Chapter 5 - The Teammate Who Vanished
By midnight, federal agents surrounded Sloan headquarters, but Victoria refused to surrender command of the internal investigation. She had enough influence to delay them for several hours, not enough to stop them forever. Rachel used that narrow window to take Ava away from the building.
They traveled in an armored sedan with Mara, whose concussion had been treated, and Cole, who now watched every passing vehicle with the alertness of a man discovering that his job interview had become a war.
Lena Ortiz lived under the name Elena Marquez in a narrow brick house near the river. The curtains were open. The porch light burned. The front door stood slightly ajar.
Rachel told Ava to remain in the car with Mara. Ava grabbed her sleeve. "You always say people should not go into scary houses alone."
"That is why Cole is coming."
Cole looked less pleased than Ava expected, but he followed.
Inside, the house had been searched without being destroyed. Drawers opened, papers sorted, picture frames turned face down. Professionals had looked for something specific. Rachel found Lena in the basement, seated against a furnace with a shallow cut on her forehead and a pistol in her lap.
"You took your time," Lena said.
Rachel stopped breathing for half a second. Six years had changed Lena's face but not her eyes. "You are alive."
"So are you. That was not supposed to happen."
Cole raised his weapon. Rachel pushed it down.
Lena explained that Unit Seven had not been a rescue team. They were test subjects selected for unusual stress adaptation. Voss used real missions to measure obedience, memory fragmentation, and combat performance after chemical conditioning. The scientists they extracted were not prisoners. They were the program's designers.
When Lena discovered the truth, she tried to expose it. Voss ordered the compound destroyed and blamed the deaths on enemy action. Lena escaped with part of the research archive, then disappeared because every official channel she contacted led back to Helix Meridian.
"Why did you never contact me?" Rachel asked.
"I did. Three times. Each time, someone reached you first and changed your location. Then Ava was born. I decided distance was the only protection I could give you."
Rachel felt anger rise, fierce and clean. "You do not get to call abandonment protection."
Lena accepted the accusation. "No. But I can tell you why they want you now."
She opened a hidden panel beneath the furnace and removed a weatherproof case. Inside was a medical file labeled MERCER, AVA - GENERATION TWO.
Rachel's vision narrowed.
The file contained prenatal scans, blood markers, and neurological assessments collected without her consent. Someone had monitored Ava from before birth. Notes described the child as "a potential inheritor of adaptive response traits." A final page authorized retrieval if Rachel displayed renewed combat performance.
Fourteen seconds.
The match had confirmed what they wanted to know.
A noise sounded upstairs. Lena killed the basement light. Footsteps crossed the kitchen, slow and deliberate.
Rachel positioned herself beside the stairs. Cole moved behind the furnace. Lena aimed at the doorway.
The attacker tossed a flash device down the steps. Rachel closed her eyes before it detonated, then drove upward through the smoke. She caught a masked woman at the landing and struck her wrist until a knife fell. The woman twisted free with a technique Rachel knew intimately.
It was a Unit Seven counter.
They fought through the kitchen, breaking a table and sending glass across the floor. Rachel trapped the woman against the refrigerator and tore away her mask.
The attacker was Mara Chen.
Except Mara was still outside in the armored sedan.
The woman smiled at Rachel's confusion. "You always needed faces to make sense of loyalty."
She bit down on something hidden between her teeth. Lena forced her jaw open before she could crush the capsule. Cole pulled off a flexible facial mask, revealing a younger woman with surgical scars around her ears.
Tattooed beneath her jaw was the number 12.
"How many units were there?" Rachel asked.
The woman looked toward the window, where the sedan waited.
May you like
"Enough," she said, "to take your daughter while you were busy with me."
Lena's house held traces of the life she had built while hiding: a chipped mug from a school fundraiser, gardening gloves, and photographs of neighbors who knew her as a quiet translator. Rachel found one photograph of herself and Ava taken from across a public park. Lena admitted she had watched birthdays from a distance, convincing herself that seeing them safe was better than risking contact. Rachel wanted to tear the picture in half. Instead she placed it back on the shelf and told Lena that witnessing a life was not the same as sharing it. Their friendship would not be repaired by one explanation, yet the anger itself proved a bond remained. Indifference would have been easier. Neither woman was ready for easy things.
