Damn, I wish my brothers were here, she moaned inwardly.
She carefully packed her work into a satchel, slung it over her shoulder and dashed out the back door into the garage. Her next task was to protect the house’s power source.
She got right to work heavily fortifying the solar power’s control box and battery located at the back of the house. She used reinforced metal sheets to cover it, then covered it with brush for camouflage. Just as she was finishing setting trip wires in a twelve-foot radius around it, she stood abruptly and narrowed her eyes at the nearly dark northern sky.
Signatures
Her psychic senses zeroed in on a cluster of unfamiliar signatures roughly a quarter mile away, to the north. She held perfectly still, opening her senses completely to allow as accurate an interpretation of the interlopers as possible.
She dropped the wire cutters and spindle of wire to the ground as she rolled her shoulders back, forcing herself to relax.
She immediately recognized them to be metahumans because of the complexity of their auras, but unlike the typical soldiers whose colors were dark shades of putty—bland, heartless—these signatures had color. Certainly not as bright as her brothers’ or Creed’s, but they did have color. She frowned at the difference.
One signature stood out brighter than the rest. It started as a lighter shade of violet in the center but as it burst outward, the color graduated to a deep purple.
Knowing she was running out of time, she felt a surge of adrenaline. Crouching she swiped up her tools and carefully placed a covering of fallen leaves on the wires. She hurried around to the garage and yanked the heavy, metal door down. She reached up and disabled its emergency access before tossing down her tools and hurrying toward the circuit breaker on the wall. She slapped the main lever down, opening the current and flipped all switches on except those marked “barn.”
Inside the now brightly lit house, she moved from kitchen to lab double-checking that every door was bolted and every window was locked behind closed wooden blinds and drawn drapes—trying to ignore the sensation of being watched by hidden cameras. She took a moment to shove heavy furniture in front of the larger panes of glass in the great room, hoping to fortify those structurally weaker spots.
When she was satisfied, she ran back to the kitchen, sprang onto the kitchen table and jumped up to grab the frame of the skylight above. She held fast with one hand, unfazed by the weight of her body plus the satchel full of weapons. With the other hand, she reached up to unlatch the window and push it open. Gracefully, she pulled herself up and through the opening, stopping only to close the window behind her.
She paused for a moment to look north. Though muted, she could distinctly see a glow of artificial lights approximately 1.5 miles away. She sighed deeply, but set right back to her task of double-checking the integrity of the zip-line bolted into a load bearing beam before grabbing the other end of the cable and quickly tying it around her waist. She tossed the remaining bundle of cable down to the ground and leaped off the roof, landing in a crouched, catlike pose.
Meg raced the distance between the house and the barn, dragging the line behind her. Without stopping, she leaped up the side of the two-story building and caught herself as she climbed—instinctively locating finger and footing edges—until she reached the roof. Running on the balls of her feet, she made her way up the gambrel truss to the barn’s apex. Barely winded, she got straight to the task of pulling the zip-line taut and bolting it into a rafter.
Satisfied with its safety, she moved toward the crow’s nest and gracefully slipped into one of the four window-sized openings. Completely hidden from view, she settled in and looked over the land behind her, though she didn’t use her eyes—she used her mind.
43 17th Company
The private plane landed at a small, unassuming airfield south of Dallas in a town called Lancaster under the watchful eye of Ernie Messelton, airport traffic controller. Once the bird had landed safely, he only half watched it taxi to the hangar. He was more concerned with the coffee grinds floating around the top of his last cup of coffee.
“Josephine! You didn’t put the filter in the coffee machine right, again!” he hollered to the next office. After twenty-two years of working together at the airfield, Josephine got away with a lot more than anyone else there. Though he blatantly saw her roll her eyes and smack her gum, he couldn’t imagine being at the control tower without her.
“Hell, it’s not rocket science—it’s just coffee!” he muttered under his breath.
He poked a chubby finger into the nearly black liquid and frowned at the granules dodging his advances when something on the ground caught his eye.