Page 56 of Victorious

But this latest one, which had been so promising, turned out to be worse than a dead end. It was a setup, the whole place rigged to blow the moment they went in. Which was, if nothing else, irrevocable proof that Vale was not a ghost. He was real, and he was out there, and he was fucking with them. Rios and her team had gotten out, but one was in medical being treated for burns, and the other two had gone straight to the nearest bar.

Only Rios, as team leader, was forced to immediately report, and undergo a full debriefing. Explain all the ways she and her squad had failed to catch EON’s most wanted. On good days, she thought Director Roy had given her the mission because it was hard. On bad ones, she suspected Roy did it because she knew it was impossible.

Either way, Rios wasn’t giving up.

She shrugged her jacket on, eager to escape the locker room, reluctant to admit, even to herself, that the man in the director’s office—Dr. Gray—had struck a nerve.

Rios knew the all-or-nothing way the soldiers—agents and guards alike—felt about the EOs. And she knew that if they found out what she could do, they’d think that’s all she was. It had been hard enough to win her own team over, and she routinely saved their lives.

But Gabriel Gray was wrong when he said she hadn’t had a choice.

She had. It might not have been a good choice, or an easy one, but Rios had always been practical, and as far as she was concerned, she’d chosen right.

She was the first EO to ever be offered a badge instead of a cell. Or at least, the first to accept. Stell had believed that not every ExtraOrdinary deserved to be locked up. He’d recognized the danger of their powers, left unchecked, but he saw the potential in them, too.

A tool for the task.

A weapon in the fight.

He’d made it very clear that Rios’s success would pave the way for others.

And maybe he would have been right.

If Vale hadn’t killed him.

Rios wove through the blank white halls, resisting the urge to turn left, into the compound’s outer wall, and step straight through into the open night. Instead, she took the long way, feeling like a mouse in a maze as she took the turns by memory.

She was almost out when the doors ahead of her unsealed, and another agent shouldered through.

Rios tensed, until she saw who it was.

Her shoulders loosened as she said his name.

“Noah.”

The department of ExtraOrdinary Observation and Neutralization had come a long way from the ten-person task force first formed by Stell six years before.

Of the eighty soldiers who now worked for EON, forty-seven were guards stationed at the compound, and thirty-three were agents in the field.

And of those thirty-three field agents, thirty-one were ordinary humans, and the other two were EOs.

One of those was Rios.

The other was Noah.

He brightened at the sight of her. “What’s a soldier like you doing in a place like this?”

Rios rolled her eyes. “Oh god, did you practice that line?”

“All morning. In the mirror.”

Her mouth quirked. As far as Rios was concerned, there were good-day friends, and bad-day friends. The first you wanted to be around when things were going well. The second, you headed for when shit hit the fan.

And there, straddling the line, was Noah.

He was still dressed in field gear—the tactical black plate wrapping around him like a second skin, helmet in the crook of one arm. The visor was cracked, the paint stripped across one temple, exposing the shell beneath.

“Bad day?”