The Unpaired (The Pairings Book 3) Page 17

  An Unpaired tried to stop Mia and she did a roundhouse kick, throwing him into a nearby desk so that his body made a sickening crunch as he landed. He didn’t move again.

  The remaining BioPure soldiers who hadn’t retreated were taken down one-by-one by the Unpaired until there was only Mia standing against two Unpaired.

  BioPure’s numbers had been higher than that of the Unpaired, but the Unpaired had surprise on their side. Still, it had all been too little too late. John was gone and Mia was going to pay. With Sledge out of the lab with the hard drives and all of our research, I watched as Mia took out one of the Unpaired before dodging gunfire from the other one. Diving across the nearest desk, Mia rose up, already lifting her gun to shoot the last remaining Unpaired point-blank in the chest. She turned away from them clutching her side and leaning heavily against the desk next to her. Syeth and I lifted our guns. I had a perfect shot—until Mia snapped her attention in our direction and ducked behind cover as Syeth and I let loose a barrage of rifle fire.

  Most of the bullets lodged in the metal desk, but the rest ricocheted off.

  Syeth was the first to stop firing. He glanced and me and opened his mouth to speak.

  Before any words came out, Mia popped up from behind the desk with two pistols in her hands. Syeth gripped my shoulder and shoved me to the floor. Jarid crawled over to us as the bullets smacked into the desk, amplifying the sound of Mia’s intention to kill us.

  “We need to get out of here now,” Jarid said. “Mia isn’t worth all of this.”

  “She lied to you, Jarid, and she’s killed so many people. I have to stop her!” I said.

  “If she can take down the Unpaired, how do we stand a chance?” Jarid asked.

  Syeth moved to the other side of the desk and peered toward Mia. “She’s dropped one of her guns. She’s going to reload soon.”

  That might be the only chance we had to get at her.

  “When she stops, keep up the pressure on her,” I said.

  “What are you—” Jarid began before the shooting stopped, and Syeth jumped up with his rifle at the ready.

  Mia ducked, and I took off toward her. I didn’t know if I had five seconds or a minute until she fired at us again. I sneaked behind another desk as her black hair appeared from cover. She shot twice at Jarid and Syeth. She didn’t hit them, but they fell to the ground for cover. I pressed my body to the ground and watched her feet from under the desk as they sprinted away from me.

  I let out a curse and rounded the desk to follow her. Between the raid from both BioPure and the Unpaired, the entire lab was scattered with upturned desks, equipment, and bodies. I had enough cover that she didn’t see me coming yet.

  I kept her in my sights, moving as quickly as I could toward her. Her focus was on Syeth and Jarid—probably thinking that I was with them. At least I had the element of surprise; I wasn’t going to give up my position until I had to.

  Mia ended up back by the research computers again, close to the stairwell exit. Each time Jarid and Syeth moved, Mia pinned them back with firepower. They were close enough to have gotten her in the arm with one of their bullets, but I hadn’t seen who shot her.

  Mia ducked behind one of the research tables. The monitors on top were riddled with bullets, much like the rest of the laboratory. Especially the scanner to my right. I waited until Syeth and Jarid had her attention again before standing behind the scanner. The clear tube was no longer gleaming and see-through, but filled with bullet holes that had destroyed the glass. I held my gun in front of me before lining up my body with the scanner so that I was only partially blocked by it.

  Mia was sitting on the floor, reloading her gun with one hand while her other pressed against her collar. Blood squirted from her leg onto the floor, but she seemed preoccupied with whoever she was shouting orders to. I couldn’t quite hear the words themselves as Syeth and Jarid continued firing.

  Once she reloaded, she rolled over and lifted herself with her non-injured leg. Instead of going after the twins, she sprinted toward the exit.

  It was now or never.

  I sprinted from my hiding spot as a body launched from her left and wrapped his arms around her, dropping her to the ground.

  Even with an injured leg, Mia wrapped her legs around Jarid and rolled him until he was underneath her. She lifted her hand and punched him across the face.

  Blood leaked from his mouth.

  The entire world fell away from me; only Mia and Jarid came into view. As I ran toward them, I lifted my gun. Jarid’s head lolled to the side and spotted me. His head nodded even as she landed another blow to his face.

  She started to stand, and I squeezed the trigger. The first shot stunned her, and the second and third launched her backward. She stumbled toward the door, her freaky strength carrying her on. I put one more bullet in her back before my gun was empty. I was about to reach down to retrieve another gun from a nearby dead soldier, but Mia crashed to the floor with a gut-wrenching smacking sound of flesh against tile.

  Jarid pushed up from the ground as Syeth appeared at his side. “That was stupid, you know.”

  “I stopped her, right?” His eye had started to swell and blood trickled down his lip.

  Trembling, I kept my rifle trained on Mia’s unmoving body, half-expecting her to get up again. She was modded up and had run away with more than three bullets in her. What was stopping her now?

  Slowly, I moved forward, keeping her in my sights. Syeth and Jarid walked alongside me, both with their guns raised. Mia faced the opposite direction from me, and I didn’t see her chest moving. Again, I thought of the mods. They could be making her appear as if she wasn’t breathing, her just waiting for us to get close enough for another attack.

  The lab was empty, and almost too quiet compared to the continued fighting we could hear going on in the warehouse upstairs. “I can’t believe they’re still fighting,” Jarid commented. “We should get up there and help.”

  “Or escape,” Syeth said. “Isra’s not going to give up on us that easily. She’s still after you.”

  He was right, but my focus remained where it was. I approached Mia’s body and stared at it for a moment. I kicked her in the side. Her body moved with the force of the kick, but she didn’t lift her head. I dropped to a crouch and pushed her hair away from her face. The same blank stare that John had stared off into the afterlife.

  Stepping back, I released a breath and my shoulders slumped forward. We were surrounded by so much death. This was the worst scenario we’d been in so far. And it had all been for nothing, so far as I was concerned.

  My legs started to tremble as Mia’s death weighed down on me. I’d killed a person. I was responsible for taking life from this world.

  “Guys!” Jarid said excitedly.

  I glanced at him.

  Syeth touched my shoulder, as if he knew my mind wasn’t really in the present. We joined Jarid, who stood in front of a computer that was half torn apart, over at the edge of the research area where someone had been working on it prior to the attack.

  “Mia must have forgotten about it,” Jarid said. “Sledge probably made her stay back and make sure they had all the hard drives.”

  Thinking about her movements, I realized she had made a point of heading to this area specifically. I’d thought she had been working toward getting to the exit unharmed, but she must have realized that there was one more hard drive to retrieve.

  “So, that has more information about the cure?” I asked.

  “It has to. They were on a cloud server so any one of the researchers could use the computers and continue their work. If anyone had downloaded the research here, it’s probably still here,” Jarid said.

  “Can you get it out?” I asked.

  “Yeah, definitely, I—”

  A loud whine cut off his words, and then the entirety of the ground shook around us. My teeth chattered as I looked around the space. Several of the ceiling tiles crashed to the ground before another explosio
n rocked the ceiling above us.

  “Get to the stairs!” Syeth said. “This place is going down!”

  “I have to pull the hard drive!” Jarid said, already trying to pull the case off the machine.

  “She was calling someone before you got to her, Jarid,” I said as another explosion rattled the building.

  Syeth cursed. “Must have been air support. If she had any clue that she was leaving without the last hard drive, then they had to bring down the building or risk others getting a hold of the cure.”

  “We need to get it,” Jarid said. “I can do it. I just need a screwdriver.”

  “We need to leave!” Syeth argued.

  I glanced at Syeth and then Jarid, who was now opening drawers to find something to use to remove the hard drive. “This can’t be for nothing.”

  Jarid nodded as if answering the question in my mind. “Go,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  I shook my head and squeezed his arm. “We do this together, or we don’t do it at all.”

  “You both need to get up there. I’ll be right behind you,” Jarid said. “Let me make up for my mistake. Go.” Without waiting for us, he went back to yanking open drawers. Syeth grabbed my arm and pulled me to the exit. “Let him go! We’ll meet him upstairs!”

  It was hard to make my legs move at first, but Syeth was right. The sooner we got upstairs, the sooner we’d know what was going on.

  We reached the door, then turned and looked back for Jarid. I could just see the top of his head as he bent over the computer.

  “Come on!” I screamed for him.

  Suddenly, another whine filled my ears. Syeth’s hands pulled me away from the laboratory door before he kicked it closed. My last view of Jarid was him disappearing in a shower of fire and concrete.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The scent of soup wafted through from the kitchen into the living room. My muscles still pulsed from our run to the safehouse, and the lumpy brown couch didn’t do much to ease my pain. The black-out curtains cut the afternoon light out of the entire house, making it appear as if it was the middle of the night. The steady sound of heavy breathing carried from the bedroom behind me. I’d insisted the door stay open whenever I wasn’t at the bedside. The only folding chair in there made my back stiff from the hours I’d spent there.

  I closed my eyes, leaning my head against the back of the couch. It was my sentry position. The snores filled my ears as the past day played over again in my mind. It was my own version of a punishment for the many mistakes I had made.

  Flickers of Mia’s dead eyes stared back at me. Not for the first time did I think about what I should have done instead of accepting what she’d said as truth. I should have done something to keep her from betraying the cause. The others had told me repeatedly that there wasn’t anything I could have done since she’d been the one to help set up the lab and “retrieve” John, but I knew now how simple a task that had been since she and Sledge had never been on opposite sides.

  Other than Mia, there were other agents for BioPure who’d been stitched into the group, hidden until Sledge arrived. We had needed them to help create the cure that worked, but in turn, Sledge had taken it from us within seconds of arriving.

  And, in the end, he’d taken more than the cure from me, too.

  I stretched my arm over my head, the muscles tugging with an ache that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to shake for a while. After the last airstrike, which had demolished most of the warehouse, it had taken Syeth and me nearly two hours to find Jarid among the destruction. He’d had more blood covering his skin than I’d ever seen on someone before, but he stood up on his own and claimed he was okay. And, he’d been clutching the hard drive.

  The three of us had climbed through the rubble and up to the main level of the warehouse. A giant hole big enough to fit one of the Unpaired’s helicopters had been our exit. Night had already fallen, and we’d run-walked for a half mile before the rest of our team located us.

  It had been chaos then, between getting us to safety, helping Jarid with his wounds, and recounting the last twenty-four hours.

  Syeth and I had wanted to know where Sledge had gone. Now that Mia was gone, I wanted to offer the same fate to Sledge. He didn’t deserve to live another day after the destruction he had caused at the laboratory and to our country.

  Harper had delivered the bad news about Sledge and his soldiers fleeing the site as the last airstrike had taken place. The Unpaired had tapped into BioPure radio communications. Apparently, they didn’t seem to care about the people who’d still been inside the building, or what side those people might be on. With the cure in his hands, Sledge had ordered the lab obliterated just in case any research of use had been left behind.

  In a way, I wished Mia would have been concerned that Sledge was in it for himself, through and through. It would have given me a little satisfaction—to see her face once she realized she was going to die within the building, without her boss caring. Mia had meant nothing to him. And now she was nothing to no one.

  Once we’d reached the safehouse—a two-story raised ranch in the middle of a suburb of Chicago—Yvette and Warren had checked us for injuries. I said I was fine, but they’d wanted to be sure. The stairwell had protected us from a lot of the damage.

  Syeth and I had checked out okay other than having loads of bruises and cuts—nothing serious. But Jarid wasn’t so lucky. He had all the injuries of someone who survived being buried in a massive building collapse, including a concussion. He could barely handle the light in the bedroom where he rested. We kept the curtains drawn, but any time he wanted to get up, he was incredibly dizzy and still complained of a headache.

  It seemed like a curse, that Jarid had very nearly fallen back into the state he’d been in when I’d met him. His memories were there, but he was in pain and unable to help us with the mission until he recovered. The others had no idea how long that would take, but I wasn’t about to leave his side after he had saved Syeth and me. If we had moved into the stairwell seconds later, we might not have survived at all. Jarid had been lucky to duck under one of the desks, but it had still caved in some under the weight of the ceiling and the floors above it.

  Harper, Warren, and Yvette’s hushed voices discussing what had happened and our next plan of action floated into the living room. Warren raised his voice and one of the others shushed him. Flemming—one of the three they had recruited from the Unpaired during their supply runs—peeked his head into the room. He was a massive guy, almost as tall and wide as the door frame, which made it easier to spot him, and I half-lifted my hand in acknowledgement.

  I curled my hands into fists, and my joints popped with the effort. All the work we had done was for nothing. We had retained the hard drive from the rubble, but despite Jarid protecting it and getting it back to the safehouse, there weren’t any files related to the research—only employee records. The essential formula we needed for the cure was in BioPure’s hands, and we’d been left with nothing.

  John was gone, too. I tried not to think of him because I ended up crying every time I did. There was no stopping the tears when they started. He had been a hair’s breadth away from saving Mom from New Zero. His happiness had been infectious at the celebration. Little had we known about the traitors we had celebrated with.

  I listened as the others talked, their murmur of voices a soothing balm after everything that had happened.

  “The surviving Unpaired have returned to base,” Yvette told everyone. “There were more casualties than anticipated, though, and they’re attempting to regroup and rebuild after the devastation of our Chicago forces.”

  “It could have been worse,” Harper’s voice cut through the fog of fatigue I was in.

  “How?” Warren demanded, his voice rising before he was shushed.

  “We got Syeth and Lora out,” Harper added, defending her response.

  “But at what cost?” Warren hissed through clenched teeth. “We aren’t welcome there anymore.”


  Harper was right. It could have been worse. We had the Unpaired to thank for helping us survive. If they hadn’t arrived in time, I doubted Sledge would have let anyone who’d helped with the cure come out of that warehouse alive, including me. Or worse, I could have been taken back to BioPure and hooked up to more equipment for study.

  Syeth and Albrecht entered through the back door carrying bags of supplies. Syeth dropped a bag on the table while the others dug through the supplies pulling out food to eat. He peered into the room where Jarid slept. “How’s he doing?”

  It took most of my effort to answer. “The same.”

  He sat next to me, and his hands flexed before landing on his knees. I had a feeling he wanted to comfort me, but I wasn’t sure anything he could do would help get us out of this hopeless situation. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “What’s the point?” I asked, shoving myself up off the couch. A burst of anger flowed through me. “John was murdered in cold blood. For no reason other than wanting to help people. If someone like him could die like that, what does that say about any of us? The Unpaired want nothing to do with us, and with the cure in BioPure’s hands, who knows if any of the patients will receive it? My brain scans were the only bargaining chip we had to play. Now it’s died along with John and the lab.” Tears stung my eyes, and before I knew it, I was bawling again.

  Syeth’s arms wrapped around my shoulders and he helped me back onto the couch. The others had gone silent—probably because of my outburst. He moved his hands through my hair, clearing it away from my face.

  “We can’t cure New Zero,” I said after composing myself. “We can’t beat BioPure.”

  “Right now, we have to focus on getting one-hundred percent again. There’s no use thinking about BioPure right now when we just had a hell of a fight. None of us is thinking clearly right now.”

  He was right. I wished he wasn’t. I sighed. “I think I need to rest.”

  “That’s the best idea you’ve had all day.” He smirked at me.