Vengeful (Villains #2)(131)

“What’s this?” asked the security guard, rising from the booth.

“Stupid car broke down,” she muttered, doing her best to imitate Holtz’s northeastern accent.

“Ha!” said the security guard. “That’s what you get for choosing style over substance.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said June.

“What you need is a good midlevel sedan—”

“Just let me in so I can grab a van and some cables and get my shit back on the road.”

The gates parted, and June stepped through. Easy as pie. She crossed the lot on foot and whistled at the sight of the front doors. It looked like someone had driven a car into them. Inside, a soldier looked up from some kind of scanning station.

“Back so soon?” he asked, rising to his feet.

“Left my wallet somewhere.”

“Won’t get far without that.”

“You’re telling me.”

Small talk was an art form, one of those things that made people’s eyes gloss over. Go silent, and they might start wondering why. But keep them talking about nothing at all, and they wouldn’t even blink.

“You know the drill,” said the soldier.

June did not. This fell soundly in the realm of minutiae, something that rarely conveyed with a touch. Making a guess, she stepped into the scanner, and waited.

“Come on, Holtz,” said the soldier. “Don’t be a pain in my ass. Arms up.”

She rolled her eyes, but spread her arms. It was like standing inside a copier, a beam of white light that moved from head to toe, followed by a short chime.

“All clear,” said the soldier.

June saluted him, a casual flick of her fingers as she started down the hall. She needed to find a computer. It should have been easy, a building as fancy as this one, but every hallway looked alike. Identical, even. And every identical hallway was studded with even more identical doors, almost none of them marked, and the farther into the maze June went, the farther she’d have to walk out. So she settled instead for simplicity, pointing herself toward the nearest door. Halfway there, it swung open. A female soldier stepped out, took one look at Holtz, and rolled her eyes.

“Forget something?”

“Always,” said June. She didn’t pick up her pace, but her fingers caught the door just before it closed. June slipped inside, and found a small room with four computer consoles. Only one of them was occupied.

“Finally,” the soldier said, “I’ve had to piss for an hour . . .”

He started to swivel toward June, but she was already there, one arm hooking around his throat. She pinned him against the chair, cutting off his ability to speak, to shout for help. His back arched as he fought her hold, throwing punches made clumsy by shock and the sudden lack of oxygen. But Benjamin Holtz was no weakling, and June had killed her fair share of men. The soldier did manage to get a pen and jam it back into June’s thigh, but of course, it wasn’t her thigh.

Sorry, Ben, she thought, tightening her hold.

Soon enough, the soldier stopped fighting. He went limp, and she let go, rolling his chair out of the way so she could get to his computer. June hummed as her fingers slid over the keyboard.

She had to hand it to EON. They had a very user-friendly system, and half a minute later she’d found the file she needed. It had been labeled alias: june. She skimmed through, curious to see what they’d found—which wasn’t much. But still enough to merit the trip.

“Good-bye,” she whispered, erasing the file—and herself—from the system.

June went out the way she’d come in.

Retraced her steps down the hall, past security and the gates, back to the waiting black coupe. June opened the car door, and by the time she climbed behind the wheel, she was herself again.

Not the leggy brunette, or the thin teen, or any of the dozen faces she’d recently worn, but a spritely girl, with strawberry curls and a splash of freckles across her high cheeks.

June let herself sit in that body for a moment, breathe with her own lungs, see with her own eyes. Just to remember what it felt like. And then she reached out and started the engine, sliding into something safer. The kind of person you wouldn’t look twice at. The kind who gets lost in the crowd.

June glanced in the rearview mirror, checked her new face, and drove away.





A MESSAGE FROM VICTOR VALE





I

A garage 10 miles outside Halloway.

“I won’t ask you again,” said Victor Vale as the mechanic scrambled backward across the floor. Retreating—as if a few feet would make a difference. Victor followed slowly, steadily, watched as the man backed himself into a corner. Jack Linden was forty-three, with a five-o-clock shadow, grease under his nails, and the ability to fix things. “I already told you,” said Linden, jumping nervously as his back came up against a half-built engine. “I can’t do it—”

“Don’t lie to me,” warned Victor.

He flexed his fingers around the gun, and the air crackled with energy.

Linden shuddered, biting back a scream. “I’m not!” yelped the mechanic. “I fix things. I put cars back together. Not people. Cars are easy. Nuts and bolts and fuel lines. People are too much more.”

Victor didn’t believe that. Had never believed that. People were more intricate perhaps, more nuanced, but fundamentally machines. Things that worked, or didn’t, that broke down, and were repaired. Could be repaired.