Page 54 of Crosscurrent

“Cara and I take south lot coverage,” Gabe continued. “Eyes on the service entrance and 114’s exterior.”

“What if he’s already made her?” Cara asked. If Diego Ortiz, or whoever the man really was, already knew Skye was outside his room, the entire equation changed.

Gabe answered immediately. “Then we hold exits. Wade still gets corridor access.” His gaze locked onto hers. “Nobody leaves clean.”

Cara understood the role instinctively because she’d spent years on both sides of funnels. She knew what desperation looked like when escape routes started disappearing.

Skye wasn’t asking for rescue because rescue implied dependency, and Skye clearly still categorized dependency as a design flaw. Cara understood that too well, and suddenly she was furious—not because Skye had gone, but because Skye genuinely hadn’t expected anyone to follow her.

Skye had walked into potential contact with a Neptune operative , assuming the risk belonged entirely to her because that was how people like them survived, by becoming self-contained enough that nobody else got hurt if things went sideways.

Cara hated how familiar that logic felt.

They moved quickly after that. No speeches. No dramatics. No wasted motion.

At the weapons locker, Wade was handing out something that wasn't a weapon.

He dropped a small foam-tipped earpiece into Cara's palm — matte, flesh-toned, no bigger than a pumpkin seed, and clearly not off a big-box shelf. "New toys. Seat it deep. You won't even feel it after a minute."

Cara turned it over. "Since when do we run comms?"

"Since we've got a budget nobody can see." Wade fit his own without looking. "Buddy of mine runs a shop called Knight Tactical. Ronan Quinn. We go back a ways. He set us up milspec on a handshake and my word I'd quit sending him Christmas cards." He tapped his ear. "Comm check. Count off."

Cara worked the bud in. A soft click, and then Tom's voice was suddenly inside her skull, dry and far too close. "Reading you. And before anyone asks — yes, I can hear you breathing, and no, I will not be turning that off."

"One," Cara said, and heard her own voice come back thin and strange a half beat later.

"Two." Gabe, across the room, not even looking up from the monitors.

"Three, and you're all welcome." Wade clicked the locker shut.

Cara crossed to the hooks by the stairs and grabbed her jacket. When she turned back, Gabe was already watching her. He’d gotten aggravatingly good at reading her face lately. A year ago she would’ve looked away automatically. Tonight she held the look for a second instead.

Close to a year of practice had apparently taught her that vulnerability was something you could train like a muscle, which still felt like terrible news.

“Keep her talking if she texts again,” Gabe told Tom.

“Copy that.” Tom went back to scraping whatever bits of intel he could from the world of software code he lived in.

The alley outside smelled like cold ocean water and damp pavement. Cara fell into step beside Gabe, matching his pace automatically. Neither of them spoke because there wasn’t much left to say.

A mile down the road, somewhere above the parking structure, Skye Reeves stood pressed against concrete running solo surveillance on a Neptune operative because she still fundamentally believed survival worked best as a one-person system.

Cara knew that instinct intimately. Take the intel. Run the math. Move first. Carry the danger yourself because trusting somebody else with part of it feels riskier than taking the whole weight alone.

For years, Cara had mistaken isolation for competence. Now she knew they weren’t remotely the same thing.

She was still learning that distinction herself. Still learning it now, apparently, because instead of peeling off to improvise some reckless side plan, she was walking beside Gabe Sawyer toward a coordinated operation with actual backup and communication and people who would come looking if things went wrong.

Honestly, she couldn’t even muster proper anger at Skye anymore. Every criticism she had sounded autobiographical.

Skye was going to be furious when they showed up.

Good.

20

The SUV was doing seventy down the access road when Tom came through the comms.