Chapter 136

“I’m okay!” Walt was shouting as Mist began to sputter, no coherent words coming out of her mouth as she watched the blood pouring out of his leg. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Walt insisted.
“Let me be the judge of that,” Rain insisted, pulling her healing wand out of the packet on her belt where she’d stashed it after she’d used it last time.
“I’m fine, really,” Walt said. “We need to get these girls out of here before the Mothers come back.”
“Walt! Let Rain use that wand on you!” Mist insisted.
Walt was already pulling a piece of cloth from his belt and winding it around his leg, tying it off like that was going to stop the blood loss. “It just nicked me through my uniform. I’m fine.”
“Adrenaline is making you feel like it’s fine,” Rain told him. “It’ll only take me a minute, Walt.”
He was already heading off toward the prisoners, though, many of which were also freaking out from the gunfire. He wasn’t limping at all, which made Rain think maybe it wasn’t as bad as she thought. But there were so many veins and arteries in the leg, he really should let her stop the bleeding before he left.
“There are medics outside,” Walt reminded her. “We need to move! And so do you!”
He was already around the corner. Rain looked into Mist’s eyes and saw the fear there, something she couldn’t remember ever seeing in her friend’s face, not even when they were under heavy fire. “Get him to a medic,” Rain said. “Or use this yourself.” She handed off the healing wand, knowing it was dangerous for her to do so because she might need it, and she was one of the team medics. But if Walt wouldn’t let her use it, maybe he’d let Mist.
With tears streaming down her face, Mist took the wand and turned to follow Walt down the hallway.
Before Rain could say anything else, bullets were flying at her again. Adam opened fire on the Mothers coming after them, from the same direction that the others had come. They were stepping over and on the last women who’d been shot down.
Lightning was hiding around the same corner where Mist and Walt had taken the other girls. Rain knew they were running out of time. She pulled a grenade from her belt, pulled the pin, and tossed it before grabbing Adam and rushing around the corner. The explosion silenced the gunfire a few seconds after she ducked out of the way, covering Lightning with her own body.
“Let’s go!” Rain said.
Adam was in front, leading Lightning along as Rain took up the position behind her, checking over her shoulder as they ran. She had to trust that Adam knew where they were going because she had no idea.
He turned left at the next hallway, and she recognized that they were headed back behind the scenes of IW, where the men had been kept, where they were still being kept, potentially, though Rain hadn’t seen any the last time she was back there, a few hours ago.
The door they needed to access had a keypad, but Lightning quickly typed in a code that opened the door. Rain exchanged a look with Adam--how she knew all of the codes was beyond her, but he didn’t seem surprised. He only shrugged and followed her through the door.
Rain immediately felt like she had just stepped into a movie. This was a place that she had only heard about from Adam and never really thought she’d see with her own eyes, but here it was, nevertheless. This was the IW that Adam knew.
And it was pretty awful.
Lightning knew exactly where she was going. She was bracing herself against a wall as she headed down the hallway, making turns as needed. The halls weren’t as long here as they were in the building proper. Soon enough, they were in an office.
With a computer.
“All right. Let me see if I can lock the door we just went through so that the Mothers don’t have the code anymore,” Lightning said, her fingers flying over the keys as if she hadn’t been a prisoner for the last half a year or more.
Rain was skeptical that Lightning would be able to get into many of the programs she needed to access. Surely, the Mothers had gone in and found all of the pathways she’d cleared before the Rebellion and made sure she wouldn’t be able to access any of them again. But as Lightning continued to type, it became quite clear that the computer hacker was more advanced than the Mothers had realized. Within a matter of moments, she was satisfied that the door was locked and the code had been changed.
“Should I go check?” Adam asked.
“No, I need you guys to find a thumb drive,” Lightning said. “I’m confident that all of the doors have been locked. That doesn’t mean they can’t blast their way through, but it’ll take them a while, and we have cameras.”
“We do?”
Lightning turned to another monitor that was sitting next to her computer and turned it on. A few seconds later, images appeared. Rain counted twelve boxes worth of views, including the records room. She could hardly believe what she was looking at. After about five seconds, the images changed. They could see from all of the cameras in the entire building, though not at the same time.
“Holy shit,” Adam muttered.
At first, Rain thought he was just impressed that they would be able to see the Mothers coming, but then she saw what he was seeing.
Men--a lot of them--locked up in a room that was so small, they were practically stacked on one another. They were all naked, and from the looks of it, they were in pretty bad shape. Not as bad as the prisoners, but it was clear they hadn’t had food in a while. They must’ve been given water, or they’d be dead.
“Where is that?” Rain asked.
“It’s the storage room off of the cafeteria.” The haunted expression on his face seemed to have more to do with the location than the awful images they were looking at. “I need to go let them out. Lightning, is there a keypad on that door or just a lock? I can’t remember.”
“There’s a keypad, but you’ll have to press the code in. Let me change it.” Lightning clicked out of whatever program she was in and opened something else. All Rain saw was code flying by as Lightning’s fingers flew over the keys--like lightning.
“Rain--thumb drive!” Lightning said without even looking away from the keyboard.
“Right.” Rain was so scatterbrained at the moment, she wasn’t sure she’d recognize a drive if she saw one. She started opening desk drawers, looking through them furiously, knocking supplies on the floor. Staples, rubber bands, pens….
“All right,” Lightning said as Adam headed for the door. “I changed it to one, two, three, four.”
“Wait--Adam, what are you going to do when you get them out?” Rain turned and looked at him over her shoulder, not sure she was ready to see him go.
“I’ll have to get them outside,” he said, looking at her with his eyes wide.
“Take them out the cafeteria door,” Lighting told him. “The attacking army has troops right out there.”
Adam nodded at Lightning and then looked back at Rain again. “Be careful,” she said. It was an order.
“You, too,” Adam replied.
Rain wanted to say more. She wanted to tell him how much she loved him, and if anything ever happened to him, she didn’t know what she’d do with herself. She’d probably curl up in a ball and die. But she didn’t say any of that. Adam gave her a small encouraging smile and then he was gone.
“Keep looking, Rain. It’s not gonna find itself,” Lightning said.
“Sorry.” She went back to digging, but nothing was sticking out to her. “Isn’t there a way to send it through the data wire to an account off-site?” she asked.
“No. All of these computers are internal only, except for the master computer in the records room.” Lightning continued to type, cursing under her breath every once in a while. Rain didn’t like to think that there was a chance she might not be able to hack her way in, but the more she swore, the more Rain felt her stomach twist into a knot and her heart sink low in her chest.
There didn’t seem to be a single thumb drive anywhere in the room. Rain opened some of the cabinets, digging through those as well, thinking there might be something else they could use.
“Here we go!” Lightning said, followed by even more swear words. Rain wanted to ask her what she’d found, but she couldn’t stop looking for something to store the data on to ask. She probably wouldn’t understand what Lightning said anyway, even if she tried to explain it to her in the simplest terms Lightning knew.
In the back of one of the cabinets, Rain saw a little black box. At first, she wasn’t sure it was what she thought it was, but when she pulled it out, a smile took over her face. “Lightning! Isn’t this an external hard drive?” she asked, showing it to her.
Lightning was too busy typing to look at first, but eventually, she turned her head. “Yep! That’ll work,” she said.
Rain expected her to be a lot happier than that, but she was just glad she’d found it. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Sit it down--and go take care of the Mothers that just blew up the door we came in.”
“What?” Rain asked, not believing what she was hearing. She looked at the monitor where the cameras were showing. Sure enough, a group of four Military Mothers were coming through the door, which was now blasted to all but shreds. Rain was shocked she hadn’t heard the explosion.
The fact that they could blow through the door meant they had to have grenades or bombs of some kind, so she’d have to be prepared for that. Grabbing her rifle, Rain took off in the direction she knew the Mothers were coming at them, hoping she’d have the element of surprise. If she died, they’d get into the office and kill Lightning, and then, it would be up to the rest of the Quebecian military to find the records room, and Rain wasn’t sure that would happen.
All she needed to do was kill four other women and not die… piece of cake.