in their experiments. It’s amazing he’s coherent at all—trust me. Doc Vinnie might be able to shrink his head.”
“That man isn’t getting within ten feet of Vinnie,” Raze said. “Not a chance in hell.”
Hmmm. Vinnie would probably be of a different opinion, but Sami had other things to worry about at the moment. The cursor flashed. “All right. Let’s open this bitch up.” She started typing.
“Can you get everything?” Raze asked.
“Yeah. When I worked here, I created a buffer overflow to give myself super-user status.” She shrugged. “They upgraded a couple of times, or tried to anyway, but I created a backdoor.” She smiled. “Old habits die hard, you know.”
“So you have a backdoor to the server?”
“No. You want to watch that because a backdoor to the server might be removed during a system upgrade. I created the backdoor in the compiler.” She warmed to her subject. “In fact—”
Raze lifted a hand. “It’s fascinating. Really. But I need to scout the hallway and back.” He turned on his heel.
Sami fought the urge to stick her tongue out at his retreating back. Itwasfascinating, damn it. She turned back and typed quickly, methodically going through a large amount of data she didn’t recognize. A video suddenly blinked on camera. “Raze?” she called.
Raze returned with Jax on his heels.
“You hungry? There’s great food down in the cafeteria.” Jax slipped a doughnut in front of her. “It’s kind of fresh, even.”
She typed in a couple of commands. A street camera went live outside of Merc territory in Santa Barbara. “They’ve been watching.”
Jax leaned in. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah. Not all the time because they don’t have the resources. It’s on a rotating schedule, but they can tune in anytime they want.” She clicked a couple of keys, and the entrance to Vanguard territory came into view just as the guards were changing. She sucked in air. “Whoa.”
Raze straightened and glanced around the pristine command center. “We’re missing something.”
“Huh?” Sami asked, leaning in to read the different files.
