“It’s urgent. They want to us to clear out by two and need to know how much longer we’ll be.”
They.Who werethey? Or was she misunderstanding the language’s pronouns? Sydney listened for clues as they continued muttering to each other in Corcasian, but no one clarified any further.
There was a pause in their argument, broken only by the sound of Eli’s muffled grunts as he tried not to bite down on the lethal cube in his mouth. Sydney made her way soundlessly up the ladder until she was almost level with the ship’s railing.
From here, she could see the back of Eli’s head. She pressed herself as flat against the side of the ship as she could.
“Come with me,” the man in charge finally said, waving for his associate to follow him. The other man fell into step without hesitation, leaving the third alone to guard Eli.
Sydney waited until the men’s footsteps had faded around the corner of the deck. Then she pulled herself silently over the railing and landed with a soft thud behind the third guard. In the same move, she pulled a knife from her boot and flipped it around in her hand so that she wielded the hilt.
He barely had time to turn before Sydney lashed out at him, slamming the hilt into the back of his knee. His leg buckled—as he stumbled, she struck him viciously in the back of his neck. The man collapsed onto all fours. Sydney moved to hit him again, to knock him unconscious—but to her surprise, he didn’t dart toward her. He went for Eli.
She lunged after him. But he ignored her, then reached Eli and swung a fist hard at the man’s jaw. It connected with a loud crack.
No!
Sydney had to stifle the scream in her throat. She threw herself forward at the guard, tackling him in the side and sending him toppling to the floor. They both scrambled for an instant before Sydney smashed the hilt of her knife against the man’s temple. He finally went limp.
Sydney hopped to her feet and hurried to Eli—
But it was too late.
Eli was foaming at the mouth, bloody bubbles dripping from the edges of the duct tape. Sydney’s hand stopped in midair as she thought better of ripping the tape off—Eli suddenly surged up, as if trying to escape the chair he was bound to, his limbs pulling in a desperate attempt to get the shattered Paramecium out. A strangled sob came from his throat.
The sob changed halfway to an uncontrollable cough.
As Sydney looked on in horror, his body contorted backward and his boots scraped frantically against the deck. She took two steps back.
The sound of his muffled grunts changed, turned gurgling. She knew right away that the chemical must be dissolving his throat.
Eli met her eyes once. They were bloodshot and tinged with tears, open so wide that she thought his eyeballs might pop right out. She stared back at him. He recognized her—she could see that in their dying glaze. He looked like he wanted to say something.
Then his gaze clouded over, and he went limp against the chair, foam still dripping down his chin.
Sydney had witnessed plenty of deaths in the two years since she started working for Panacea, had enough nightmares of what she’d seen to last her lifetime. She knew how almost every kind of death sounded—a sigh from a shot, a gasp from a slash to the throat, the thrashing of dying limbs, the crumple of a body slumping.
But this. This was death by a new chemical weapon.
The billionaire tycoon behind one of the biggest trafficking operations in the world. The mogul who owned museums and yachts and sprawling estates. The man that Panacea had focused their attention on for years. The entire reason why Sydney and Winter were here in London.
He was now dead.
“Shit,” Sydney whispered to herself. “Shit,shit!”
Paramecium. She didn’t want to imagine what the chemical had done when it’d broken inside Eli’s mouth, didn’t want to think about what that little blue cubecoulddo once it was loaded back inside its metal cylinder and launched within a city’s center by the thousands. There had been a part of her that could believe—until she saw the weapon at work—the shipment was a myth, that maybe it wasn’t real at all, that they were just here to find a ledger of numbers.
Well, she’d seen it now.
The cold air swirled against her, and she shivered. Her hand went to her back pocket. When she’d attacked the man, she had managed to swipe his wallet out of his pants and tuck it into her own. She wanted to flip the wallet open now and take a glimpse at who these assailants were, but there was no time. She had to get out of here.
Instead, with a last look at Eli, she hurried to the deck’s railing and swung back over the edge. Her hands shook.
Eli Morrison is dead.
And so was their mission.
And in that moment, she froze against the hull’s ladder. Cutting through her memory of Eli’s dying rasps was the last thing the Corcasian ringleader said.
