24 September, 2050
Going by her real name in the post v-revolution world, unlike her twin WonderGurl, Lena stared at him, the speaker to her ear.
Across the window pane in the Correctional Facility's meeting room, her eyes always threw daggers at him. But Harry knew the daggers rained from a keenness of spirit rather than veiled aggression. For him at least.
A badass case worker for the Department of Children and Families, Lena had often gone up against mean, bigger parties in her bid to win rights for her clients. Her first foray into the prison had been revenge by a sore loser of custody rights with secret connections to the Aryan Brotherhood.
But that was the Lena of before.
He ignored the daggers.
"How they treat you here, Lena? Do they come at you for no reason? Do these guards give you grief?"
Lena tilted her head and squinted her eyes. "Why the superficial queries today?" She relished every morsel of sound she voiced into words. The cordial had bubbled her up again.
He chuckled self-consciously. He had always refrained from intrusiveness, even when he wondered how she fared behind bars.
"It's just that ... things been happening lately ... can't put my finger on anything yet ... just ... they seem to be coming together in a bad way ... Maybe I'm thinking too much." He played with the cuff of his jacket as he rambled.
Embers shot into his vision from the dull green waters of a deep, deep lake. Some shooting sparks bequeath warmth more than they sting. He gulped the image down his throat and blinked to clear his mind.
"Haven't things been going bad since the turn of the century? Every decade they just get worser than before." Lena returned his philosophical mood and smiled her braces at him. Oddly, he had never seen her without those, the one year he had known her. "What brings you back, sworn brother?"
He gave her a precis of The Dismantler puzzle. Prison was a buzzing hive of criminal underworld and this time Len had a way in. He rambled on with his personal theory about the assignment, but stopped when, instead of an encouraging spark on Len's face, he saw the skeptical twist of her mouth.
"You don't have zit to go by, Slash Dash. They're baiting you. That's what that sound like to me." She teased a ribbon weaved into a strand of her hair hugging the side of her face. Her dismissive response earned a chuckle from the boy.
"What in the world would the Bureau gain by that?" Harry's mind couldn't reconcile the image of Timothy Ross's face and the idea of baiting. "It's just absurd."
"I dunno, they testing ya? Seeing what you can come up with ..."
"Let's just backtrack a moment here. A big enough party. Could be huge by the sound of it. After a priceless load that someone stole from them ... they set their boogeymen on the trail, like, all over the place ... look at the list of the places here ... Montana, Utah, Virginia, Winnipeg, more. The target is moving. And obviously evading them. Now look at the name ... The Dismantler? You know what that word means, right?"
She had been chewing gum, amused with Harry's drowning man attitude, clutching at straws to stay afloat. But she thought of him as her little brother so she keyed in some empathy.
"An agent that would topple a structure, take apart a set-up ..."
"Exactly. The runaway's possession is of such huge significance-"
"Allegedly," she spoke interrupting the glazed-eye boy.
"It threatens the big party in a big way. Why else would they ... Heck, the sender could be FBI, for all I know--"
YOU ARE READING
The Girl Who Kept Running
Mystery / ThrillerHe ran into her at street theater. She was a force of nature, not a casual first time hire. She brought the house down with her performance, literally pulled the audience to their feet in standing ovation. Her performance was too real, unnerving, de...
