Page 53 of Crosscurrent

Cara knew the look because she’d worn it herself. Skye had already left mentally before she left physically.

“The Inn,” Wade said with flat certainty. “Room 114.”

“Copy.” Gabe looked toward Tom. “What do we have?”

Tom was already dragging feeds onto the main screens. Public traffic cameras. Harbor and First. Parking structure coverage. Exterior security from the Haven Cove Inn. Two private systems he probably shouldn’t have had access to and one he absolutely shouldn’t. Then his fingers stopped.

“The inn’s internal cameras are dark,” he said.

Cara felt tension tighten low in her stomach.

Tom looked over his shoulder. “Not malfunction dark. Intentionally dark.”

Of course they were. If you were staging in a building you didn’t control, surveillance was the first thing you eliminated. Cameras created timelines. Witnesses. Evidence. You blinded the environment first.

Gabe’s phone buzzed. “It’s confirmed. She’s at the inn.”

He turned the screen so Cara could read it.

Skye: No worries. I got this.

Tom pulled up the garage feed. Grainy wide-angle footage washed in sodium-vapor yellow. Concrete pillars. Six parked vehicles. Oil stains. Empty spaces. And near the far edge of level two, barely distinguishable from shadow⁠—

Skye, back pressed to a support pillar. Completely motionless. Not nervous or hesitant. Waiting.

Cara’s chest tightened. She knew that stillness. Not theoretically. Literally. She remembered parking garages in Chicago where every footstep echoed too loudly and every passing headlight made adrenaline spike through her bloodstream, breathing slowly behind concrete pillars while mentally rehearsing exits because there had been nobody to rely on if things went wrong.

No backup. No safety net. No one coming.

Lord, keep her safe.

The second monitor flashed red. Tom sat up. “Yo, people. Incoming. I’ve got a ping on the dark web scrape. It’s not good.” He cleared his throat and read. “Observation maintained pending cipher retrieval. Termination deferred.”

Neptune’s language always sounded bureaucratic because bureaucracy was exactly what they were: layered approvals, compartmentalized actions, authorization chains wrapped around violence like corporate policy. Not chaos. Systems.

A bureaucracy with a kill function.

She didn’t say any of that out loud. She didn’t need to.

Wade pushed away from the table. “Then we move now. Let’s go get her.”

That was the entire conversation. No debate. No weighing options. Just movement.

Sophie rotated her laptop toward Tom, revealing county permit archives and fire safety floor plans for the Haven Cove Inn, filed 2019. Cara looked at Sophie again and silently adjusted her assessment upward for about the fifth time tonight. Sophie had entered the basement and mapped the room before speaking. She’d recognized Tom’s network architecture within minutes. Now she’d produced floor plans before anybody requested them.

Not performatively useful. Actually useful. There was a difference. Cara trusted people who understood it.

David stepped closer to the screen. “Corridor runs forty feet from the elevator. Stairwell south side. Service entrance outside here.” He tapped the display. “Two or three occupied rooms adjacent depending on vacancy.”

Efficient delivery. No dramatics. But underneath it, Cara heard the careful control of somebody who had once been genuinely afraid in a situation like this and had chosen to come back anyway.

Gabe took over immediately. “Wade goes first. Elevator to three, stairs down to two. Avoid direct approach.”

“Just the way I like it.” Wade hauled himself to his feet and headed for the weapons locker.

“We do this in under four minutes,” Gabe continued. “Primary objective is Skye. Everything else is secondary.”

Cara felt something loosen in her chest at that.