Page 33 of The ARC Unit: Breach

“I want to understand what all of you actually do. Not the personnel file version. If Hawk says he sees something six hundred meters away and Wolf changes an operation because of it, I need to understand why that matters. If Bear is responsible for whatever keeps shaking the building, I would also like to know whether I should be concerned.”

From the couch, Jackal called, “You should.”

Bear threw a cleaning cloth at him. Raven looked at me for another moment then closed his laptop.

“Tomorrow morning.”

I smiled. “What time?”

“6:30.”

“Look at that. Somebody finally gave me a start time.”

Raven stood and picked up his coffee mug.

“Wear shoes you don’t mind getting dirty.”

I glanced through the window again toward the training grounds beyond the compound and for the first time since I’d arrived, I found myself looking forward to something.

Mostly.

The bathroom was still involved.

Chapter Three

MIA

I set an alarm for 5:30 the next morning because I had learned two things about life at ARC in less than forty-eight hours.

The first was that everyone in the building seemed to believe six in the morning was a perfectly reasonable time to be conscious. The second was that if I wanted even a chance of using the bathroom without negotiating around another human being, I needed to get there before the men who had spent years treating communal showers like a basic feature of civilized life.

The alarm vibrated against the metal desk before the sound had a chance to start. I reached across the narrow gap from the bed, silenced it and sat up slowly, hair falling across my face in a thick mess that had escaped the loose knot I’d put it in before sleeping. The room was still dark enough that the gray t-shirt I had slept in looked almost black, and the hem had twisted around my waist sometime during the night, leaving one side of my black sleep shorts exposed higher on my thigh than the other.

For a few seconds I stayed there, listening.

Nothing.

No Jackal accusing somebody of cheating, no voices in the hallway. I took a deep breath and smiled.

Finally.

I grabbed my toiletries, tucked a clean set of clothes under one arm, opened the door as quietly as I could and looked around. The corridor lights hummed overhead, casting the same institutional glow across the concrete walls, and the bathroom door at the far end stood partially open.

That should have been my warning.

I pushed it open, disregarding my better judgment, and stopped.

Jackal was standing at the center sink in black boxer briefs and absolutely nothing else, brushing his teeth with one hand while using the other to comb damp fingers through his hair. A towel had been thrown over one shoulder but appeared to be serving no practical purpose. Water still ran down his back from the shower, tracing over the mix of tattoos that spread across his shoulder blades, climbed up his neck and continued down his sides before disappearing beneath the waistband of his underwear.

He saw me in the mirror and neither of us moved as foam covered one corner of his mouth.

“Morning,” he said around the toothbrush.

I took one step backward into the hallway. Jackal looked down at himself as though only now realizing there might be an issue, then looked back at me.

“What?”

“You own pants.”