Line of Fire

2x04; i will face my enemy

Three weeks.

It had been three weeks since Coulson had brought Mara over from England to work on the strange, unknown writing and so far Mara had come up with nothing. No matter how much time she spent on them, she was still coming up with nothing. So far, the only thing she had been able to do was figure out that it didn't match linguistic patterns with over fifty different languages and couldn't be decoded by any known code-breaking algorithms.

Until last night. While keeping several of the images open on her tablet at once, Mara was able to see the overlap in the markings. They fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Now all she had to do was figure out which way they all went. It was a bit of an exhausting process, but it was better than nothing.

"More crosswords?" Skye joked when Mara walked into the holocom room on the Bus, nose in her tablet.

"Sudoku today, actually," Mara lied easily, covering it with a smile. She leaned against the pane of glass behind Skye, eyes never leaving her work. Sudoku this was not. Still... "Have to mix things up every once and a while. Keeps things interesting."

After that, she fell silent. Occasionally, she would push her glasses back up when her perspiration made them slip down the bridge of her nose. Damn, it was hot in here. As if it wasn't hot enough on the Bus already, now they had to travel to the tropics? Mara let out a quiet groan, billowing her shirt in a vain attempt to remain cool.

Why was she even here again? She wasn't part of this mission - not really. Mara was content to stay in her corner of the Bus until May and Coulson made it back from the mission, but she couldn't help worrying about them. As hard as she tried not to, Mara still wound up back in the holocom room, ears peeled for any sounds of distress. What she wouldn't have given to be out in the field with them somehow. But Mara remained quiet and focused on the work at hand. May and Coulson could certainly handle themselves and she had a problem to solve. Besides, there was no need to draw unnecessary attention to herself when she had something so sensitive on the screen in front of her. Still, that didn't mean she wasn't paying attention.

"That painting is essential. The markings on the back of it-"

The moment the words left Skye's mouth, she had Mara's undivided attention. Subtly, of course. Mara straightened, device in her hands forgotten. How did she know about the markings? And here Mara thought they were some sort of level ten secret. Then again, Coulson was the one who had gotten rid of the levels in the first place.

"-The same markings that were on the Obelisk and Garret went crazy scratching into the walls-"

Garret was involved? Just the mention of his name made Mara's blood boil, but she let the tension out of her body in a breath. But the fact that Garret had been writing these symbols - that was new information to Mara. She'd had no idea where the markings came from, but she was slowly piecing it together.

"There has to be some sort of connection there," Skye concluded, just as Mara did. A connection, yes. But what was she missing? Seeming to realize something, Skye suddenly turned around, catching Mara staring at the pictures up on the screen in front of her. "What is it, Mara?" There was a cautious edge to her voice that told her she was suspicious of something. "Do you recognize anything?"

"Not sure," Mara said slowly, looking over these new images. "It's not any language or code I know of." Not a lie. "I have no idea what they are, really." Also not a lie. If she knew, it would have made things much simpler.

However, the fact that Skye knew about them was a shock to her. It seemed like she and Mara knew just as much as each other, but that didn't mean much. The one thing Mara wanted to know was why, if they were such an open secret, was her working on them one of the highest security jobs she'd ever been assigned?