Chapter 90

Jo had fallen asleep again. She only discovered this when she woke up to find herself leaning on Zane’s shoulder. She sat up, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand and said, “Sorry,” aloud. He only shrugged. She looked around to see everyone else either dozing or on their phones, likely playing games because they probably wouldn’t have a signal, and even if they did, who could they possibly be texting that didn’t have an IAC?
The sun was up. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Had Ryker been up this entire time? She figured he had to have been since no one else knew how to fly a plane.
She checked the time and noted that she’d been asleep for about four hours. Coupling that with the nap she’d taken earlier when she was supposed to be the copilot, she figured she actually got a full night’s sleep.
“Any idea where we are?” she asked, still trying to get her orientation.
“Somewhere over the ocean,” Zane replied. “That’s all I know.”
Jo didn’t know for sure how long it was going to take for them to get to DC since she didn’t know how fast the plane was flying. But an even more important question popped into her head. “Did we stop for fuel before we set out across the ocean?”
“You don’t remember when we stopped for fuel?” Elliott asked her from across the plane. He still had his phone up in front of his face.
“Did I wake up?” Jo wanted to know.
“Not really.” Cass didn’t have her phone out. Her eyes were shut, and her head was leaning back on the plane, her face lifted to the sky. “You mumbled something like, ‘Leave me the hell alone,’ and then passed out again,” Cassidy said with a smirk. “It was like you thought we had landed just to annoy you.”
Jo didn’t remember any of that. She felt her face heat up slightly in embarrassment. At least she didn’t say anything too ridiculous. “We have enough fuel now to make it across the ocean, right?”
“We’d better or else we’re going to be swimming part of the way,” Brandon said. “There’s not a lot of places to land in the middle of the Atlantic.”
That’s what Jo had thought. While none of them would die from a crash landing in a large body of water, except for Ryker, it wouldn’t be a whole lot of fun to swim that far, and it would delay their arrival. They needed to get to Jamie and the others as quickly as possible. For all she knew, they wouldn’t make it in time anyway. That was something she couldn’t let herself think about.
“Scott, have you heard anything from your mom?” Jo asked, thinking, if Ashley had told him anything significant, she was certain he would have shared it with the rest of the team, but she still felt the urge to ask.
“No,” he said quickly. “I’ve been trying to reach her for a while, but I haven’t gotten through to her yet.”
“Are we already in the zone where the US government is scrambling our messages?” Jo asked. She would’ve thought that they would have at least a few more hours before the IAC stopped working.
“I’m not sure,” Scott said. It was clear he was worried about both of his parents. “I thought Aunt Margie was going to do her best to stop that from happening so that we could communicate during the rescue mission, but she might not have come up with anything to block the frequencies they are sending out to keep ours from going through.”
Something about the way he worded his response made Jo think of an alternative. “Cass, do you think there’s any way that you can shield our IACs from being affected by whatever it is that President Crimson Crotch is doing to keep them from working?”
Her aunt didn’t move for so long, Jo thought maybe she hadn’t heard, but then, slowly, she opened her eyes and looked at Jo. “I haven’t tried,” she said. “I can try when we get closer, but it might take a big chunk of my concentration away, which means I might not be as effective as I normally would be.”
“We have Heather, though,” Scott reminded them. “So maybe one of them can throw the shield while the other one does whatever else needs to be done.”
“Unless it takes both of us to keep y’all from gettin’ yer asses whooped,” Heather said. It was the first time Jo had heard her talk in a long time, maybe since they got on the plane.
“I guess we can sort that out once we get there and figure out from Margie exactly what we need to do,” Jo proposed. She wanted to have a fairly firm plan in place before they arrived at the location, but she realized that might not be possible considering all of the variables that had to be sorted out.
“As long as we don’t hesitate about any of it once we arrive,” Scott said. “We have to make sure we fully commit to whatever it is we are doing. Any sort of hesitation could cost us precious seconds, and we just don’t have any time to waste.”
It was obvious that Scott was growing more and more anxious about the possibility of losing his dad every second. She couldn’t blame him. Jamie had always been one of the most important members of their squad, and Scott was always really close to his dad. But there’d been nothing Scott could do to keep his dad from being taken prisoner during the raids. It was a miracle that Scott and Ashley had gotten away. While Ashley was not as important to President Crimson’s plan, Scott was a healer, so he could potentially be used for the same sort of experimentation that his dad was involved in, the specifics of which Jo wasn’t sure.
“We’ll be decisive once we start,” Jo assured him. Scott didn’t look convinced. “Scott, trust me,” she said. “We will do whatever it takes to get your dad out of there safely, okay?” She made no promises about the others, but she had every intention of saving every LIGHTS member that she could. One way or another. Even if she had to sort it all out as it unfolded, they weren’t coming all the way across the ocean to fail.
Scott said nothing in response, only stared at a spot on the floor between his shoes. His knees were pulled to his chest, his arms wrapped around them. He was so still, he looked like a statue. A worried statue.
“Does anyone want to hear about the time I took out three Vampires with just one bullet?” Elliott asked, finally putting his phone away.
“You did not!” Cassidy said, smelling one of Elliott’s ridiculous stories before he even started talking.
“Oh, yes I did!” Elliott insisted. “Let me tell you all about it.”
Jo knew that everything that was about to come out of her uncle’s mouth was going to be a line of bullshit, so she essentially tuned him out, letting her mind wander to what they needed to do once they reached the US. Jamie and the others were being held in a high security government building in the capitol, once called Washington DC but now known as Crimson City. Jo refused to call it that, though. In her mind, it would always be DC. Anyone who said otherwise was clearly on the wrong side of this situation.
The information she had about how to get into said building was sketchy at best. Scott’s mom, Ashley, had gathered as much intel as she possibly could, including tracking down a copy of the blueprints to the building, but they were from when it was first erected, over ten years ago, so there was no telling how much the Vampires might have changed the interior. Jo pulled it up on her IAC to look it over and try to figure out what they might have done to better secure their prized possessions. She wanted to get it all sorted out before she got there. Otherwise, she’d run into some surprises--and Jo didn’t like surprises.
The building itself was made of a concrete-like substance that was meant to withstand blasts from nearly every form of bomb that had ever been made. No one had ever tested a nuclear bomb or an atom bomb on it, but other than that, the stuff was pretty solid. So how in the world were they supposed to get into the building?
The obvious entryway would be a chimney--if there was one. That’s what they’d used to get into the castle where Holland was hiding out, after all. If the building had a chimney, they could use it, but looking at the blueprints, there was nothing like that on this particular building. So she'd have to find some other weakness to exploit.
There was a sewer system that might work, though the thought of crawling through raw sewage made Jo want to hurl all over the hull of the airplane. She remembered a story her mom and Elliott used to tell about how they’d taken to the sewers during the annihilation phase, right before her mom had gotten pregnant with her and Cadon. They’d found a huge crocodile down there that was actually a Vampire that had shifted its form, thanks to Holland’s powers. Her mom had killed it, but it had been a struggle. Uncle Elliott liked to call it a crocopire. Jo wasn’t looking forward to running into anything like that. Nor did she want to deal with being covered with shit for who knows how long. But if that’s what it took to get into the building, then that’s what she’d do.