Chapter 91

She realized that the plane was awfully quiet and looked around, snapping back to reality. “Jo? Are you all right?” Cassidy asked.
“Oh, yeah. I was just studying the blueprints of the building we’re about to attack.” She wondered how long they’d been waiting for her to tune back in and what she’d missed.
“Are you trying to figure out a way for us to get in there?” Brandon asked.
Jo nodded. “Yes, but we don’t have a lot of options.”
“Maybe it has a weak spot, like the Death Star,” Elliott suggested.
Jo raised an eyebrow at him, not having any idea what he was talking about. “The Death Star?”
“Yeah… the Death Star. You know. From Star Wars?” He was looking at her like she had never heard of the color blue or the number seven.
Surveying the others, it appeared that Jo was the only one who didn’t get the reference. She really should’ve paid better attention during the stupid old movies her family used to make her watch. “Did the Death Star have an entryway option like a sewer involve several tons of poop?”
“Uh, no,” Elliott said. “But it had a thermal exhaust port. And that port led directly to the main reactor so that when Luke hit it with his torpedoes, the entire thing exploded.”
Not sure what to say, Jo simply looked around again. Heather looked as lost as she felt, but the rest of them were completely on the same page. “When did this movie come out?”
“Star Wars? Nineteen-seventy-seven. What difference does that make? It’s one of the best movies of all time. Jo, seriously, sometimes I think we’re not even related.” Elliott shook his head like he couldn’t believe her.
“Maybe that’s because we’re not actually related,” she said with a shrug.
His mouth dropped open. “How dare you! Fine… I’ll just go ahead and take you out of my will right now.”
“You can’t even die,” Cassidy reminded him.
“Well, if I could, Jo would get nothing.” Elliott crossed his arms and looked away from her.
“Can we talk about the actual attack instead of this fictional one from seventy years ago?” Jo asked, but Elliott still wouldn’t acknowledge that she was speaking. She rolled her eyes and looked at the others. “Has everyone looked at the blueprint?”
“Yes,” most of them said at once. Elliott said nothing.
“What do you think about the air conditioning ducts?” Scott suggested. “I’ve been checking those out, and it looks like that might be one way in.”
Jo looked more carefully at what the prints showed for the heating and cooling systems. While the ducts themselves looked big enough for most of them to crawl through--except for maybe Elliott and Brandon--there wasn’t a clear entry point that led to them. “We’d have to blow a hole in the ceiling to get in, and that could be loud and messy.”
“It wouldn’t necessarily have to be loud,” Cassidy said, her finger tapping against her chin. “I wonder if I could create a shield that could absorb the sound waves.”
“Have you ever tried anything like that before?” Jo asked her, assuming by the way she’d made the statement that she hadn’t.
“No, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it.” Cassidy continued to consider the possibility, her forehead scrunched as she thought about it.
“Do you think it would be possible, Heather?” Jo asked.
The cowgirl shrugged animatedly. “Hell if I know,” she said. “I ain’t never thought about doin’ nothin’ like that, but then, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as throwin’ shields until I had to in order to keep Brandon from gettin’ his arms ripped off. He’d already basically lost a leg.”
Again, Jo was lost, but Brandon and Heather shared a knowing glance that Elliott appeared to be in on, too. He didn’t look quite as put out as he had before. Cassidy was too distracted to be listening.
“You’ll have to tell us that story some time,” Jo said, hoping Heather knew that now was not that time. They needed to concentrate and stop getting distracted and off on tangents that wouldn’t help with this case.
“You know…” Brandon said, narrowing one eye. It was his turn to come up with a suggestion, apparently, and Jo hoped his would be a good one. “We might be able to use the portals to get in.”
“The portals?” Jo repeated. “How? Only Christian and my dad know how to manipulate them enough to get them to open whenever and wherever they want. And neither one of them is here.”
“Yeah, but we can text them. If they’re in the Blood Moon portal, they’ll get the text within six hours. One of them can arrange to open a portal for us at whatever time we need it,” he explained.
“But we won’t know what time we need it six hours early,” Jo reminded him.
“They can just leave it open, can’t they?” Heather asked. “Ain’t that somethin’ Christian figured out once?”
Jo didn’t have an answer for that. She had never paid much attention to what Christian did, so if he had figured it out, she’d missed it. “I guess it doesn’t hurt to ask,” she said with a shrug.
Brandon pulled out his cell phone and studied it for a minute. “I have one bar,” he said.
“Don’t you know you’re supposed to turn your cell phone to airplane mode when you’re on an airplane?” Elliott asked him.
“That’s just an old wives’ tale,” Brandon replied. “That’s something they used to say in the olden days before cell towers were as sophisticated as they are today.”
“Fine. Make the plane fall apart, see if I care,” Elliott said. “I’m not the one who’s gonna die when he hits the ground.”
“Neither am I,” Brandon said, trying not to smirk at his father’s comments. Brandon typed out a message on his phone and hit send. “There. Now, we wait. It’ll get to them within the next six hours, but then, they might not have time to respond before the portal closes.”
“Then what?” Jo asked.
“We wait another six hours,” he said with a shrug.
“So this might actually take twelve hours?” she clarified.
“Or longer. It’s just a possibility. We can come up with some other ideas.”
“We’d better come up with a lot of other ideas,” Jo said, “because I don’t think that one’s gonna work. And I really don’t want to be crawling through the shit in the sewer system.”
“Why don’t we all study the blueprint for a while and see what we can come up with?” Zane suggested. It was the first time he’d spoken to the group as a whole that Jo could remember.
It was a good idea, and they all set to work doing just that. Quiet settled in around them, no one talking, all of them just looking at the blueprint in their minds.
It lasted almost an hour before Elliott finally said, “Aha!”
“What?” Cassidy asked for all of them. “What did you find?”
A big grin spread across Elliott’s face as he said, “The thermal exhaust port.”