Page 174 of Victorious

“Patch me through to the other van,” he ordered the agent at the wheel as Eli stepped down out of the transport. His own comm device came back online. He tapped it, and a small map blinked onto the screen, showing the two transports on their respective roads, separated by a narrow strip of woods.

“We’ve got a car in the road,” said the other vehicle.

Eli turned and stared into the trees. The woods whispered, and the birds sang, and he knew, with a certainty he would have once called faith, that something was about to happen.

“Looks like it lost control.”

Once, growing up, his father had pressed a heavy finger to his chest and said that when God talked, he better listen. Eli had asked why he didn’t hear it in his ears, if God was speaking, and his father had explained, with uncommon patience, that He didn’t have a mortal voice. We heard Him in our hearts, our bones. That the faithless called that gut instinct, but it was really Him.

“Get it moved,” Noah was saying.

Later, right before Eli shoved his father down the stairs, he’d heard it for the first time. That voice that wasn’t a voice, but a pressure, a guiding hand. Telling him to push.

“Approaching the vehicle,” said the agent on the other road.

Eli listened now, when that same voice that wasn’t a voice, but a will, a power higher than Gabriel Gray’s, told him to reach up, and take the comm out of his ear before the doctor could issue a command.

He listened when it told him someone had helped Mitchell Turner escape the transport in the park. When it whispered a name, not in his ears, but his heart, his bones.

Victor.

Just then, an explosion burst across the comms from the other van, a blare of static, followed quickly by gunfire, the melee punctuated by a single word.

“—EO—”

It was all the confirmation he needed.

“Shit,” said Noah, turning, too late, toward the back of the van, and Eli.

But he was already running.

XXVINOW. THEN.MEANWHILE, AT EON …

FROM his post in the Command room, Gabriel saw everything.

A fractured film, pieced together from the cameras mounted on the convoy, from the ones on the fronts of the agents’ fatigues, to the drones pacing each van as they drove, and stopped.

At his back, Helena shifted in her heels. The closest she’d come to a display of disapproval. He glanced over his shoulder. “What is it?”

She looked from Gabriel to the bay of screens, where Noah exited the vehicle. “Protocol dictates that they keep moving.”

“I see,” said Gabriel. “You think I’m making a mistake?”

She hesitated, lips parting and then sealing firm again. “Answer honestly,” he pressed.

Helena bobbed her head once. “When a transport is in possession of a captured target, its first directive is to return to base intact.”

Under different circumstances, he might have been impressed. Might have even taken notes. Helena was, after all, the first human he’d converted to express a point of view counter to his own. Even if she was only reciting from another script.

Under different circumstances—but just now, he had other things to worry about. His attention was drawn back to the second figure descending from the van. Gabriel watched as Eli stared into the woods, and then reached up and tugged his earpiece out. A premeditated gesture. A way to circumnavigate Gabriel’s voice, and thus, his intercession.

Even now, after all this time, he still found the presence, the capacity—the will—to resist. The energy it must be taking, at this point, was staggering. God knows, Gabriel felt the strain as well. So much that he was beginning to wonder if, somehow, Eli would be the one EO who didn’t fully—

BOOM.

The yellow roadster obstructing Serena’s transport van went off like a bomb, smoke occluding the cameras, leaving only gunfire and static.

Perhaps Helena was right—he should have told them to keep moving.