Chương 21: Chapter 19 - Pack Ops

We landed at seven-fifty, and the base received us with roughly the ceremony of a gravel delivery. Well, except that someone would have been happy about a gravel delivery. Medical took everyone in the order we came off the ramp. Manuel had a hairline fracture in his forearm that he hadn't noticed until a corpsman pressed on it and he made a sound like a kettle. Torres had a burn along one shoulder where his plate had cracked open.

Kara had gone so far past exhaustion that somebody had to steer her to the scanner by the elbow, and Nadia's hands were still shaking four hours after her last shot. The scanner found two closed punctures on my left side and the ghost of a laceration across my back. The corpsman read the screen, looked at the amount of dried blood on me, and read it again.

"Most of this isn't mine," I said.

"It is." He typed something into his tablet.

"But you are not wounded. I have nothing to treat." Francesca was waiting in the corridor when I came out. She had showered and changed and she'd been standing there long enough that the duty nurse had stopped noticing her.

"Now," she said, and started walking. Ah, damn it. I followed her. She took us past the vehicle sheds to the far end of the valley, where the camouflage netting ran out and a firebreak cut a bare stripe through the pines. No cameras, no foot traffic, and enough open ground in every direction to see anyone coming for a hundred meters. She had picked the spot before the deployment. She stopped and turned around, and the friendly squadmate who blushed when Luca complimented her wasn't anywhere in her face.

"How does a kaiju lead you to a mage?" I asked.

"I paid a seer in Ravenna." She folded her arms.

"The Church keeps three in the north of Italy and two of them are frauds."

"And the third?"

"The third cost me multiple favors." She said it without any particular weight, which was somehow worse. But favors meant a lot among mages.

"I asked her to show me the man who took my memories. She worked for four hours and found nothing. No face, no name, no thread to pull. As far as divination is concerned, he isn't in the world." I shrugged, not showing the relief that washed over me.

"Guess she isn't that good."

"She is that good. Divination works through spirits, and when the spirits can't find someone, it usually isn't because he doesn't exist. It's because they're too frightened of him to say." Francesca's eyes stayed on mine.

"So I asked her a different question. I stopped asking who, and I asked where." The pines moved above us and dropped a few needles between our boots.

"She told me I would meet him when facing the crimson titan." And I was the only mage around. Wonderful. I apparently severely underestimated seers. One of the few things I was actually good at was lying, and the trick to it had always been keeping my face doing nothing in particular.

"That's a hell of a lead to build a career around."

"It's the only one I have." She shrugged one shoulder.

"Every mage on the eastern seaboard who matters will be within a mile of that thing when it dies. He'll be one of them. So I go where El Crabo goes, and I keep going until I meet who I need. One day, I will stand next to him… or her." I was, at that precise moment, standing next to her.

"That could take years."

"It's taken half a year already. I've got time. What I don't have is memories of why my body isn't mine." Her original body wasn't exactly in a useable state. I let the silence run for a bit, because filling it would have been a mistake. Out past the treeline, a generator kicked on somewhere and settled into a hum.

"I want something from you," she said.

"Go on."

"A seal carries the hand that laid it. For obvious reasons, I cannot scan my own soul." She tapped two fingers against her temple.

"You're the only other mage on this base. I can see you've got no mana, but perhaps you could take a look at it for me." I shrugged.

"I'm not sure I can help. I indeed don't exactly have any mana to work with."

"But you can try…" She sighed.

"Look, I know you're hiding what you can do, but it's insanely obvious. You don't use any techniques or spells, but that's because you don't need to. And that's fine, but you can't pretend you can't do anything when you are out in public making out with the Spectre." Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Hmph. I narrowed my eyes. That sounded like something Ophelia could have been called.

"What does that refer to?" With a desperate chuckle, she rubbed her eyes with her hand.

"You cannot be serious." She shook her head.

"You are. You are the endurance build, not an intelligence build. All right, history time. The Spectre, or more precisely, lo spettro, is the code name used for the Church's court assassin. The stories are woven so that it sounds like it refers to multiple people, but for over four hundred years, it was one person, Ophelia. She has thousands of confirmed kills on other mages, and she is famous for being batshit crazy. Now, I've even given you something, so look at my seal." With a sigh, I put my hand on her head.

She closed her eyes. I couldn't check the seal in any way. But I had to fake doing something somehow, so I quickly tapped my back leg, and spun my other arm. The movement sufficed to produce a cloud of instability that, upon my utmost concentration, passed through her. It didn't do anything, but she would feel it, so she would hopefully mistake it for me scanning the seal. I stopped and withdrew the hand. She opened her eyes, expression filled with hope.

"It's a seal on your soul," I said.

"The memories are there, just inaccessible. I'm not good enough to do anything with it without risking crippling you." She smiled.

"That's more than anyone else ever managed to read of it. Thanks!" Fuck. I gave more information than I should had.

"Sorry I can't do more." My phone buzzed. I drew it from my pocket, and looked at it. Thirty missed messages from Ophelia, and one new message from V. I read only the last one:'Half a mile north after midnight.' I pocketed my phone.

"Who's writing you?" Francesca asked.

"At this hour?" I opened a different message, a picture from Ophelia, one particularly of her posing in heels, just heels. I showed it to Francesca.

"She's trying to figure out what heels to wear to an event." Her face flushed into a shade of red, gaze darting to a side.

"Sorry." I used the opening to retreat. And I did manage to rest for a bit before my alarm woke me up. The rest of the squad slept around me. I got out of bed and found Francesca tracking my movements. She motioned with her hand to come to her. I leaned down, so I could hear her whisper.

"And where are you going?" she asked.

"Ophelia's pussy's itching, so I'm going to fuck her until it calms down. I'll be back before dawn." Francesca turned red, looking away. Got her. Raised in Italy in a Christian family, Francesca was prepared for many things, but not for my lack of shame or standards. With how understaffed the base was, it didn't take much to sneak out. I used the maintenance exit in the back of the barracks, walked by the wall till I reached the part of the barracks where no one was housed, and climbed over the wall.

Nobody was watching this area since no one was supposed to be here, and the base didn't run cameras because those could and would be hacked. Hell, I wouldn't be here spying if the place had any cameras, because then the corporation would have long since hacked into it and seen everything. I took a hike north. The forest eased my soul, fresh air making me forget everything else. Half a mile later I saw the familiar black van parked on a forest road. On the side, it now had marks of a sticker being removed.

The pack decorated their vehicle, and had it promptly removed by the corporate. I walked to the van, and the door slid open. K-pop thundered from inside, otherwise kept inside by the van's soundproofing. They turned the volume down before I got there, and I climbed into the van with six teenage werewolves. The pack all smiled at me. They all wore matching hoodies now, black with a symbol of a wolf over a moon embroidered on the chest, with a text underneath that read PACK OPS. No way this got past corporate.

"Nice hoodies."

"Thanks!" four of them shouted at once.

"Don't tell V," two more added.

"She wouldn't like them." I snorted.

"Because you are adding to yourselves a recognizable symbol while the corporate policy is no symbols precisely to avoid that?" All their eyes widened, mouths opening.

"I thought it'd be because she's too old to have any style," one said.

"Other than the grandma style," another added. The rest chuckled.

"Want a hoodie to complete the team?" I glanced over my shoulder. They had a PACK OPS hoodie for me too.

"Nobody's wearing this on a mission." With a disappointed whine, the driver slammed the gas. They hid the hoodie in the back. We bolted forward.

"By the way," one of them said.

"V told us we're coming on the mission." I frowned. I wasn't going to argue, so I simply texted V:'Is the pack cleared to participate in the mission?'

'They are obliged to. They are not wearing something stupid, are they?'

'Of course they are.' A rolling eyes emoji came back, together with,'They go on the mission, anyway. The young need to learn from the old.' I wasn't that old, only like ten years older than they were. I pocketed my phone. But they weren't that young either. They were old enough to get stomped to death by a kaiju, to have their civilization be destroyed, to watch the slow-rolling apocalypse that could take the world they grew up in away from them.

"What're your names?" They grinned.

"How we sit," the girl in the back said, "Ookami, Volk, Farka, Wilk, Lyke, Varg." I slapped my face with my palm.

"No way your names are wolf in six different languages." They all blushed a bit.

"We didn't name ourselves." One of them looked at me through the window reflection.

"Our mom thought she was being super-smart when she came up with the names." I would have never guessed. I tried to remember them, though that wasn't going to be easy. The boys and the girls looked nearly identical, and they wore the same clothing. Only the way their hair was messed up differed. They must have been allergic to combs.

"I'll take the hoodie." They all brightened up, pulling out the hoodie again. I took it, and put it on. It even fit. We blasted through the forests, and headed toward Atlantic City. At first, they had no music. Then they put on classic rock, on low volume. Then they increased the volume and changed the genre to glam rock. Since I said nothing, the volume went up, and the music slowly progressed to K-pop. I had to give them credit for cooking the frog slowly enough. We made it to the edge of Atlantic City.

We parked outside the light perimeter, and Varg killed the engine. The van's soundproofing quit at the same moment, and the pines got very loud with nothing in them.

"Did you get any mission details?" I asked.

"Nope," three of them said at once.

"Then it's reconnaissance. You stay behind me, you stay where I can see you, and nobody splits off on their own. Clear?"