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  So what was someone using this place for? The construction looked human, but she wouldn’t have known how to identify Wreetan or Oscavian architecture. They were on Earth, though, so whatever the enemy had built had most likely come from the planet.

  As they turned the corner, they saw a large garage door and a smaller entrance beside it. There was no door covering the opening, and Dryce approached it slowly, weapon drawn and ready to engage with any threat. But still none came.

  He got close to the door and looked ready to step through it, but before he could cross the threshold, Peyton put an arm on his shoulder and yanked him back. He was made of muscle and outweighed her by enough to count, but the warning was enough to stop him.

  He shot her a questioning look.

  Peyton bent over and picked up a small branch on the ground and chucked it at the door. It gave off a wicked spark as it smoked and fell down to the ground outside the door. “Force field.” They weren’t common on building entrances, but she’d seen plenty used to guard precious artifacts that she was supposed to work on. It had only taken burning her hands a few times for her to learn to recognize them by sight and the faint hint of ozone they gave off.

  “Can you disable it?” Dryce asked. He stared at the opening like the door could offer the answers of the universe. But it was just a simple force field, it had no answers to give.

  “The controls are liable to be inside, so no.” Peyton hated not to use her skills, but there was only so much she could do. “Taking out the generators might work, but that could have an alarm on it and could call down whoever owns this place. Even then, a force field like this if it’s properly set up runs on an independent power source. The best way in is to find another door.”

  That proved difficult. Beside the force field guarded entrance and the locked garage door, there wasn’t a way inside. The windows they found were too high up for them to reach, even with Peyton climbing on Dryce’s shoulders, and time was running out.

  They tried forcing the garage door open, but it was locked and the door was so huge, taking up nearly a third of the tall outer wall, that even if they’d managed to unlock it, she wasn’t certain that she and Dryce could lift it up.

  Meanwhile, Peyton’s mind was spinning, trying to work out the puzzle of the open entrance. She played with the edge of the vest Dryce had forced her to wear and encountered a small bit of wire sewn into the hem. Probably part of the system to defray blaster fire.

  Well, that could work.

  “How important is it to keep our presence a secret?” she asked, practically bouncing from foot to foot as her mind worked out the puzzle, putting the pieces into place and making them fit with wire and ingenuity.

  Dryce studied her with narrowed eyes. “Why?”

  “I think I can get us inside, but it will be obvious someone tampered with the door. We can probably disguise it with a fallen tree branch, but if anyone looks closely, they might realize that we did something.” Her fingers were already moving, ready to grab her toolkit and get them in, but she needed Dryce’s okay.

  “How fast can you get us in?”

  “Five minutes?” If this worked she’d only need two, if it didn’t work, the time didn’t matter. Dryce gave a nod and Peyton grinned. She pulled out a small cloth wallet that contained a spool of copper wire and some of her finer tools and then stripped off her coat and the protective vest. Dryce let out a small sound of protest, but once she started stripping the fabric off the vest he subsided. She yanked out the power source and got to work.

  After a minute Peyton looked up at him, a small drill in her mouth. “How important was that tablet you were using earlier?” She held out her hand, needing one of the components that was sure to be inside.

  “I have a spare,” Dryce handed over the tablet and waited.

  It wasn’t easy to set up, and she’d only have one shot, but once Peyton was satisfied that things were as good as they were going to get, she got as close to the entrance as she dared and tossed her coiled ball of wires and electronics at the door and held her breath.

  The device exploded.

  Dryce tackled her to the ground, covering her body with his own and shielding her from whatever was coming towards them, but after a moment there was no more excitement and the smell of burning electronics surrounded them. Dryce pulled back and Peyton smiled up at him. “I think it worked.”

  “You didn’t say anything about an explosion.” He tried to keep his face serious, but a smile threatened at the corners of his mouth.

  “All good science comes with a risk of explosions,” Peyton informed him. She wanted to pull him down and kiss him in triumph. It wasn’t bomb defusing, but she’d found a challenge that only she could meet and she’d succeeded. Dryce rolled back and offered her a hand up. Peyton took it gladly and they walked into the building.

  There was nothing much to see inside, and she choked a bit on the smoke from her improvised force field key.

  Dryce pulled something out of one of his pockets and set it on the ground.

  “What’s that?”

  “Recorder. We don’t have much time, but it should be able to get a full picture before we leave.” He rolled the device away and Peyton watched as it moved around them, silently taking in the room.

  From the inside it seemed impossibly large, as if the true scale had been hidden while they were standing outside. Catwalks ringed an upper floor but left a large area completely bare from floor to ceiling, and rutted tracks in the cement floor suggested that something heavy had been moved at some point.

  Peyton and Dryce walked the place, but there was no bomb, and it seemed like it was all for naught.

  Until Peyton found the barrels.

  “Fuck.” She recognized the smell from several meters away and raised her hand to cover her mouth and noise. That shit was toxic as hell and she didn’t want her or Dryce breathing in more of it than necessary.

  But she had to be sure.

  As a precaution she’d brought a sample kit with her. She could perform basic chemical compound scans and had several secure vials that could be used to transport samples. She didn’t want to get any closer to the barrels, but she didn’t have a choice.

  Dryce was immediately at her side. “What is it?”

  “Not good.” The kit she carried came with a pair of gloves, but the thin material wouldn’t offer much protection from the corrosive chemical. Still, she put them on. Negligible protection was better than no protection at all. “If I’m right this is a really dirty accelerant that could be used in a bomb. Three barrels of it is more than enough for just about anything, and judging by the state of this warehouse, I’d guess this is excess.” She moved as quickly and carefully as she could, scraping a sample from around the opening of the barrel, not willing to risk opening. She got a basic reading from her scanner which seemed to confirm her suspicions.

  Something near Dryce beeped and he looked at his communicator. “We need to get out of here. Time’s almost up.”

  Peyton secured her sample and was thankful to step back from the chemicals. Dryce found his recorder and they made their way outside. It took a few moments to find a tree branch that they could set up to look like it had battered the force field enough to overpower it, but they set the scene and were out of the warehouse just in time.

  A vehicle came through the trees almost silently, the loudest sound coming from where its body smacked against the wood. The garage door opened with a creak and the vehicle slid inside, the door closing behind it without anyone getting out to check out the damaged entrance.

  “Did you get a look at them?” Peyton asked. She hadn’t managed to see anything beside the vague outlines of the passengers.

  Dryce shook his head. “We need to leave. Now.”

  Chapter Twelve

  They had enough time to head to the third location, but Dryce pulled them out almost before they began. His sensors were going crazy, warning of hostiles nearby and recording a variety of weapons that
had no place in a peaceful forest on Earth. He sent out his drones in stealth mode and he and Peyton waited in anxious silence at the helicopter. They couldn’t risk letting the drones transmit data directly back to his tablet, so it was more than two hours before they could leave. He stashed the drones away and they were off, heading back towards DC and away from whoever was causing trouble in the middle of these woods.

  “You’re not going to analyze the data?” Peyton asked as Dryce lifted off. He hadn’t even bothered to extract the data stores from the drones. That would be for the team once they got back.

  “They’re sure to be on high alert after we checked out the second location. I don’t want you caught.” He didn’t realize that he’d said it that way until Peyton’s breath stuttered.

  “I—” He could see her shaking her head out of the corner of his eye. “I can’t say I’ll be disappointed to sleep in my own bed tonight.” That hadn’t been what she was going to say at first, he was sure of it, but he didn’t press. They were on the mission now, that was what had to come first.

  “We’ll be back,” Dryce promised. “And with a bigger team. We should have had more than just distant support since this started, but they wanted us moving fast and light.” And with a civilian, that had been one of the most dangerous decisions that Dryce had ever seen Sandon and the rest of the Detyen leadership make.

  “Fate of the world,” Peyton replied, almost like she’d read his mind. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around.”

  The flight back to headquarters was tense, with Dryce on high alert waiting for any signs of hostile pursuit. Once he was certain they were out of range of any surveillance he contacted their base and informed them of the change of plans.

  Peyton sat beside him, hands clenched into fists, but Dryce didn’t know what to say to calm her down. The mission had changed, their time alone together had suddenly come to an end, and no matter what he felt about that, she was sure to be happy. He didn’t want the reminder that she couldn’t stand him outside of the times she wanted to kiss him.

  “What comes next?” she asked, breaking the silence after nearly an hour. At least now the tension in the air didn’t come from their strained relationship but from the threat of Oscavians and Wreetans hellbent on destroying their home.

  Dryce glanced over and offered a quick smile. “We regroup. Plan a more careful breach of the third location, and once we’re satisfied, we’ll head back out. Hopefully the drones caught sight of whatever it is they’re building. They didn’t have long to scan, but they’re powerful little beasties.”

  Her lips pulled into something that might have been a grin at the mention of the machines. “I know,” she confessed, “I was part of the team that designed them.”

  “Really?” He’d been amazed by the dexterity of that piece of tech when the humans showed it to him, but no one had said a word about Peyton working on them.

  “We scavenged something like them off a pirate vessel that was recovered on Mars. I reverse engineered the drone and suggested some design changes that would make it work better on Earth. They’re not exactly cheap, but I know that field agents have been happy with them.” She said it simply, as if it wasn’t amazing that a person could take tech from another planet, another civilization that shared no common roots with her own, and figure out how it worked and then improve on it.

  Dryce wanted to hear more, he wanted to know the inner workings of his denya’s mind. She fascinated him and captivated him, and if he’d been slightly less concerned with the safety of the Detyen and human races he might have diverted their helicopter and stolen away with her to a place no one would be able to find them.

  “What else have you worked on?” he asked instead.

  And Peyton bloomed. Her smile grew wide, but she didn’t speak immediately, instead taking several moments to think. And then her grin grew impossibly bigger and she started to talk, her hands waving as she explained her current project, a cloaking mechanism recovered from another craft that had crashed in upstate New York. “We don’t normally have a problem with pirates, but the past few years we’ve seen a flurry of activity. It’s terrible for people who get scared, or abducted, but the tech we’re seeing is unbelievable. The day could be twice as long and I still wouldn’t have enough time to get through everything in my lab.”

  Some of the things she mentioned, Dryce hadn’t realized weren’t common on Earth, but other improvements and modifications she’d implemented blew his mind. The woman might have been afraid of flight, but the ships leaving the planet had a lot to thank her and her team for.

  Because every time she told him about something she’d discovered, she was sure to give credit to the rest of her people for their parts, insisting that the work she did was impossible to do alone.

  “Did you start working on things from space to feel closer to your dad?” Dryce asked as she told him about her first solo project in college.

  And the happy expression was gone from Peyton’s face. “What? What do you know about my dad?”

  If the helicopter hadn’t been mostly on automatic controls at this point, Dryce would have crashed as he scrambled to think of a reason to know about her family. She’d told him about her parent’s marital problems and her father’s wanderlust in their communicator messages, but she had no idea that she’d been talking to him. “Your file,” Dryce finally muttered. “It said your dad was a space pilot.” Probably, it probably said that, but Dryce hadn’t read the entire thing.

  “My file?” she responded cautiously, eyes narrowed. “What else did this file say?”

  He stood on the edge of a cliff and she was ready to push him off with one wrong word. How could Dryce be so stupid? They’d been doing well. She’d been opening up, and he’d gotten to see just how brilliant a woman fate had seen fit to choose for him. And now he had to dash all hope to pieces because he couldn’t keep his identities straight.

  He needed to come clean. Needed to tell her that she’d been talking to him for weeks now, that she’d shared secrets with him that she didn’t tell anyone else. He needed to tell her that she was his mate and he wanted to spend all of his days showing her that they were better when they were together. This part of the mission was over, it wouldn’t put much in jeopardy to confess.

  But Dryce didn’t want to do it yet. He’d started to formulate a plan and a half-assed confession on a flight home from an aborted mission had no place in it.

  “It said you’re brilliant. Best mech the SDA has to offer.” That part was true. And he didn’t want to say much more out of concern that he’d reveal too much.

  “Yeah, fine,” Peyton subsided, slouching back in her seat. “But my dad has nothing to do with it. I’m good because I worked my ass off and I love what I do, I don’t do it for the approval of some—ugh!” She shook her head and turned away, staring out the window and saying no more.

  Dryce didn’t try to make her talk. He’d done enough damage already.

  PEYTON COULDN’T GET off of the helicopter fast enough. The last stretch of the ride crawled on, but when they set down she was off like a shot, not even giving Dryce a chance to say goodbye. She was sure someone would insist on talking to her, debriefing her, or whatever the right word for it was, but she needed a few minutes alone. After two days in Dryce’s constant company, she was going to go crazy if she couldn’t take ten freaking seconds to unwind.

  Though, strangely enough, being around him full time hadn’t actually bothered her until he dropped that shit about her dad. Was her family’s entire sordid history laid out for anyone with security clearance to read about?

  No. No, it couldn’t be. Why would it?

  Oh, shit. She’d completely overreacted.

  Peyton found a bathroom and hid, locking the door behind her and sliding down the wall to sit on the tile floor, heedless of the germs. Sure, she was afraid of heights, but germs had never bothered her that much. That was what soap and water was for.

  She sucked in a deep breat
h, her noise itching from the astringent scent of whatever cleaner had been recently used. Things didn’t normally hit her like this. Yeah, she knew she was a bit screwed up from the way her dad had abandoned the family and then unceremoniously died, but she was nearly thirty years old, she hadn’t had a father for more than half of her life, she should be able to deal with that. One innocent question from a co-worker shouldn’t send her over the edge.

  Hell, she’d been able to tell DF the entire story without freaking out! Though, if she thought about it, she’d been able to confess all of that to him because they were basically strangers. She didn’t need to worry about his judgment, didn’t need to examine the look in his eyes as she confessed that her father hadn’t loved his family enough to stay on the planet where he belonged.

  “Get a grip, girl,” she muttered, slowly standing up and making her way to the sink. A look in the mirror made her grimace. She was dirty, like she’d just spent two days running through the forest beside a massive warrior that she wanted to climb like a tree when she wasn’t pissed at him. Her dark eyes were tired and hollow, and she only had Dryce to blame for that.

  No, that wasn’t fair. It was her own issues that were to blame, he’d just triggered them.

  She splashed some water on her face, and while it couldn’t do much to fix the hollow look, it did get rid of the dirt and woke her up a bit. Once she dried off, she pulled out her communicator and turned it on for the first time since they’d left. Maybe that wasn’t the proper protocol, but she needed a little slice of normalcy. She was a bit disappointed, and strangely relieved, to see that DF hadn’t contacted her. Other than to tell her that he would definitely be interested in a date when she was back, he’d been silent, just as she’d requested.