Chapter Text
“Get out,” Nate said.
His heart was thundering through his ears, so loud he could barely hear Sophie’s scandalized. “Nate!” as his gripped the table hard enough that he felt his knuckles creak.
The girl – girl she was just a girl, just a child as old as Sam would have been, it wasn’t her fault – flinched, cringing back into herself, making herself smaller. Less of a threat. An instant later, her eyes flickered. Her shoulders uncurled, rolling languidly back as she slid down in her seat to…there was no other word for it, lounge against the wooden chair. Her head tilted up, defiant, and angry and…yes, still a little afraid. For all that she tried to hide it beneath bravado.
She didn’t look like herself anymore. Nate had seen Sophie pull on many a persona and this, this was just as masterful. For a second, Nate could not place her. Then he realised. Her body language was a pitch perfect echo of the boy she had come in with. The acting was truly remarkable. She had been trained well.
“Are you in danger?” he forced out aware his voice came out a low growl.
The girl blinked, and then her body language was her own again. She shot an uncertain look to the empty air beside her and then turned back, peering hesitantly up at him. “Yes? I said? Sensates. They kill them. Kill us.” She shuddered, eyes growing watery and then dropped her gaze to her hands.
Nate shook his head, “No, no, no,” he waved one hand in the air. “The people who put you up to this. Who gave you the information about my son. Are you in danger from them? Are they going to hurt you?” The fear was real after all. He had seen that. They were running from something.
Sarah’s shoulders sagged, resignation flickering over her face, she closed her eyes for a moment. Hardison shifted, like he was going to come forward, and say something but a sharp glance from Nate kept him silent. Sophie had vanished to a back corner, where she could observe, without being part of the action. Eliot and Parker were both watching the kid, though Parker kept glancing at Hardison.
“I said you wouldn’t believe me,” she said again, smiling ruefully, even as her eyes filled with tears. “But you will.”
She reached into her bag and pulled another file out and fumbling it onto the table between them. “This is everything we know about the BPO,” she shrugged ruefully. “It’s not much. We are only fourteen. But. I told you. when they catch one of us, they use that one to find the rest of us. Information goes both ways. And S – my Sensate-sibling, they have been held for a very long time.” She smiled, her face glowing for a moment. “They pick things up. The BPO has a facility in Iceland. We know where it is. Or at least one of us narrowed it down. She’s very smart.”
The girl paused after she said that, shooting another one of those strange looks into the air around her. She smiled slightly, beamed, tucking her hair behind one ear and ducking her head as a blush painted her cheeks. She shook her head slightly, and then stood up.
“We’ll come back when, when you’ve had some time to, to look it over,” Her hand trembled on the strap of her bag, and she swallowed. “Then you can decide whether or not to believe us.”
She turned to leave. Another odd thing. She had been nervous. On edge. Terrified this whole time. She shouldn’t have just turned her back. Should have edged out, not turned around until the last moment. Instead, it was like she didn’t even care that she was taking her eyes off them.
“Wait,” Eliot said, moving forward, eyes pinched in concern. “Where are you staying? Somewhere safe?”
Sarah smiled tightly. “Sorry. I’m not really comfortable…we’re fine,” she glanced over at Nate, eyes softening. “We’ll see you in a few days.”
She ducked her head, disappearing out of the door before anyone else could say anything.
A few moments passed, and then the room erupted into chaos.
Xxx
“Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself, Nate,” Sophie snapped, her tone biting. She had wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing them slightly as though she were cold. “You do remember that was a child you just scared half to death, yes? And now she’s out there, God knows where, with God knows who after her!”
Nate shook his head, finding an old bottle of whiskey he had secreted in the room and pulling the top off with a satisfying pop, inhaling deeply. For a second, he didn’t want to get a glass. Just wanted to give up completely and drink from the bottle, drink until oblivion claimed him. Until his mind had sharpened enough that he could focus on the potential job and not on the ringing in his head that had been deafening ever since the child said Sam’s name.
She knew about the trumpet. How did she know about the trumpet? Maggie? His father didn’t know. The person they had hired to teach the lessons? But they wouldn’t have known Nate’s own history with the instrument.
Eliot and Hardison were snipping back and forth, Hardison already flipping through the second folder the girl had given them, while Eliot leant over the table and scowled at the two brain scans. Nate filled his glass and took a drink.
“Wait, psychics are real?” Parker said, her voice much louder than Eliot and Hardison’s squabbling. Too loud for the room. Her eyebrows were pinched in concern and confusion, her ponytail flicking behind her as she looked between the other members of the team. “I thought they weren’t. Didn’t we already prove that. It’s all cold-reading and conning, right? Right?” her voice pitched upwards, with her panic and Nate’s fingers tightened around his glass as he remembered how shaken she had been, that arsehole from –
“No, they’re not real,” Nate said, coming back over to the table and sitting down. It was just another job. That was all. Just think of it like that. Impersonal. “Someone’s just convinced them.”
“I dunno, Nate,” Eliot said shaking his head and standing straighter, his eyes turned hard, the way they always did when he was remembering things. “You hear things. Out there. When I served there was one man on my unit. He said he’d fought with someone who one day just dropped. Said the guy claimed his sister had died at that exact moment. Didn’t say how he knew. Couple days later the guy bit a bullet.”
“Nasty,” Hardison said, wrinkling his nose.
“Hey, have some respect for the dead,” Eliot snapped, rounding on him. Hardison held his hands up in surrender.
“I’m just saying. Five minutes ago, you were saying psychics belonged in my ‘dumb’ movies and now you apparently believe in them.”
“Hey, I don’t believe in psychics, man. I’m just saying you see some weird shit out there, alright.”
Nate twitched, pinching the bridge of his nose to stave off the incoming headache. “No one is saying they believe in psychics, we just need to –”
“I am.”
“Yes, I know we should –” Nate paused, the words taking a second to permeate his racing mind. He frowned, turning to Sophie.
She was still standing apart. Deliberately. Separating herself from the group. Her chin was tilted defiantly, her lips pursed. She still had her arms crossed over her chest. Not cold, like he had first thought. Soothing. She was worried. She was…she wasn’t just nervous. She was afraid.
“I believe in psychics,” Sophie said, tilting her chin up further, her eyes glinting in the light. “My mother was a Sensate.”
“What!”
It felt like everyone in the room shouted it at once. Well, everyone other than Nate. He was too stupefied to even think the word, let alone let it fall out of his lips.
“My mother was a Sensate,” Sophie said again, she swallowed real guilt and shame flashing across her face for a moment, before she dropped her gaze. “Her cluster was located by –” her breath hitched in fear. Sophie was so rarely afraid, now she was terrified. “Whispers when I was a child. He couldn’t get to her, my family was,” a casual hair toss, “highly placed in British nobility. But it didn’t matter. She…Sensates rarely outlive their cluster by long.”
“Cluster?”
Sophie shrugged. “The general term for one of the Sensate groups. I only ever met my mother’s Cluster-mates, but I know they knew others. If Sarah really is a Sensate, and if the BPO really do have one of her cluster, then she has never been in more danger.”
Nate stared, Sophie met his gaze without flinching. Sophie would never lie to them about something like this. Not about something so serious. Not about Sam.
It was just a job. Treat it like a job. Take the emotions out.
“Hardison,” Nate said, and the boy snapped to attention, clearly relieved that Nate hadn’t started shouting. “Find the kids. If it really is so dangerous, I want them off the streets.”
Xxx
Sarah had her back to James, looking out into the street as people walked past, uncaring for two teenagers hidden in an alleyway. They probably wouldn’t even care if she screamed, she thought with some disgust, hearing the clatter of James prising the wooden boards loose from the window into the abandoned basement that they had been staying in. They’d have to move tomorrow. Two days was long enough to stay in the same place. They couldn’t get too comfortable.
“After you, m’lady,” Olu said, deliberately thickening her Australian accent to a thick drawl and bowing slightly.
Sarah blushed, tucking her hair behind her ears, and ducking down through the gap into the dark, dusty room.
James wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, yeah, flirt in your own brain,” he complained, jumping down after her and balancing the planks over the hole.
Sarah’s face flamed, spreading from her cheeks to her ears and the back of her neck. Olu inhaled so quickly that she inhaled spit and started coughing. Dimly, Sarah heard Olu’s mum asking if she was okay, and Olu managed to get herself together long enough to wheeze that her drink had gone down the wrong pipe before rounding on James.
“James!” She hissed, flapping her hands slightly.
“Olufemi!” He said with the exact same intonation, flapping his hands in a much more dramatic fashion.
Olu grimaced at her full name, shuddering slightly and James relented, flopping down onto the pile of sleeping bags they’d made in one corner.
Sarah joined him, and he obligingly moved so she could tuck herself against his side. Her older brothers would have never let her do anything that might be construed as ‘hugging’ or, as the oldest put it ‘being soft’ but she and James had got used to huddling together for warmth during their time, stowed away on a ship and then, later, on the streets.
“Do we have any news from Celeste?” She asked.
Olu grinned. She always caught the her bottom lip between her teeth when she was smiling about something she was particularly proud of and it was devastatingly cute. “She told her dad she had ‘women problems’ and managed to lock herself in the room long enough to come down from blockers for a couple hours. Whispers has no idea it’s her. He knows there’s one of our cluster in Kiruna but nothing more.”
Sarah frowned. “She’s not going to be able to pull that again though. Not for another month.”
“I know,” Olu wriggled slightly. Another sign that she was proud of something. “We set up a code. She gave me a list of books on Amazon. If anything happens, she’ll leave a review. More stars she leaves, the more danger she’s in…and,” Olu added on, grinning wider. “If Whispers is in Kiruna, then he’s not in Iceland with Sam. You don’t need to worry about him picking up your conversations out of his head.”
James nodded, his hand going to his pocket where a tictac box with their…very limited stash of left-over blockers was kept. “Good. How long do you think we leave it?”
The two of them looked at Sarah. God knew why. For some reason they all did. At least when Hideo wasn’t there. Somehow, she had gotten herself stuck as the decision maker of the group.
She hated it.
“Two days,” she said. “We’ll go back in two days.”