Page 72 of Hell’s Weapon

“Of course,” Toby replies.

“We are not,” Cameron snaps at him. “He’s our competition.”

I’m not sure I ever really liked Cameron but the dude is getting on my nerves, especially after his comment in the gym as well. “They never said only one team can win.”

It’s a truth most of the competitors seem to have forgotten.

“I don’t care, whoever is first to figure it out is going to stand out. We have no idea what awaits us at the end, but I want to have first dibs.”

“Again, no one said anything about a leader board. I was one of the first to complete that weird ass hike and I’ve had no privileges.”

“That’s true. Are you wanting to collaborate with us?” Toby asks.

“You don’t get to make that decision,” Cameron snaps.

I ignore the douche, he’s clearly on some sort of power trip. Seeing as no one picked up on the gun reference I made earlier I circle back to it. Revealing that it’s not the gun we’re looking for isn’t a huge help. Plus, there were a few others that saw it and no doubt put the evidence together. It's not a big advantage to know about it.

“Did you know that the gun isn’t the item we need to retrieve? It’s what the team tried to collect this morning before they decided to wake up the entire compound by blowing themselves up.”

A couple of their faces tell me they didn’t know. And a few look like I’ve just blabber mouthed the biggest clue yet. One of the guys starts scribbling in a notebook.

“Thanks, Wyatt,” Toby says.

“How do we know he’s not lying?” Seriously, I have no idea what Cameron’s problem with me is but he’s officially off my buddy list.

“Ask about half the people in the room. Several were there this morning and saw it. They brought it out after you’d clearly given up and gone back to bed.” I glower at him.

Note taking guy, number Thirty-One, starts shuffling through their papers and crossing out sections of their annotations. I keep up the grating conversation as I watch them flip through the stack, recognising the familiar sheets.

I begin to think they’ve got the exact same set of suspects we have until the last. It's a different name on the top. Bingo.

“Well, as fun as this hasn’t been, I better go grab some breakfast.” I push up from the table and stalk away.

The two subsequent tables I visit are just as fruitful, adding two more room numbers to my list to check out. It’s as I’m selecting which group to approach next that Tacita and Milo arrive. After this morning, I am not ready to face her yet, so I abandon this mission. I need a plan on how to win over my girl first.

Milo seeks me out as they sit at the table our team seems to have claimed, and as our eyes lock I shoot him a wink and a smile before I exit the canteen.

Several hours later and having broken into all the rooms I suspected had the files in, I now have three new profiles to add to our collection. We needed two of them, the third I just stumbled across and decided to take it anyway.

I also took some duplicates, you know, just to fuck with the other teams and make it hard to decipher which are the ones we were hunting. Not that they’ll figure out which team now has double the number we were originally given.

My final mission of the day is to bump back into the guy from Cameron’s team and do a little pickpocketing.

Thankfully, our last class is together and I pull my signature bulldozing shit to make sure we sit together. I feel a little bad because Milo is in this class too, and it’s the only one he doesn’t share with Tacita. His face nearly broke my heart and made me change my plans when he saw me stride straight past him and head for Thirty-One, whose name I can’t get to stick. Ben maybe? Or Wren.

I don’t care anymore.

He’s a target and he’s about to be relieved of his file hoarding duties. Waiting until the end of the class, I spend the lecture running through my options, but decide to go with the classic.

We’re dismissed by the Officer teaching this class, whatever it was about, and that’s when I start engaging.

“Professor?” I ask, purposefully standing up with all the gusto of a tornado so my chair flies back and my desk flies forward, right into the back of Thirty-One’s knees, unbalancing him.

“Yes, Thirty-Nine.” The Officer turns to face me.

“I got confused on that last bit.” I step forward, spotting the board the officer had been writing on. I act like I’m heading to the front, but crash into my desk again like I’m tripping over my own feet. It traps Thirty-One.

“Watch it,” he grouches at me.